Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report : “This report provides data from the past two decades on the size of the U.S. Postal Service workforce, the number of persons employed by USPS by employment categories, and the number of persons employed by USPS under time-limited contracts. USPS employs over 784,000 persons. USPS’s workforce declined about 1% during the past two decades, and nearly 12% in the past five years. The number of career employees declined over 6% since 1986, and the number of non-career employees increased more than 62%. Clerks, who staff retail counters at post offices and manually sort mail, dropped about 26%. Rural mail delivery employees, however, grew more than 84%, and three categories of employees directly involved in the transportation of mail prior to its delivery grew between 8.9% and 26.9%.