Complaints: Missoula post office employees sarcastically cough on each other

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    MISSOULA, Mont. (The Missoulian) — Discord last month in Missoula’s post offices over state and local face mask rules in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic had intensified to the point of anti-mask employees sarcastically coughing in other staff members’ faces, according to complaints filed with the local health department.

Local U.S. Postal Service officials have continuously worked over the last two months with the Missoula City-County Health Department and bosses up the mail agency chain to rectify the internal failure to enforce directives ordering mask use, according to documents released by the health department. Still, after another mask-related complaint was filed on Wednesday, the health department issued a letter — albeit short of a health officer’s order — Thursday urging Acting Postmaster of Missoula Deren Bennett to enforce the mask rules.

“The goal is to limit the number of Missoula County cases, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19,” Missoula City-County Health Officer Ellen Leahy wrote in the letter. “USPS, as an integral part of the community, has an important duty to ensure that face coverings are worn as required.”

When asked for comment on the complaints, a staffer in charge while Bennett was on vacation this week said local offices are not able to comment to the media.

Eighteen complaints have been filed with the health department against the local Postal Service facilities since the local face covering rule and order went into effect in early July. Seven came from employees; several do not indicate whether the complainant is an employee, customer or observer. One person submitted a complaint to the health department on behalf of their wife, a post office employee. Health department officials told the Missoulian last week another batch of complaints filed with the local Postal Service union have been submitted to the agency, as well.

The U.S. Postal Service is in a state of uncertainty nationwide over budget cuts and alleged political subterfuge. Mask use — or the personal dispute of it — in the offices reflects a nationwide division. In her letter to the Missoula postmaster, Leahy noted Post Offce management and supervisors have been the subjects of complaints for failure to wear face coverings and enforce them among staff.

When the USPS District Manager Mark Talbot visited the Missoula facilities during the first week of August, he said he was impressed by the level of compliance, according to the files released by the health department. The morning after Talbot left, local management and many staffers went back to working without masks, one complainant said. Complaints filed by employees at Missoula’s Post Offices, which were released to the Missoulian on Thursday, indicate stress within the offices is riding high.

“People who are not wearing masks are making fun of those who do, with such actions as coming up and coughing in people’s faces a common thing. Management is not wearing masks or enforcing the wearing of masks at all. People are taking personal sick leave to not come into work because there is no social distancing or mask-wearing,” one person, apparently an employee, wrote in their complaint on July 28. “Escalation of tempers on the floor is getting out of control.”

Employees reporting a lax mask policy at work to the health department has helped draw the agency’s attention to compliance issues, as was the case for The Resort at Paws Up in July. Unlike the luxury resort, however, the Post Office’s services bring carriers to people’s front doors, and dozens of others together into facilities for essential work. A common stance for those who oppose mask use is a perceived constitutional right to refuse the order, although a constitutional law professor at the University of Montana said in July that argument has no footing.

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