Post office employees say they have been banned from mentioning Amazon deliveries as a cause of mail delays

Around 65 people gathered for the listening session.
(Photo by Annalise Braught, Bemidji Pioneer)

One of the U.S. Postal Service's greatest strengths -- connecting every delivery point in the United States to every other delivery point -- is what made a company like Amazon possible. But now, the massive task of servicing Amazon's contract is pushing some rural post offices to the brink.

Even limited research on Amazon packages and rural post offices shows how hard rural post office employees must work to fulfill the sheer number of Amazon packages and overall "last mile" package deliveries. Articles and petitions addressing the issue include details on how stressed postal employees are, including The Washington Post's recent story with this headline: "Rural post office was told to prioritize Amazon packages. Chaos ensued."

Since the Post article was published, mail carriers in their featured small town, Bemidji, Minnesota, say they have been censored for speaking out. "Mail carriers in a rural Minnesota post office [Bemidji] overwhelmed by Amazon packages say they've been warned not to use the word 'Amazon,' including when customers ask why the mail is delayed," Caroline O'Donovan of The Washington Post reports. "'We are not to mention the word Amazon to anyone,' said a mail carrier. . . . 'If asked, they're to be referred to as Delivery Partners or Distributors,' said a second carrier. 'It's ridiculous.'"

The directive was "passed down Monday morning from U.S. Postal Service management and comes three weeks after mail carriers in the northern Minnesota town staged a symbolic strike outside the post office" to protest "the heavy workloads and long hours caused by the sudden arrival of thousands of Amazon packages, O'Donovan reports. "On Tuesday, staffers from the offices of Democratic Minnesota senators Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar hosted a 'listening session' with Bemidji residents to "discuss ongoing postal issues related to package and mail delivery."

"In addition to being banned from saying 'Amazon,' postal workers have also been told their jobs could be at risk if they speak publicly about post office issues," O'Donovan adds. "Staffers were told they could attend Tuesday's meeting only on their 30-minute lunch break if they changed out of uniform, mail carriers said. One mail carrier said he'd been warned there could be 'consequences' for those who showed up."

"Tuesday's meeting in Bemidji lasted over an hour. Fifty people attended in person, and more than 180 watched a live stream on the website of the local newspaper, the Bemidji Pioneer," O'Donovan reports. "Multiple postal workers who recently quit or retired due to the ongoing issues attended, including one who identified herself only as Shelly, and received a spontaneous round of applause when she began to speak. . . . 'I worked at the post office for 30 years. . . Never in my life have I been treated so poorly. I go home at night crying. . . I was forced to retire.'"

To read the Bemidji Pioneer's coverage, click here.

'I don't know if the virus will kill me or it's going to be my rage" at anti-maskers, asthmatic clerk in rural store says

Lori Wagoner at her workstation (Photo by Eamon Queeney, The Washington Post)

Lori Wagoner, 63, never expected that her job as a retail clerk in a small North Carolina town would become so dangerous. But as she told The Washington Post for a July 18 package of 12 oral histories from the pandemic, covid-19 has drastically changed her job responsibilities.

Wagoner told reporter Eli Saslow that she has asthma, and if she got the novel coronavirus, she’d have an increased chance of developing a severe version of its disease. Thus, North Carolina’s mask mandate is crucial to her health, and she says about 95 percent of her customers have followed signs outside the store and worn a mask, but many of those who don’t have not been kind to her. Many are coastal visitors from cities: "They come here to have a good time and maybe they’re drinking. Some of them would see our signs, open the front door, and just yell: “F--- masks. F--- you.” Or they would walk in, refuse to wear a mask and then dump their merchandise all over the counter."

She relayed one encounter that spiraled downhill: “He rolled his eyes and ignored me, so I knew where it was going. . . . He said he just wanted to buy a drink. I said, ‘Okay, that means I will get your drink while you wait outside and I will bring it to the door.’ But he’s still moving into the store, and I’m trying to stay in front of his path and keep him from going down the aisle. He said, “Come on, lady. I just want water. I said: I’m tired of this. Just leave the store now.’ He kept moving toward me, yelling, ‘ADA exemption, ADA exemption’,” referring to the Americans with Disabilities Act that protects people with disabilities -- but not mask mandates.

“And now my body was starting to shake. It was fear and so much anger. My co-worker was yelling for him to get out, and another customer started yelling, and finally he stomped around for a while and then turned back outside. We locked the front door and my co-worker and I went back into the storage room. We sat there and sobbed.”

Now, at this small store on the coast of North Carolina, in a town Wagoner apparently didn't want to name, a customer has to ring a doorbell to enter. And next to her, behind her register, is pepper spray. With the local sheriff’s office refusing to help enforce the mandate, she said, she is now acting as enforcer of the mask mandate and ultimate defender of her own life; a retail clerk intimately trained in an array of behaviors from the public in response to a scientific and public-health effort.

“I don’t know if the virus will kill me or if it’s going to be my rage,” she said. “Sometimes I want to cut America into different pieces, and all these anti-maskers can live together, and we’ll see how it works.”