“Ending Saturday delivery, closing post offices, laying off hundreds of thousands of postal workers—all of these measures seem like a form of suicide for the Postal Service. But this isn’t a suicide at all. Rather, it is a premeditated act of murder carried out by Wall Street banks and mega-corporations that want to get their hands on this fantastic resource that has been treasured by the public. …
“The unions can use their vast power—a still untapped power—to stop this anti-worker scheme in its tracks. Nothing is more urgent than to demonstrate to the powers-that-be that the labor movement is prepared to raise holy hell to stop this latest attack. If labor fights, it can win. If labor fights, the broader public can be be rallied into a powerful force against those who want to loot the U.S. Postal Service.”
—Brian Becker, ANSWER Coalition national coordinator, speaking at the Gaithersburg, Md., demonstration on March 24
Letter carriers, postal workers, mail handlers and community members held rallies in every state on March 24 to protest plans to eliminate Saturday mail delivery.
At the action in Gaithersburg, Md., members of the National Association of Letter Carriers and the American Postal Workers Union from throughout southern Maryland gathered outside of the Suburban Maryland General Mail Facility. They held a spirited picket for several hours, chanting: “What do we want? Six day! When do we want it? Now!”
Speakers at the rally included William Burrus, former president of the American Postal Workers Union; Jos Williams, president of the Metropolitan Washington Council AFL-CIO; Ken Lerch, branch president of NALC, 3825 Rockville, Md.; Nannette Corley, president of the Montgomery County, Maryland area local of the APWU; Dena Briscoe, president, APWU, Nation’s Capital and Southern Md. Local; Brian Becker, of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism); and several more.
Eliminating Saturday mail would impact millions who depend on getting their mail—home-bound seniors who get prescription drugs through the mail, those living in rural areas whose post offices have already cut hours drastically (some to two hours per day), those waiting for word from loved ones far away. The impact is compounded when holidays fall on a Monday and mail is delayed for one more day. Organizations from the National Farmers Union to veterans groups to the NAACP have protested this proposed cut in service.
Postmaster general poised to break the law
On March 21, the Government Accounting Office issued a legal opinion stating that Congress’s Continuing Resolution (funding government operations) passed on Sept. 28, 2012, requires that mail delivery not be reduced. The language of that law requires the Postal Service “to continue 6-day delivery and rural delivery of mail at not less than the 1983 level.” In 1983 and every year since then, both parcels and letters have been delivered on Saturdays. Despite this, the postmaster general has declared that he will end Saturday letter delivery to homes beginning the week of Aug. 5.
Mass opposition to the cut in service forced Congress to pass another Continuing Resolution (with the same six-day language) on March 20. This would preserve six-day mail only until Sept. 30. As a sign of the impact of organizing, President Obama is expected to sign the legislation. Only a year ago, on Feb. 13, 2012, President Obama proposed a budget that allowed for a reduction to five-day delivery. And before that, on Sept. 19, 2011, he proposed a budget with the same five-day delivery language. Now he is expected to sign the bill with six-day language.
After the bill passed on March 20, Congressman Darrell Issa and Senator Tom Cole (leaders in the right-wing fight against the postal workers) issued a joint statement demonstrating their skill in twisting the truth. They said that despite the law and despite the legal opinions, the postmaster general could still go ahead with his plan. They claimed that he would be “merely altering what products are delivered on what day.” For them, the fact that mail delivery of letters would be ended is not a cut in service.
The impact on workers
The Postal Service is the second largest employer in the U.S. after Walmart. But unlike the workers at Walmart, postal workers have a degree of power because they have unions. Because they have unions, they have been able to get decent wages and benefits that help support their families—and the communities where they live.
Ending Saturday delivery is part of a plan to replace full-time workers with part-time workers. The administration claims that there will be no layoffs but admits that 22,500 jobs will be “impacted.” Office closings, consolidations and speedup are the means being used by the Postal Service to force people out of jobs and still maintain the image that it is not laying anyone off.
Management has already been demanding the acceptance of two-tier pay systems to cut wages, as well as pushing at every opportunity to increase the use of workers who are paid less or have fewer rights such as “Postal Support Employees” or “casual employees” (not represented by the union but doing the same work at less pay).
