‘You can’t tell me you’re not delaying mail’: Employees, supporters of mail plant push back

About 180 people attended a public hearing on a proposal to downsize the Charleston Postal Processing and Distribution Center and transfer part of the operations to Pittsburgh on Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2024 in the Little Theater at the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center in Charleston, W.Va. (Lori Kersey | West Virginia Watch)

An estimated 180 people spent their Valentine’s Day evening at a contentious public meeting about the future of a South Charleston mail facility.

Officials from the United States Postal Service on Wednesday outlined preliminary plans to downsize the Charleston Postal Processing and Distribution Center and transfer part of the operations to Pittsburgh, a move the organization says will require transferring 25 jobs but union officials argue will affect more and slow mail delivery.

During a 15-minute presentation, Kenny Hanson, a plant manager for a Columbus mail facility, said downsizing the facility would have no impact on mail delivery. After the presentation, the meeting stretched on another two hours as employees and supporters of the South Charleston facility commented and asked mostly unanswered questions about the proposal.

“You know you’re wiping the state of West Virginia off the postal map,” Craig Brown, president of the local American Postal Workers Union, told mail officials.

“Who is going to go to their postmaster or the clerk at the window and get a West Virginia post mark? That’s going to be very rare,” he said. “We’re going to have Pittsburgh and Pinewood all over our mail. West Virginia will disappear off the postal map just like you’re doing to Delaware.”

The postal service last fall announced plans to review the Charleston Processing and Distribution Center and possibly make changes as a part of a 10-year, $40 billion strategic plan to modernize the nation’s aging postal network. Several public officials have spoken out against the proposal.

Brown said what bothers him the most is the assertion that the changes would not affect mail delivery.

“You can’t tell me you’re not delaying mail,” he said. Even now customers complain about their mail being delayed, he said. “My pay stub I used to get on Wednesday or Thursday before pay day. Last pay day I got it the Friday after pay day. That’s how it has swung down over the last six months. [U.S. Postmaster General Louis] Dejoy has slowed the mail down…

“You’re going to tell me if I’m in Ronceverte mailing a letter to Huntington it’s going to go over 400 miles back and forth to Pittsburgh, then be processed at our plant and it’s not going to go out the next morning like it does now,” Brown said. “That’s at least a one-day delay.”

Jarrid Thomas, a clerk at the South Charleston facility, said the postal service’s plan “threatens the very fabric of postal services in West Virginia.”

“The repercussions of these decisions are alarming,” Thomas said. “Mail delays of one day … a two-day delay looming over our heads, maybe even longer. This is not just about packages and letters arriving late, it’s about the disruption of our lives, missed opportunities and the erosion of trust in a service that has been a lifeline for over 230 years in the state of West Virginia.”

Other employees, including Daka Sigmon, worried about their own future. Sigmon, a mailhandler’s assistant of one year, has been out of work because of an injury since November, she said, and has heard little about what will happen with her job.

“I am only 20 years old, sir,” Sigmon said. “I have maybe $10,000 to my name in a savings account. Do you expect me to move my entire life all on my own?… I haven’t even moved out of my parents’ house yet. I still live with my parents. They still take me to work when I work. Do you expect me to go to Pittsburgh whenever you move all this mail? … Do you expect someone like me to pick up my entire life and move or do you expect me to …just say I resign?”

The postal service emphasized that downsizing the plant would not result in layoffs of career level employees, but would require transferring 25 of them and affect an unspecified number of the center’s “flexible workforce.” The 25 employees would be reassigned according to union bargaining agreements, USPS spokesperson Sean Hargadon said.

Sigmon said the postal service is one of the highest-paying jobs for people like her who do not have a college degree or the means to get one.

“Both of my parents worked for the postal service as well,” Sigmon said. “My mother is a manager and my father is a custodian. Both of them also worked with the postal service and they understand my plight. They understand that I am in trouble. They know my job is at stake.”

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Brown called the postal service’s presentation a “farce” and a “joke.”

“They won’t answer questions, they’ve done that all over the country,” Brown said. “I think we’ve probably had the best showing of any public hearing that the postal service has had so far this year… When you can’t answer questions, it’s a joke. But at least people got heard and maybe it will help.”

Several public speakers disagreed with the postal service’s assertion that mail service would not slow down as a result of moving parts of the operation to Pittsburgh.

Mail sent locally has a two-day standard that the postal service believes it will maintain if some operations are moved to Pittsburgh, Hargadon said.

“That’s a lie, and you heard it directly from the people who work the mail exclusively,”  Tim Holstein, vice president of the local American Postal Workers Union, number 133, told reporters. “You heard it from the employees that touch the mail on a daily basis, the ones that clock-in at six o’clock in the morning when you are asleep, to make sure that you get your medicine and you get your packages, that you get your envelopes and letters.”

Brown contended given the number of machines being moved from the local facility, more than 24 jobs may be affected.

“We’ve got big machines up there, and they’re taking out both of our machines that run packages, they’re taking out one of our flat sorters, several of our DBCSs which run letters across it,” Brown said. “It’s hard for me to believe they’re only talking 24 jobs and the machines they’re bringing in do not use that many people. I fully expect the number to go up from 24 when they give us the final. I hope not, but that won’t surprise me.”

Hargadon said the public feedback heard Wednesday is an important part of the study the organization is doing about what to do with the facility, but it’s also important to know what’s going on with the postal service in general.

“You’re talking about an organization for the last several years that has lost billions upon billions of dollars who needs to make changes in this network and its logistics structure across the country,” Hargadon said. “Charleston is one of those facilities we’re considering. So [the meeting] was a chance for us to share about the improvements we want to make here.”

Included in the postal service’s proposal are plans to upgrade the facility’s machinery, building and parking lots, Hargadon said.

Hargadon said the number of affected employees could “possibly” change.

“But the thing is right now we would reassign those employees, they would not get laid off,” he said.  “That’s what we’re talking about when we say no layoffs.

He noted that while the postal service is a service, it’s also a business that rarely gets money from the government.

In 2022, the federal government approved $50 billion in relief for the U.S. Postal Service to be implemented over 10 years.

“That legislation went through a couple years ago was a rare instance of that happening, it won’t happen again,” he said. “So the reality is, we need to operate more like a business, be more efficient. That is the case. That’s where we’re at.”

The postal service will accept comments about the proposal through the end of the month and anticipates making a decision between 90 and 120 days from Wednesday, Hargadon said.

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