Hi everybody, Cheryl Ackeson here. Welcome to another addition of full measure after hours. Today, no, it's not you, U.S. mail delays are real.

I noticed in the past couple of years some extremely delayed mail coming to my house or other people

telling stories about first class letters that should be arriving. We thought in one to three days

that they were taking weeks or months. Sometimes we're not coming at all. We're being returned

even though they had been addressed to

the proper address. And I began asking around and hearing other people talk and I started to think

this was pretty widespread. And I began looking into it to find out what was behind this

snail mail trend. It turns out it's true. it's well documented, and there are a number of

reasons behind it, which I get into in my Sunday, May 11th edition of full measure.

250 years now into its existence, the Postal Service, is it a pivotal crossroads, you might say?

Stuck in a dead letter pile of delays,

there are also deficits, and a lot of doubt about its future, with $9.5 billion in losses last

year alone, and sometimes mail-taking weeks just to cross town or even be delivered across the street.

My investigation not only unearthed a lot about the reasons behind all of this and some of the recent history behind

the U.S. Postal Service's problems, but I also got some insight information and details

and documents and photographs that you will see showing stacked up mail at distribution

centers that should have been delivered long ago but was just gathering dust at the time

the photographs were taken. But today in this podcast, we're going to hear from one person in this

story, Mark Dimmonstein. He is president of the American Postal Workers Union.

He's going to tell us about why some of this is taking place, but also address plans for

fixes of the Postal Service, which I've been covering and reporting on as long as I can

remember as a reporter because the Postal Service has been in financial trouble for so long.

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