Atlanta-area postal worker dies on the job

Atlanta-area postal worker Shannon Barnes collapsed on the job on Sunday, August 18 from a brain aneurysm and later died, after her co-workers were unable to call 911 in a timely manner due to a lack of cellphone coverage in the vast facility where they worked.

Barnes, a 48-year-old mother, worked at the US Postal Service’s Regional Distribution Center in Palmetto, Georgia. It was a full 30 minutes after losing consciousness before she received medical attention, and by then it was too late. Doctors later told Barnes’ family she had already passed away by the time she reached the hospital.

Reporters from WSB-TV in Atlanta interviewed workers at the facility, who reported that they were unable to place calls or text messages inside the building, or even call 911. It has been reported that an employee had to leave the facility to find a cell signal and call an ambulance, a critical delay that may have cost Barnes’ her life.

Barnes’s son Quenious Holmes told the network that “his mother always complained about not being able to use her phone inside the distribution center” and “It was real devastating. We were told a lot of stories—there’s been a lot of stories… I think something’s going on at that post office because it isn’t my first time hearing about this.”

This tragic death is only the latest in a series of fatalities and life-threatening injuries that USPS workers have suffered in recent years as the speed-ups and efficiency schemes imposed upon them by management and their collaborators in the union bureaucracy erode what few job protections remain. 

Barnes’s death follows that of fellow postal worker Wendy Johnson of Fayetteville, North Carolina, on June 6 of this year. Johnson, a 20-year veteran of USPS, was found unresponsive in a bathroom at her facility shortly after returning from her route and later died in the hospital. The temperature that day was 95 degrees.

There can be little doubt that the lack of cell coverage inside the sorting facility was a deliberate choice on the part of USPS. The distribution center where Shannon Barnes died is a new facility, recently built and opened in February 2024. The Postal Service bosses no doubt calculated that preventing workers from using their phones on the job would improve profitability, and if a worker occasionally dies as a result, it would be worth the cost.

The distribution center in Palmetto is one of a new series of giant postal hubs opened under the exploitative “Delivering For America” plan that USPS first rolled out in 2021. DFA aims to make the USPS profitable by eliminating local post offices, merging operations into fewer and more extensive facilities, and “increasing efficiency” by imposing speed-ups and putting workers out on the street. Postmaster General Louis Dejoy has gone on record stating that DFA will lead to the loss of 10,000 letter carrier routes and 50,000 jobs.

The goal of DFA is to set the conditions for the privatization of USPS, so that it might more effectively compete with UPS, FedEx, and Amazon.

The Palmetto center consolidated four smaller units that serviced the Atlanta area, and its operational roll-out has been a disaster. From the outset, the facility, which has a capacity of 200 loading docks, snarled mail delivery throughout the Atlanta Metro area, home to over 6 million people. Only 37 percent of inbound mail handled by the Palmetto center was delivered on time in March, shortly after the facility opened. 

The mail delays have caused a cascading set of disruptions. Medications, mail-in ballots, income-tax filings and other important documents have taken weeks to be delivered or failed to show up at all. A series of investigations by local media led to congressional hearings where DeJoy doubled down on the need for DFA but agreed to slow its implementation.

A recently released report by the office of the inspector general found that the Palmetto facility was understaffed by nearly two-thirds when it opened and that management had failed to train postal employees on the machinery and processes at the new facility. 

Under DFA, letter carriers also face heightened exploitation. USPS installed a monitoring system in May 2023 in collaboration with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) union known as the Technology Integrated Alternate Route Evaluation and Adjustment Process (TIAREAP). This system monitors workers’ activities to ensure they’re always working and there is no downtime.

Rural carriers are monitored by a similar program, the Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System (RRECS). A worker that the WSWS interviewed said that under the RRECS , which is the system that determines their pay, there are “counts.” These counts are two-week periods designed to determine the amount of time it takes to deliver the mail, using a highly complicated system based on GPS. The problem is, when carriers deliver mail based on GPS, the system doesn’t consider that a worker may have to climb multiple flights of stairs or drive through maze-like parking lots in an apartment complex. It also doesn’t allow for the time it takes to remove and load mail from and into large mailboxes in the complexes.