In layman’s terms, they wanna move carriers to sorting facilities to cut down on cost for shipping mail to local offices. This could cause carriers who live in the towns the deliver in, like myself, to drive upwards of 45 minutes to an hour away to a sorting facility (this number is based on what my office’s situation would be, could vary office to office). After clocking in and sorting our routes, we would then have to drive back that same amount of time to town to deliver, then drive that far back to return to office.
You can see the issue here, sure you’re cutting on transportation costs to local offices, but you’re now spending a lot more on carriers fuel in the already inefficient mail trucks to drive back and forth to their routes. We wouldn’t get compensated for the milage and time going to and from the new office and it would lengthen our days because of the new drive time. That being said, if that drive time is accounted to our routes, our routes are supposed to be adjusted to 8 hours total time for normal mail volume. Now you’re adding that much time, you gotta cut deliveries per route. Now you have to add more routes to compensate, which means paying more salaries to cover said routes. Sure it’s good for us as carriers because routes need readjusting anyway, but is not the cost saving measure they think it is.
Edit: Another idea they’ve had is create regional delivery offices where 3 or more towns are in a single building, but this can cause the same issue, and in some regions it may not be possible due to the distance between offices in highly rural areas such as the Great Plains.