For Postal Workers, Mailers Are a First-Class Pain

Dave Flores arrived at work at 5:30 a.m Saturday, hoping to get a head start on what promised to be an ugly day. It didn’t help.

Flores, a Santa Ana mail carrier, had hoped to start on his route of 500 homes by 10 a.m. But by 9:30, he still had about 2,000 pieces of mail to sort.

With only days left before the election, the workload for Orange County postal carriers has almost doubled. They get up before dawn and work late into the evening, delivering hundreds of thousands of campaign mailers.

For the carriers and postal clerks, that means putting in more than 10 hours a day, starting sometimes at 4:30 a.m., 2 hours earlier than usual, and working until after dark, just to keep up with the volume.

“For most of the carriers, our main concern is our customers,” Flores said. “They expect their mail at the same time they’ve always gotten it. They have letters from Aunt Matilda, their Social Security checks and their TV Guides. A lot of people are more concerned about that than this political mail.”

Some areas of Orange County, particularly where there are heated local races, have been inundated with political flyers this year, postal officials said. Between Wednesday and Friday, for instance, more than 2.8 million pieces of political mail were delivered from county post offices.

“We’ve been working too hard,” John Brown, a carrier at the King Station in Santa Ana, said Saturday. “A lot of us here are really digging in, and I’m here sweating like a hog. The good thing is that it only comes every 4 years.”

The worst of it seems to be in Santa Ana, where a bitter City Council campaign is generating four or five different mailings a day and the 72nd Assembly Districtrace is averaging eight to 10 mailings a day, said Orange County Postmaster Hector Godinez.

“Santa Ana has gone completely off the scale--the Richter scale. I’ve never seen it like this in Santa Ana in all the years I’ve been in business,” said Godinez, who has been with the Postal Service in Orange County for 42 years.

“We’re trying to get the mail delivered no later than 5:30 or 6. We try to have it delivered before dark. It’s a very, very long day for carriers.”

Dennis McKeown, the area manager for Santa Ana and Fountain Valley, said carriers at the King Station alone delivered more than 260,000 pieces of campaign mailers last week in addition to their normal workload. He said that amounts to about 2,000 extra pieces of mail a day for each postal route.

“During a normal week in the city of Santa Ana, carriers deliver 6 million pieces of mail. This week, it will be around 8 million,” said McKeown, referring to the week that ended Saturday. “And the difference is the political mailers.”

During the crush, Orange County post offices are paying 50% more overtime than usual. Managers are working long hours too, said Pat Cosentino, a manager at the King Station, who left work at 7 p.m. Friday and returned at 3 a.m.

Some carriers and clerks who are usually off on Sundays will be asked to work today. But most of the carriers are taking it in stride, Cosentino said.

“It’s just another job,” said carrier Brown, a 17-year veteran. “If you sat around and cried about it, it wouldn’t get out. Christmas has a lot more volume, but it goes faster at Christmas because the envelopes are (standard sizes). I would rather have Christmas anytime than this. But you have to get this out to people so they can decide what the issues are.”

But Margaret Tippie, a postal carrier for more than 5 years, was not convinced of the importance of this extra work.

“All (the mailers) say is, ‘I’m a good person and my opponent is a creep.’ They don’t seem to address the real issues. I want to serve my customers, but they get angry when they get a lot of this,” Tippie said, holding up 32 mailers that would go to one home Saturday.

“I started before 6 (a.m.) and I will work until after 6 (p.m.) It makes me furious when I know they (politicians) aren’t even paying (enough) to get this done. I still get paid whatever happens, but I would like to see everybody else not have to support this.”

Politicians tend to favor the third-class, bulk mailings because it is a much less expensive method of getting campaign literature out to voters, postal officials said. A 1-ounce letter costs 12.2 cents in bulk mail; first class is 25 cents. But to qualify, the customer must presort the mail by ZIP code before bringing it to the post office.

In Orange County, the Postal Service is earning an average of $130,000 a day from bulk mailing fees for the campaign flyers, according to Postal Service spokesman Joseph Breckenridge.

Normally, carriers are allowed to leave third-class mail until the next day if they don’t get to it during their regular shifts. But the high volume during this campaign has forced the post office to deliver it as quickly as first-class mail.

The post office wants to make sure political mail is delivered in time. Candidates have been known to complain that their mail was deliberately or accidentally delayed, thereby robbing it of its timely political punch.

“You have to walk on eggshells because everyone believes their mailer is the most important; it will win the election for them. We assure them we’re moving the mail,” said Godinez, who is seeking reelection to the Rancho Santiago Community College District Board of Trustees.