Melville USPS Jobs in Jeopardy

"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night" will keep couriers from their appointed rounds, but budget cuts could.

The U.S. Postal service announced on Thursday that it will consolidate 229 of its mail processing locations and cut its workforce by approximately 13,000 employees, resulting in about $1.2 billion in cost reductions annually. The Melville Mid-Island Delivery Bar Coder Annex, located on Maxess Street, is one of the planned consolidations. The automated machinery will be moved to the larger Mid-Island Processing and Distribution Center, located on Duryea Road in Melville, Connie Chirichello, a representative of USPS said.

The Annex currently employs one supervisor, four mailhandlers, 15 maintenance employees and approximately 49 distribution employees who process mail through the machinery. Chirichello did not specify how many employees will lose their jobs, but stated that "staffing adjustments will be necessary."

“We simply do not have the mail volumes to justify the size and capacity of our current mail processing network," Lorraine Castellano, District Manager for the Long Island area of the Postal Service, said in a statement.

Chirichello called the Postal Service's economic woes, a "dire financial situation."

"Just last week, our 2012 Second Quarter financial results showed a loss of $3.2 billion dollars, and total year-to-date losses of $6.5 billion," she said.

The first phase of activities will result in up to 140 consolidations through February 2013. Unless the circumstances of the Postal Service change in the interim, a second and final phase of 89 consolidations is currently scheduled to begin in February of 2014, Chirichello said. The consolidations will begin this August.

The Postal Service also announced that it would soon change its overnight delivery policies that will initially shrink the geographic reach of overnight service to local areas and enable consolidation activity in 2013. The new rule would further tighten the overnight delivery standard in 2014 and set the wheels in motion for further consolidations.

“We are essentially preserving overnight delivery for First-Class Mail through the end of 2013, although we are collapsing the distance that we can provide overnight service to the distribution area served by a particular mail processing facility,” said Megan Brennan. Approximately 80 percent of First-Class Mail will still be delivered overnight, added Chirichello.

When fully implemented in late 2014, the Postal Service expects its network consolidations to generate approximately $2.1 billion in annual cost reductions, and lead to total workforce reduction up to 28,000 employees.