A U.S. mail carrier in Ohio says he was pulled off his route and suspended after using Facebook to warn that Winter Storm Fern was turning deliveries into a dangerous grind. His posts and videos about buried trucks, icy roads, and exhausted coworkers have since ricocheted across social media, turning a local workplace dispute into a national argument over safety and speech.
At the center is Jason Thompson, a USPS carrier who says he was only trying to keep people safe when he hit “post.” Instead, he is now off the job, facing possible termination, and watching his warnings about brutal conditions become a public test of how far a worker can go when calling out their own employer.
The Facebook post that lit the fuse
Jason Thompson’s story starts with a simple decision: to stop venting in the break room and start talking on Facebook. During Winter Storm Fern, he used his personal account to describe what it felt like to deliver mail while streets were buried and visibility was shot, saying that if snow piled “two feet on the sides,” carriers were effectively buried and that a single shovel was not going to cut it for crews trying to dig out their vehicles and reach mailboxes packed in by plows, a warning later echoed in Jan. He framed the post as a plea for more resources and realistic expectations, not a rant against customers, arguing that the strain on “men and women” hauling mail through drifts was reaching a breaking point.
Thompson’s frustration did not stay contained to a single status update. He followed up with video that showed him stuck between buried trucks and slick roads in Ohio, describing how routes that normally felt routine had turned into a maze of snowbanks and ice where one wrong move could send a postal truck sliding, a scene later detailed in coverage of a mail carrier in. In his telling, the point was to show the public what “extreme conditions” really looked like from the driver’s seat, and to nudge USPS into taking the storm’s risks more seriously.
From viral video to emergency suspension
The reaction inside the Postal Service was swift and, from Thompson’s perspective, punishing. He says USPS managers contacted him shortly after his Facebook posts about winter safety went up and told him he was being placed on leave, a sequence he and his supporters have described in multiple interviews and that aligns with accounts that Thompson expressed his online before hearing from the agency. He says the message from supervisors was blunt: his public criticism of “extreme conditions” during Winter Storm Fern had crossed a line and could cost him his job.
By the time his story started circulating more widely, Thompson was already off the schedule and facing what he describes as an emergency suspension without pay. One account of the case notes that a USPS worker was placed on emergency suspension after management reviewed his social media posts and concluded they violated internal rules, a move described in a Daily Dot newsletter. Another report says Thompson was explicitly warned he could be terminated for criticizing the conditions he faced during Winter Storm Fern, with one write up stating that USPS carrier Jason Thompson was threatened with termination after he described routes buried under feet of snow.
What Thompson says about working through Winter Storm Fern
Thompson’s posts and later interviews paint a picture of a job that, during Winter Storm Fern, felt less like a routine government service and more like a survival exercise. He has talked about trudging through drifts, trying to reach mailboxes that were effectively walled in by plowed snow, and navigating streets where even experienced drivers struggled to keep control, a reality that matched warnings that if snow was “two feet on the sides,” carriers were essentially buried and needed more than a shovel, as described in coverage of Mail carriers in FAIRFIELD, Ohio. He has also pointed out that many carriers use their own vehicles in these conditions, which means they are risking personal cars and trucks, not just government equipment, when they slide into a snowbank or get stuck behind an unplowed intersection.
In some parts of the country, postal workers were operating under an Extreme Cold Warning at the same time they were being told to keep delivering, a tension captured in reports that a Mail carrier who raised concerns on Facebook still felt pressure to meet the expectation of finishing the route. Thompson has argued that the official line about safety first did not always match what he and his colleagues experienced on the ground, where the unspoken rule was to keep moving unless conditions were so bad that trucks literally could not get through.
USPS policy, public image, and the social media gray zone
USPS has long told carriers that they are expected to complete their routes in all kinds of weather, but that they should do so with safety in mind, a balance that was reiterated in coverage noting that USPS carriers are typically expected to deliver in harsh conditions while still prioritizing employee safety. The gray area comes when workers decide that the safest move is to speak publicly about what they are seeing, especially on platforms like Facebook where a post can jump from a local friends list to a national audience in a matter of hours.
Thompson’s case shows how quickly that can happen. A video clip of a Postal Service mail carrier from Ohio describing his suspension and warning that he had been threatened with termination after a Facebook post criticizing the storm response was shared widely, including in a Postal Service focused video that spread on social media. An Instagram post about a US Postal Service mail carrier from Ohio who was suspended after a Facebook post about Winter Storm Fern, tagged with “Mail-evelont resolve,” helped push the story into broader feeds, as seen in a Mail themed update that framed his stand as a kind of stubborn resilience.
How the story went national and what is at stake
Once Thompson’s suspension hit wider circulation, the story stopped being just about one carrier and started raising bigger questions about how essential workers are treated when they speak up. Human interest coverage highlighted how a mail carrier in Ohio, identified as Jason Thompson, said he was suspended after posting worries about winter storm safety on Facebook, and how he later raised communication concerns about how the storm response was handled, details that appeared in a profile by Abigail Adams, a Human Interest Writer and Reporter for PEOPLE. Another account described how a U.S. postal carrier named Jason Thompson took to Facebook to complain about working through the snowstorm and ended up suspended without pay, sparking debate over whether management had a clear safety plan in place.
Online commentary picked up the thread, with one newsletter noting that a USPS worker was placed on emergency suspension after criticizing the storm response and pairing that with lighter chatter about topics like Zohran Mamdani’s jackets, a juxtaposition that underscored how quickly serious labor disputes can get folded into the daily scroll of internet culture, as seen in the Daily Dot roundup. Another outlet framed the episode as a postal worker being suspended after calling out USPS in a video, noting that large portions of the Northeast and the Cincinnati area were buried under two to three feet of snow that forced many businesses to close while carriers kept working, a contrast highlighted in a Discover More style feature.
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