Members of local Clarksburg APWU rally for better working conditions

CLARKSBURG, W.Va (WDTV) - UPDATED (04/28/23, 9:23 p.m.)

The position being presented here by the leadership of the APWU is absent of anything based in reality. The facts are… that over the past two years, we have worked diligently with our union and management associations to address our shared goals of employee recruitment and retention, workplace safety, and career training and advancement. We have focused steadily on stabilizing our workforce resulting in employee availability and overtime requirements being at the most favorable levels in many years. We have converted 125,000 pre-career workers to full-time career employees since October 2020, including 50,000 conversions between April 2022 and March 2023. We have already reversed years of declining service reliability and now 98 percent of the nation’s population receives their mail and packages in less than three days, and we are working hard to correct service-related issues in the other limited areas.

ORIGINAL POST: Members of the American Postal Workers Union Clarksburg local were rallying for better working conditions.

Vice President of Clarksburg local APWU Tracy Mullennex had worked for the post office for almost seven years.

In that time, she said things had changed.

“The post office is pretty much in danger right now, and when I say danger, I’m saying like the communities don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, but we do, and that’s why we are here,” she explained .

Mullennex said that she and other workers have been encouraged to do their jobs quicker.

“The supervisors will be kind of mean to old people that are getting slower. They’ll want the mail out as fast as they can to reduce the clerk hours. They’re just basically trying to save money. But we are a service. We are not a corporation,” she explained.

Mullennex said that some local post offices might not exist in a few years due to what she said was a shift to create bigger distribution centers in the area.

“They’re going to absorb all of these small offices around these distribution centers. They’re going to make them into one, and what’s going to happen is the offices are going to start closing,” she added.

However, no matter what obstacles they faced, she said they would continue to work for better conditions.

“We fight to keep our jobs. We fight for more hours. We fight for everybody. If you look at all these people here, have families, and we are all in jeopardy of losing our jobs,” Mullennex added.

We reached out to the United States Postal Service regarding these concerns, and a spokesperson sent this statement.

“As a point of information, the postal service certainly respects the right of our employees to participate in off-the-clock informational picketing on issues of concern to their membership,” the spokesperson said.

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