PORTLAND — Mail carriers in Portland rallied Sunday morning during the peak of the holiday season asking for safer working conditions.
Dozens of workers stood outside the post office on Forest Avenue asking for better workplace safety and mail delivery.
The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) union says carriers have long struggled with understaffing as well as poor management that has created delayed delivery of mail and what they describe as an unsafe working environment.
Some mail carriers in Maine have been working 16-hour days, seven days a week, according to the union.
The workplace safety concerns stem from carriers having to deliver mail later into the evening, facing threats they say of robberies and car accidents.
“We’re not asking for more money. We’re not asking for more benefits. We care about the customer, we care about the mail, and we care about our health and safety,” said Mark Seitz, President of the NALC in Portland. “We need somebody to help us.”
Union leaders also claim that USPS prioritizes Amazon packages over others, which USPS called “ridiculous and false.”
In a statement, USPS said: “We have been aggressively recruiting and participating in and hosting job fairs across the state to fill vacant positions but, like most other companies right now, we’re not seeing the number of applicants we’d like to.”
