Cut And Slash Is Not The Way To Save America’s Post Office

by John Greathouse
Editor, The Pacer
National Postal Press Association
American Postal Workers Union
Central Michigan Area Local – Lansing, MI

In 2010 the Postal Service, under the guise of a financial crisis, began with what is best described as a “Fire Sale”! This financial crisis gave them the reason to begin the closing of mail processing facilities and local Post Offices across the nation.

Perfect Storm

When the country entered the recession in 2008 the Postal Service was experiencing its second year of Congressional “bloodletting”, under the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), requiring the USPS to prefund its retirement funds for the next 75 years at the rate of $5 billion dollars a year. This massive expense in addition to a declining mail volume created the “Perfect Storm” for the Postal Service.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe added fuel to the fire by repeating over and over again that First Class Mail volume was declining and that the USPS needed to make cut backs. A great deal of that lost volume was due to him constantly crying “the sky is falling” and driving customers away. He was able to report to Congress that First Class Mail volume had dropped over 20%, thus giving management the excuse to cut almost 60% of the mail process facilities (252) across the country and over 150,000 middle class jobs.

Here’s how they are doing it

In almost every town across the country is a Post Office, some smaller than a one car garage, but they are what binds each community together. Many of these places do much more than sell stamps. A Post Office is a place where townspeople, from all walks of life, regularly cross paths maybe, have a bit of conversation and begin to see each other as neighbors in a shared community. Each Post Office also links its postal community to all others, forming a human network for the common good. That’s why this institution is widely appreciated, often beloved and consistently rated the most trusted by the people. Whether their zip code is in Detroit or Elsie each is a dot on the map of America’s vast countryside.

Local Post Offices have become a social entities that are located everywhere, open to all, dedicated to service, resourceful and extremely popular.

Elimination and privatization of the Post Office is the goal Congress, USPS management, Washington’s lobbyist and think tanks that have for several years now they’ve been using ideological pandering, legislative gridlock and political deceit in constant attempts to disable or dismantle piece after piece of the system.

Grand Theft Postal!

In 2011 the USPS listed 3,700 offices across the country under review for closure. The USPS budget was running about $5 billion a year and was bleeding red ink, explained a postal spokesperson who’d been propped up in front of a TV camera or town hall meeting to calm the locals. He sympathized with their loss, but said with a sigh: “The postal service has to look under every rock, to save every dollar, to try to keep the service alive.”

That comment makes the postal powers seem almost heroic, but their actions are actually somewhere between pathetic and vile. Three points:

1. The “savings” hoax. Locking the door on many of these small Post Offices would save a paltry few thousand dollars a year for the $67 billion a year USPS which, since 1971 has been a quasi-private enterprise that’s solely funded by sales of its stamps and services. The widespread notion that taxpayers somehow benefit from these cuts and closures is completely fallacious. Not only do these “savings” do little to solve the USPS’s problems, but will cause widespread economic impact on many of these small towns and communities by eliminating what few middle-class jobs that was available.
2. The “every rock” hoax. While Congress and the postal service’s top bosses busy themselves by scrutinizing financial pebbles they continue to pretend that the massive boulder of manufactured debt hung around the neck of USPS isn’t there. The USPS is far from being “broke” as the right-wing, anti-government crowd ceaselessly claims. The Postal Service’s revenue greatly exceeds its operating costs generating an impressive operating profit of $1.4 billion annually. Yet, the service appears to be sinking in red ink, thanks to one outside factor, the malicious congressional meddling. While Washington has loudly insisted that our public mail network must sink or swim on its own as a business, getting no taxpayer subsidies, Congress quietly intervened in the Service’s business in 2006 to rip a Titanic-sized gash in its balance sheet. Other than the USPS, no other business or government agency has to pre-fund retirement and healthcare accounts for even one year, much less seven and a half decades. This adds an unbearable, artificial, government-manufactured debt of more than $5 billion a year to USPS–accounting for 100 percent of its current “losses.”
3. The “keep the service alive” hoax. The only important thing the USPS has to offer our customers is SERVICE. Kill off the community facilities and the dedicated workers who deliver and what’s left of the PO? Nothing! This is precisely why the extremist anti-public ideologues and corporate profiteers keep chanting their “shrink to survive” mantra. In addition to its PO closure list which bears the ridiculous title of Retail Access Optimization Initiative, the postal hierarchy is either contemplating or is already implementing such “shrinkages” as:

