Samuel Messidor
The United States Postal Service has systematically falsified heat training records after failing to provide heat safety training, according to the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) union. This comes as logistics, construction, and other workers face injury and death from rising temperatures and fever-pitch work tempos.
The latest heat-related postal worker death is that of Eugene Gates, 66, who died while delivering mail in Dallas, TX in June 2023. Gates’ widow is working with the union to take legal action against the postal service over the falsified heat training records for her late husband. According to a Dallas letter carrier union steward, the Postmaster for Dallas lied to workers about Gates’ cause of death just one day after he passed, attributing his cause of death to a heart attack.
USPS has acknowledged that “in a few instances proper procedures were not followed” regarding the falsified training records, spinning the systemic cover-up of their failure to train workers on safety as a simple matter of some bad apple managers or even simple mistakes. This is in light of the thousands of accusations brought by the NALC on similar training falsification.
USPS has previously argued that heat does not pose a threat to workers, with USPS lawyers arguing in response to a 2016 OSHA fine that excessive sweating is not related to working conditions. However, OSHA figures show that heat is the 2nd highest cause of injury for USPS workers, after slips and falls.
The “cause of injury” is not just heat, but more so the logistics capitalists’ drive for higher rates of profit that pushes management to raise work tempos while also falsifying and skirting around safety training and policies. Letter carriers in touch with The Worker cite harassment to push carriers to work through their unpaid lunch breaks and threats of termination for failing to meet an arbitrarily-determined work tempo. The Postal Service has bragged about their plans to lay off 50,000+ employees in the coming years through their “Delivering for America” restructuring scheme, and they have already cut the wages of thousands of rural letter carriers earlier in 2023. This restructuring includes consolidating post offices into distribution hubs, increasing work tempo, and increasing parcel delivery in light of declining traditional mail volume.
The majority of mail trucks are not air-conditioned and the company’s promise to provide new, air-conditioned delivery trucks has been postponed year after year, mirroring the “victory” provided by the UPS/Teamsters contract for a company-controlled roll-out of air-conditioned vehicles.
Meanwhile, USPS negotiations with the NALC is ongoing. City carriers have been working without a contract as of May 2023 and the union leadership has kept the details and proceedings of the negotiations secret, though a city carrier in touch with The Worker says there are rumors among carriers that the 2-tier system of employment, hated by postal workers, is a point of contention, as it has been in the recent UPS and Big 3 auto negotiations.