Because of the civil rights struggles from the 1940s through the more intense 1960s, many of the 200,000 post office employees are African American, Latino and Asian. Many are women. Many are veterans. Any action to reduce jobs will impact these communities the most. Unemployment for African Americans is already double or triple that of whites in many areas. February reports show that the unemployment for Latinos was 18.2 percent in Rhode Island, 16.1 percent in Connecticut and 13.3 percent in Pennsylvania. Those figures come from the most conservative—and unrealistic—calculation of unemployment.
Not just a one-day reduction of service—office closings
On March 22, the Postal Service posted its final notice on the wall in the La Jolla, Calif., post office declaring that it will close the office. Activists had tried for a year to stop the closing and even got it added to the National Register of Historic Places to designate it as a historic building.
The Postal Service plans to close five offices in New York City, including the Tito Puente Station in East Harlem, the Bronx General Post Office, the old Chelsea Station and possibly the Washington Bridge Station. Protests forced the Postal Service administration to agree to a public meeting April 11 at the Old Chelsea Station, located at 217 West 18th St., on the plans to sell that office.
It is important to note that in 2011 the Postal Service proposed closing 34 offices in New York City. In 2012, it proposed closing 17. Now it wants to close five. Protests and pressure have reduced what it thinks it can get away with.
Other struggles against closures are taking place from Albany, Ga., to Berkeley, Calif. Following protests in Berkeley, on March 5 the City Council passed a resolution against the closing, and Mayor Bates sent letters to 54 mayors calling for a united opposition to post office closings. Bates said in a statement, “Collectively, we may be able to lobby the federal government to halt the sale of post offices across the country and express our outrage at the privatization of publicly funded buildings.”
The Postal Service lists 47 sites for sale right now from Los Angeles, Anaheim and Fresno, Calif., to St. Louis, Philadelphia and New York.
Not just office closings—privatization plans
Saturday delivery is just the tip of the iceberg. Powerful forces want to privatize the whole operation. Under the guise of a “think tank,” a former head of the Government Accountability Office recently released a report calling for everything to be privatized. Later it was revealed that Pitney Bowes (which got $30 million from Postal Service outsourcing in 2012) financed the group. In 2011, Pitney Bowes made $567 million from “mailing services,” and it is that portion of their operation where they expect to see the greatest growth. Fed Ex, UPS and Pitney Bowes would love to have everyone in the U.S. completely dependent on them for mail services. They are drooling at the prospect of getting hold of the $65 billion in Postal Service revenues.
Budgets and big lies
Again and again, the big lie has been touted by politicians and the press that the Postal Service is a money-losing operation that must be “reformed” by massive cuts to service and workers. On Dec. 20, 2006, President Bush signed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. It had nothing to do with enhancement and everything to do with weakening the Postal Service so that it would be easy prey for privatization. It required that the Postal Service do something that no other corporation or public body had to do—pre-fund retiree health care for 75 years (for employees not even born yet!) By requiring that billions be paid in this way, Congress and the president were also making it almost impossible for the Postal Service to function. In so doing they were following a well-worn path of underfunding and understaffing public services until a claim could be made that it just was not working and had to be privatized.
Interestingly, at the time that Bush signed the law, he said that he would interpret the changes made to also mean that the government had a right to open private mail in “exigent circumstances.” So not only was this a move to weaken the Postal Service but also a move to weaken the right of privacy.
Sometimes those who want to hide a big lie use a small truth to do it. The expanded use of the Internet and e-mail is an obvious fact. But it is not the reason for any significant financial losses at the Postal Service. Total mail volume increased from 2003 through 2008, then dropped due the world economic crisis. E-mail certainly existed from 2003 to 2008, so the cause of the Postal Service losses is not e-mail but the combined economic depression and the requirement to pre-fund retiree health care.
A struggle that we all have a stake in
If the Postal Service is successful in its attacks on 800,000 postal employees and their unions, that will further weaken the labor movement and make it harder for everyone to achieve justice on the job. It will mean that the communities where postal workers live will be hit with more foreclosures and feel the ripple effect of layoffs.
Since 1970, the Postal Service has been required to “break even,” as if a public service should be a capitalist business. “Breaking even” means breaking the lives of seniors living in rural areas, areas where it isn’t “profitable” to bring the mail and where gasoline is too expensive to get to a post office—that may now be closed.
The struggle against cutting six-day delivery is part of the struggle for the human right to the basic necessities of life. Those who are pushing cuts and privatization at the Postal Service are not calling on the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department and all of the imperialist and repressive agencies of the state to “break even,” much less break up. That is because their vision of the world is completely the opposite of those who care about people. From that point of view, the fight for six-day delivery is a people’s fight with profound implications.
