-This is a complete culture shock for me.
-I worked with the post office for 32 years.
I've never seen anything like this.
-I don't know that this damage can be repaired.
-We are trained from day one to never delay the mail.
Delaying the mail has always been a disciplinary offense
in the postal service.
-When DeJoy came in,
it just all of a sudden, hey, guess what.
No more late trucks.
Boom. Put a stop to it.
Deliver what mail you have.
But when a carrier gets more mail and he's running his route,
after his eight hours is done and his shift is done,
they cut off their route.
So the end of that route is not gonna get their mail.
I've had mail-handling friends tell me that,
"You know, I'm at the end of the route,
and I haven't gotten mail in three or four days."
-There was no explanation, right?
They were just given an edict.
What you end up seeing was when you mailed a letter
to your daughter or your grandmother or whoever,
what you saw was that the letter didn't get there
for almost a week.
-I know so many elderly people in Indiana
that rely on the postal service
to get their medications on a regular basis.
They can't be delayed four, five, six days.
It's been very difficult for postal workers to sit
and watch that mail that's being delayed
when we know there are customers out there
who are looking for their mail.
-Now he's saying, "Well, we're not going to delay mail."
So to me, it was an admission of, "Yeah, okay,
you did put those policies in, right?"
The damage is done. Machines are scrapped.
I can speak for Ohio and Cleveland.
We have eight.
Five of those, they were tarped.
What you call "being tarped" is they turned them off.
In other words, they pulled the plug
and they just put a tarp over them.
You have an increase in the volume, right?
Because of Christmas season, as well as the ballots, right?
So we're going to see that increase.
So they were tarped, right?
Not scheduled to be dismantled.
When he came in, he moved forward and said, "No.
I don't want them just tarped. I want them dismantled."
They were put out back, dismantled, rained on.
So we know they're not going to bring those back.
-There are 671 machines nationwide
that are slated for removal.
They're selling some of these machines.
The post office thinks that they're removing
these machines to save money.
They're selling them for a few hundred dollars.
And typically, these machines cost a half
a million dollars or more.
-When you have someone who's been working in mail processing
for years,
you know, all the employees are questioning,
like, "Do they realize
what they're doing or know what they're doing?"
And so, this shows evidence.
That's why you do not hire
someone who has no familiar with the mail.
-We are a service.
We're not a business.
So you can't expect us to act as a business
because we're there to serve the American public every day.
But to be able to get through the bounty,
the dramatic increase in the numbers of ballots
we expect to handle,
we're gonna need financial assistance.
We're gonna have to be able
to use all of our mail-processing equipment.
We don't want any more equipment removed.
Postmaster General said he would stop it for now.
-I feel very confident that we can handle the volume of mail.
It is a lot of pressure on us
to have to hold all these ballots in our hands
and make sure they get where they need to go.
But they are important just as every piece of mail
that we hold is important.
-Right now, along with this pandemic
that we've been dealing with across the country
and across the world, the Postal Service
and those ones that you see on the street every day
or come to the station or what have you,
we have been a sense of normalcy for people, right?
No matter what's going on, you saw that guy or woman
walking down the street delivering that package.
-If the Postal Service continues to degrade service,
we're gonna lose business.
We believe, to keep the Postal Service,
who is owned by the American people,
on solid financial footing,
then we need some help from Congress.