Western Industrial Contractors and its SRCC workforce are eight weeks ahead of schedule as they wrap up the first upgrade in decades of the automated mail sorting system at the Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S. Postal Service processing and distribution center.Â
WIC began upgrading the aging mail collection lines in April of 2024. WIC is a global integrator of material handling and conveyer systems, and the company employed 140 millwrights from numerous SRCC local unions across the South to complete the job.
“The reason why we choose union workers is because you’re getting a better quality all around and not to mention the safety,” said WIC General Foreman Jason Sarenana. “All of these guys are trained. They are skilled laborers, so with the skilled labor your quality goes up, your production goes up and typically you are more efficient.”
The Greensboro USPS facility serves as a major regional hub that uses advanced sorting to handle nearly a million packages daily with over 100 package drop lines. Once completed, every drop line in the facility will have been upgraded and modified by SRCC millwrights to fit the tallest available postal packs and make the system more efficient.
Seventy-three package drop lines have been upgraded so far in the first major update to the facility since it was built in the 1970s.
“Mail comes in off the dock, gets loaded onto a mail dumper, which sends the mail through a maze of conveyors and onto a singulator, which shuffles all the mail into a single file line to be read by a scanner, which tells the system which chute to dump it out on,” Sarenana said. “This project builds on the original tilt-tray system that runs on a chain, with a lot of the conveyers being upgraded to powered roller conveyors.”
The new system upgrade includes repurposing metal for the framing and tearing old drive systems out of existing conveyors and replacing them with modern, faster powered rollers that get rid of the chain-and-sprocket style conveyor.
“We had 110 guys out here at the highest point, there was a lot of moving parts, a lot of people coming together to make this thing work. A lot of these guys have been going seven days a week, 10-hour shifts,” Sarenana said.
Patrick Willingham, a council representative for the SRCC, has assisted WIC with staffing the project. “With our training and our skill level, we are unmatched,” Willingham said. “For instance, this project in particular is running eight weeks ahead of schedule.”
The remaining 28 millwrights on site are hard at work completing upgrades to the previous system. The project is scheduled to wrap up in April.
“WIC trusted the SRCC union millwrights with this task because of the training and safety culture being far superior to non-union counterparts,” Willingham said. “The reason this project is ahead of schedule is because when contractors go into a facility that they have been renowned for doing, for instance conveyor installation, we pair them up with membership that not only has worked with them in the past but also have a certain level of expertise that they can bring to this company.”
