Hiring/Retention

USPS is growing its workforce, but a ‘retirement wave’ may be coming soon, watchdog warns

USPS loses about 40,000 employees to attrition in an average year. That includes retirements and employees leaving to find work elsewhere.

Jory Heckman@jheckmanWFED

August 20, 2024 6:18 pm

4 min read

The Postal Service is facing a potential “retirement wave,” its inspector general’s office warns, with nearly one in five of its employees now retirement-eligible, and more than half its workforce eligible to retire within a decade.

The USPS OIG, in its latest report, found USPS experienced no significant shortage of career employees last year, despite a tight labor market in the U.S. and record-low unemployment rates.

Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, USPS grew its workforce by more than 8,000 employees — a more than 1% growth rate. The agency employs about 637,000 total workers.

The agency, however, may also need to prepare for a large contingent of its workforce to retire.

The USPS OIG found nearly 20% of all USPS frontline “craft” employees were eligible to retire, as of November 2023, and another 5% will reach retirement eligibility by the end of this year.

An additional 13% will reach retirement age within the next five years, and within the next decade, nearly 53% of frontline employees will be retirement-eligible.

Within the next decade, nearly 53% of frontline employees will be retirement-eligible. (Source: USPS OIG)

“While not every employee will retire as soon as they are eligible, and the Postal Service’s staffing needs may change over time, a retirement wave could cause workforce challenges,” USPS OIG wrote in its report.

USPS loses about 40,000 employees to attrition in an average year. That includes retirements and employees leaving to find work elsewhere.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said in an exclusive interview last year that USPS may need to hire about 300,000 new employees over the next 10 years just to keep its current workforce headcount.

The agency’s aging workforce persists across the country. In more than 92% of its 63 districts, at least a third of all craft employees will be eligible to retire within the next five years.

These numbers exceed but bear resemblance to a similar trend happening across the broader federal workforce.

About 14% of federal employees were eligible in November 2023, and almost another 3% will reach retirement age this year. Within the next decade, about 45% of federal employees will be eligible to retire.

Experts have warned about a potential retirement “tsunami” for years, but a mass exodus of retirement-eligible fed has yet to materialize — even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

USPS accelerated hiring during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic when the agency faced persistent short-staffing.

Between FY 2019 and 2023, the number of USPS mail handlers grew by nearly 19%, while postal clerk staffing grew by nearly 2% — in part because of their role in assembling kits of free rapid Covid tests following the launch of CovidTests.gov.

The number of city carriers fell by less than 0.5%, while the number of rural letter carriers fell by more than 3%. Building and equipment staffing fell by more than 6%.

USPS told auditors that demand for mail handlers grew because packages are taking up a greater share of its total volume, and because USPS is updating equipment in processing plants that depend more heavily on mail handlers.

“During the time frame of this report, 2019-2023, the Postal Service has seen a drastic change in mail volumes. With traditional letter and flat volumes declining and packages increasing, the Postal Service has had to adapt processing operations with ongoing network modernization, as well as a change in the mix of machine sets within processing operations that rely more heavily on mail handlers than processing clerks.”

Each craft added more career employees than pre-career employees, and most crafts saw their pre-career workforce numbers shrink.

Since January 2021, USPS has converted more than150,000 of its pre-career employees to career positions, with better pay and benefits. USPS sees much lower attrition among career employees, compared to pre-career employees.

USPS management, however, believes the agency can continue hiring to keep pace with retirements.

A trio of USPS executives — Chief Processing and Distribution Officer Isaac Cronkhite, Chief Retail and Delivery Officer Joshua Colin and Vice President of Human Resources Simon Storey — told USPS OIG that its average time to hire dropped from 49 days in fiscal 2021 to 32 days in fiscal 2023 — a 35% decrease.

The average time to hire, so far in fiscal 2024, is 25 days.