Mail service providers in non-urban Vermont usually face reduced pay and extended routes, and several Vermonters report not receiving mail on a timely basis.
That’s according to Seven Days reporter Rachel Hellman, who recently dove into how policy changes with the U.S. Postal Service are impacting mail delivery in Vermont.
She sat down with Vermont Public’s Mary Williams Engisch to break down her reporting. Their conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Williams Engisch: I’d like to discuss both mail carriers and mail receivers in some rural areas in the state since you found both groups are affected.
First, can you set the stage for us? On May 6, the U.S. Postal Service tweaked the formula it uses to calculate wages for mail carriers. Can you break down that change?
Portrait of Rachel Hellman sitting in a restaurant
Jeb Wallace-Brodeur
Seven Days reporter Rachel Hellman
Rachel Hellman: Absolutely. So this change has been years in the making. It’s been a result of negotiations between the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association and USPS.
Something worth noting is that rural mail carriers and city carriers have different systems that determine their salary. City mail carriers, who are hourly employees and are paid overtime, have different pay than rural carriers who are paid a salary based on an annual count of the amount of mail they handle. For years, this count was done manually. The supervisor would go with the mail carrier and physically count how much mail they were delivering on their route.
This new approach is essentially a system that requires a daily count of the mail passing through sorting machines, postal facilities, and handheld scanners that carriers are required to carry on their routes. What I heard from mail carriers is that no one really received clear instructions on how to use these scanners. USPS actually acknowledged this, and there were difficulties with the implementation of their new program.
Essentially, these scanners are capturing information that determines how long it takes to complete a route. The reality is that carriers should be scanning it quite regularly at very specific intervals to get an accurate reading. But they weren’t given this information – at least many of them weren’t. So, they’re scanning it six times a day. Many of them said they were supposed to do at least six specific scans when, in reality, they should have been doing more scans.
And you spoke to mail carriers covering these rural routes, specifically in Washington County, Windsor County. How did that formula change impact their incomes?
Yes, it was quite astounding. On a national scale, this change resulted in two-thirds of all rural mail carriers experiencing some sort of pay cut.
I spoke with a few different carriers. One had a 15% pay cut from $54,000 per year to $46,000 per year, which is quite significant. Another mail carrier had a $10,000 pay cut, and she had been with the postal service for 24 years.
I spoke with another carrier who had a 25% pay cut. He was making $100,000 per year, largely because he had worked overtime during Christmas, which is one of the few times that rural mail carriers can get overtime pay.
And for some of the mail carriers you spoke with, their routes actually got longer. What’s the explanation there?
Basically, because this formula is determining their count-to-time ratio, many of the people I spoke with were only going to get paid for a certain amount of hours because that’s what the formula determined.
One person mentioned that for some of their coworkers, it would generate a different amount of mail with an even shorter amount of time. So, it’s this weird time-mail ratio that, to a lot of mail carriers, doesn’t feel accurate to the actual amount of time it takes to deliver the mail.
What’s the potential impact of the change? Could we see workers quitting because of this?
I think that’s a real concern. Already, people have talked about thinking that they’re going to potentially quit or hearing rumors from their coworkers.
The context for all of this is that Seven Days has done several reports on the mail carrier shortage that’s out there – the Postal Service is not alone; it’s really like the beating heart of rural life.
If you have meds, that could be the only way you get them. It’s a very serious issue – not being able to deliver all the mail and having to be choosy about which routes to do.
“And perhaps even most alarming, some of them reported to me – and this was confirmed by a spokesperson with the Postal Service – that some Vermont postmasters are having to drive to towns to cover mail routes that have been left unstaffed.”
Rachel Hellman
And mail carriers from other states are actually being sent to Vermont to cover unfilled positions.
Well, let’s shift to people receiving or not receiving their mail. A lot of complaints have been surfacing over the last few years that mail delivery has been unreliable for many folks in rural areas. What did you find there in your reporting?
In talking with one of my colleagues who has done a lot of reporting on this, she was able to provide me with loads of Front Porch Forum conversations of neighbors saying, “Hey, I haven’t received my mail for a week.” This is something that was really exacerbated during the pandemic, but it’s still causing an issue in rural areas.
There are long-standing effects. On business viability, you can’t really run a small business if you can’t get the supplies you need. Also, on quality of life and well-being for many rural Vermonters.
Vermonters are frustrated that they’re not getting their mail, and postal workers are frustrated that they’re not able to deliver the mail in a timely manner.
Well, what’s next in the story? I know Vermont’s congressional delegation, they’re pushing back on the wage formula change.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with six other senators, wrote a letter urging the Postal Service to delay implementing the new pay system until its “serious flaws were addressed.”
On May 17, Rep. Becca Balint questioned Postmaster General Louis DeJoy during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing. She expressed to me that she did not feel like her question – “Are rural Americans going to get the services they need?” – was going to be met.
There is a grievance filed by the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. Some of the mail workers I spoke with said that they’re waiting to see the outcome of that before they quit. Only time will tell
Mary Williams Engisch is actually a local variety on That being said, Weekend Release Saturday plus Weekend Release Sunday.
