SACO, Maine — Aurea Vega has lived in her 1892 home for the last 13 years. She admires the hardwood staircase, the many closets, and the massive windows overlooking Main Street in Saco.
The only thing that's stopped working this fall, she said, is the postal service.
"This past week it really became noticeable because we got mail on Monday last week, and we haven't since then," Vega said. "We were expecting some ornaments for the kids, and bills."
Meanwhile, at her local post office, it's a busy scene of carrier cars loading and leaving. A mail carrier who could not interview with NEWS CENTER Maine said he was going to work well into the night making sure parcels were delivered.
Portland post office employees over the weekend hosted a rally, where more than two dozen people gathered outside the Portland Post Office on Forest Avenue on Sunday morning. Standing among the snow and traffic, they held signs demanding their employer hire more staff.
"We are severely short-staffed. A lot of carriers are very upset," Mark Seitz, who has been a mail carrier for 19 years, said.
Seitz is also the president of the Maine Association of Letter Carriers. He said employees log nearly 100 hours a week filling shifts, and in some cases, mail goes undelivered for more than a week at a time.
"It's been a slow downhill decline. It's been severely in a downward trend for a while, and I don't see an end in sight unless they change their hiring practice," Seitz said.
For carriers with a longer career like Walter Stover, who has served the same route for more than 30 years, the staffing issues have never been this bad.
"A lot of people say they have already heard, about the hours being too long and the working conditions," Stover said makes the job seem unattractive.
Northeastern USPS communications specialist Stephen Doherty did not respond to interview requests on Monday but offered a statement to say USPS aggressively recruits.
"Like many companies, due to the low unemployment rate right now, we’re not seeing the number of applicants that we’d like. Retention is another area that we are focusing on heavily," Doherty said in an emailed statement.
Both Seitz and Stover said carriers are being asked to deliver more parcels over enveloped mail, as managers make more bonuses the more parcels delivered.
Doherty said this was not true in his emailed statement.
"The idea that we would prioritize delivery of packages from one business over another’s is ridiculous," Doherty said in an email.