A USPS worker delivers mail in Maryland. Credit: Flickr/perspective (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Here’s our problem
The United States Postal Service is one of the only universal programs that every person in the U.S. has access to and is able to use on a regular basis, but the survival of this vital service is now in question.
USPS processes and delivers over 23 million parcels of mail a day at extremely low costs and is mandated to deliver to every address in the country. Working people, and especially those in rural areas, rely on USPS to receive critical packages like medicine and other goods they might otherwise lack access to.
In addition to meeting the needs of hundreds of millions of people across the country, USPS is a vital source of union jobs for more than 640,000 workers in the U.S – especially Black Americans. USPS workers enjoy better pay and benefits than their counterparts in the private sector – Amazon, UPS, and Fedex – and their jobs provide stability for working class families across the country.
These critical public benefits are easy to overlook, however, because the USPS is dealing with a huge and unnecessary financial burden. This can result in long wait times at the post office, slow delivery times and even incorrect or lost deliveries by overworked staff. Since 2006, USPS has been required to pre-fund its health benefits to retirees 75 years in advance – something no other private company or public agency is expected to do. Because of this, USPS loses $5.6 billion a year and is stunted in terms of how much it can develop and expand its operations.
The con game of billionaires
Donald Trump wants us to believe that privatizing the USPS will resolve the issues working people experience with it – when in fact, that will only make it worse.
The reality is that public institutions aren’t innately inadequate – but under a capitalist system that prioritizes profits for the few over public good, public institutions are slowly chipped away at. When corporate executives and politicians criticize them as inadequate, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Public agencies like USPS are on the chopping block of Trump’s administration not because it’s not meeting the needs of the majority, but because there’s a profit for a select few companies to make at the expense of the majority.
USPS’s 2024 operating budget was almost $80 billion: billions of dollars that private companies like Fedex, Amazon and UPS would love to gobble up. And if they’re able to eliminate the postal service, why would they improve services as opposed to lining their own pockets? In fact, if Trump succeeds at selling off USPS to private companies, costs for sending mail and packages will skyrocket, and postal workers will suffer major blows to the pay and benefits they’ve won through their union.
The real answer for the working class
First, we have to get rid of the totally unreasonable and unprecedented mandate that the postal service pre-fund health benefits nearly a century in advance. This requirement was intentionally imposed in 2006 to slowly bleed the system of the funds it needs.
Then, we can find ways to direct more resources to the postal service so that services can be expanded and improved. One key way to do this is to make corporations who rely on USPS as part of their business model pay their fair share. Amazon, for instance, maximizes their profits by taking advantage of the low-cost services offered by the postal service –they can certainly afford to pay more. And by expanding USPS rather than turning it over to private corporations, we will create badly-needed, union jobs that pay a wage that can sustain a family.
This article is also available as a downloadable pamphlet here.
