Postal Workers march to save six-day service

[Better Believe It]

Postal Workers march to save six-day service
By Barb Kucera, Workday editor
25 August 2010

DETROIT - Thousands of members of the American Postal Workers Union, led by President William Burrus and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, marched through the streets of downtown Detroit Tuesday to save Saturday service and rally for good jobs.
Wearing blue APWU T-shirts and chanting “Five Day – No Way!” the marchers shut down busy streets and assembled at a park to alert the public to the need to preserve Saturday mail delivery. The rally included several dozen Postal Workers from Minnesota.

“Everywhere we go, the Postal Service is closing and consolidating post offices,” Jackson told the crowd. “We are postal workers fighting back. It’s time to save our jobs and Save Our Service!”

Burrus said that members must “tell America that we’re not fooled” by the plan to close mailboxes on Saturday, and the union must let the public know that they shouldn’t be fooled either.

The Postal Service has asked Congress for permission to eliminate Saturday mail delivery – a plan that would slow service, drive away business, and lead to the demise of the world’s most efficient and trusted postal system. The American Postal Workers Union is leading a campaign to preserve six-day service.

Millions of citizens depend on Saturday delivery to receive prescription drugs, checks, newspapers, magazines, greeting cards and other material, the union said. Most U.S. businesses operate six or seven days a week, and many rely on a six-day mail delivery cycle.

Members of other labor unions pledged support for the fight.

“Over 200,000 working members of the Detroit AFL-CIO stand with you,” said Saundra Williams, president of the Metro Detroit Central Labor Council. “We will defeat this crazy notion of five-day delivery. We will not support diminishing services.”


The Rev. Jesse Jackson addressed the crowd at a rally to save Saturday mail service.



Read the full article at:

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_4598

They say cutback. We say fightback! BBI

[mike r]

1. USPS still hasn't done much about the wasteful spending and malfeasance in their management

http://www.dmnews.com/audit-finds-wasteful-spending-during-usps-2009-fiscal-year/article/160168/
A report released this month by its own inspector general's office found that agency's employees spent $792,000 on meals and events without justification in late 2008 and the first half of 2009. The USPS disclosed a net loss of $3.8 billion for fiscal year 2009.

[Better Believe It]

2. So that's $792,000 in wasteful spending out of billion. Absolutely horrible!

Why if it wasn't for such waste and malfeasance the USPS would have made a big profit in 2009!

So why is the postal service suppose to be a profit making service like private capitalist enterprises such as UPS and FedEx?

Oh .... that $792,000 was not racked up by letter carriers and other workers.

But don't blame postal workers and take it out on them by laying off tens of thousands with a reduction in service.

[mike r]

5. I have nothing against postal workers

They're good hard-working folks. It's the management and their nonsense that I have a problem with. The above expense item was just a fraction of what's going on in the executive suites.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. Did the report also tell you that most of that billion

has to do with meeting future retiree obligations as part of a bill passed in 2006 and signed by Bush?

Or the story forgot to tell you this?

[CTD]

3. I know it would suck for the Postal Workers...

But there is no practical reason for mail delivery to happen more than three days a week - Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Nothing urgent arrives by regular mail. Just bills and outright junk. The bills can wait a day and only have to put the junk on the recycle pile ever other day would be a bonus.

If cuts need to be made, this seems like an obvious place to make them. Yes it impacts the workers. And that sucks. But we also no longer have telegraph operators or typewriter repairmen.

I am all for defending jobs. But the Postal Service is a relic whose time is rapidly passing into the rearview mirror.

[Better Believe It]

8. Millions of people are dependent on six day mail service. Many are not online.

So service should be reduced and thousands laid-off because we no longer have telegraph operators or typewriter repair workers.

Well, that sure makes a lot of sense if people used the Postal Service to fix typewriters and send telegraph messages!

Are UPS and FedEX about to go belly up or will they be reducing their service to three days a week as you suggest USPS should do?

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. You do not get it

and that's ok. This is a wet dream for the republicans, but you also know that the Postal Service IS the ONLY service in the US Constitution?

Oh and just because you get bills and junk does not mean that OTHERS like oh BUSINESSES don't depend on it.

By the way, you do this, it will hurt you as well... the domino effect on the economy will be felt by you too.

[Occulus]

14. You don't work there

so you don't have any idea of what you're talking about.

Post offices and distribution centers do not have the storage capacity to hold the volume of mail the USPS currently moves to the level you're suggesting. Even a one day delay- say, for a holiday- is taken advantage of to catch up.

It's really astonishing how much of a difference it makes. The USPS has to deliver every day due to the sheer volume.

[PATRICK]

15. What it means on the workfloor

It means EVERY week is like a holiday weekend logjam. The money saved by treating the schedule like that means a weekly tidal wave effect(Lord knows what the actual weeks will look like) of murderous volume that takes days into the week to recover before it simply starts all over again- with some really interesting Xmas seasons I'm sure. The overtime and overdrive are just the thing to lay waste to an aging workforce that I am sure will be constantly replaced by casuals and privatization and further chaos.

The customary justification of lowered work force and lowered hours on the floor (that the USPS will stubbornly adhere to for greater reasons than the actual delivery of mail will guarantee poor service) critical delays of DATED circular mail, seeming justification for MORE bright ideas leading to the Bush Postal Commission's Holy Grail- selling out the entire service to profiteers.

One poster nailed the essential antique nature of paper message service. I recognize in a perfect future with equitable access and profitability for all, electronic services should replace most things except parcel delivery. In America profiteering has replaced any notion of such actual progress such that it would be like closing the roads so that everyone is left with the limited, often pricey seats on the supertrain line that does not stop at small locations. I thought we were facing our demise decades ago but paper business boomed along with everything else. In an economic contraction plus federal malfeisance in raping postal funds with oopsy pre-funded retiree healthcare miscalculations added to bizarro destructive management, a perfect storm has been created out of which there is no safe harbor for either workers or the public at large. Just more cannibalistic profiteering and union busting.

People have no idea what happens on the many holiday short weeks and the bulges that businesses plunge into them. Granted that some holiday business campaigns create bigger bulges than normal, making every weekly schedule a panic rush to get around the two day delay will enormously effect service every single day for every single customer.

[scheming daemons]

4. This march will be as successful as...

..when the 8-track tape makers marched in 1985.

..or when the buggy-whip makers marched in 1915.



A "march" isn't going to change the economic reality that people need paper mail less and less.


3 days a week...like some other poster said... would be sufficient.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. Or that the Republicans voted on a bill in 2006

that is a time bomb set to destroy the USPS from within in order to privatize it.

I recommend people get educated. If they did not have to meet FUTURE retirees obligations right now, they'd not be bleeding the red ink they are.

Oh never mind, continue please.

[Kingofalldems]

6. K and R for the union

[MilesColtrane]

10. Stealth privatization in the guise of "cost savings".

The private carriers will slowly take over all mail as the USPS atrophies.

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. Somebody who does get it

Kudos to you.

[w4rma]

12. That's the plan. It's been interesting to read the usual tripe of the apologists for this plan.

I've noticed that the supporters of privatization are always dismissive and arrogant about any government service that someone with a lot of money would like to become the middle-man for.