• shutting down over half of the 487 mail processing centers throughout the country slowing delivery;
• reducing the hours of business for more than half of America’s post offices 2, 4, or 6 hours a day. Reduced hours will limit customer access resulting in reduced revenue for the Postal Service;
• cutting nearly a third of postal jobs by the end of this 2015, the largest reduction of postal employees in the Post Offices 240 year history;
• discussion of eliminating Saturday mail delivery, again reduced service to our customers;
• corporatizing the marketing of the most popular and most profitable mail products by letting Staples run boutique PO kiosks in its big box stores and staffing them with their poorly paid, minimally trained, non-union workforce.

That’s not a plan to build up the Postal Service – it is death by a thousand cuts.

This vital, vibrant national resource has been seized by a band of misfits who don’t want it to survive. Cut-by-cut they’re draining the Service’s ability to serve. And if we let them, they will bleed it until there’s no life left–no sense of public mission, no throbbing heart of an energized workforce, no community soul… and most importantly… no customers.

Benjamin Franklin, our first Postmaster General appointed by the Continental Congress in 1775–prior to the establishment of the USA itself, saw the Post Office as a tangible expression of the new nation’s inventive, public-spirited, democracy-expanding possibilities. Have we Americans today lost all of that spirit? Are we now so culturally corporatized that we can no longer imagine the big possibilities that we, as a society, can team up to build? I’ve found that “We the People” want to do the exact opposite. If the leadership in Washington accidentally stumbled upon some workaday folks at a mom and pop cafe, they’d find a powerful commitment to the democratic ethic of “we’re all in this together,” a yearning to rebuild and expand this great institution as well as the rebellious dismay at the obsequious servitude of our national leaders to the corporate few.

Fire Sale!

On January 5, 2015, the USPS cut the delivery standards for First Class Mail across the country. Overnight mail is now a thing of past. You used to be able to mail a letter across town and it would arrive the next day. In the words of a USPS spokesperson, “It will be there any day now!” The official delivery standard is 2 to 3 days, however we have had reports deliveries taking of more than 5 days!

Revisiting a time before the Insanity of the Cuts

Back in 2011 the USPS held numerous town hall meetings as it was running around making plans to close hundreds of small Post Offices across the country claiming that it was both fiscally necessary and not that big of a deal. After all, they cheerily explained, there is another Post Office in the next town or you could run down the local Village Post Office in the little country store a few miles away! The people hadn’t come to talk about the inconvenience of driving to another town for service, but about community.

“Once the post office goes away,” said one, “we’re just another ghost town. Where we go to get our stamps is not important. It’s our central place.”

In 2012 USPS had to suspend its “wholesale” closure plan. More than one Congressman was upset that a office in their in the district was being closed so they told the USPS not to do it.

Not to be out done the USPS rolled out their next plan. Communities were asked if they would like their small Post Offices closed or if they prefer that their office hours be cut? Of course the people voted for reduced hours. This information was misrepresented by management that the customers were asking for reduced hours! This is a GREAT Service plan… a Planned Failure!

The majority of people who are upset about the dismantling of the Post Office are making it very clear, in this fight from coast to coast, that the common good matters more than all of the blather about shrinking and privatizing government. The people of our country are not small thinkers unlike those in power. Their vision and goal is not to have a postal service that can “survive,” but one that can expand and thrive.

As they cut mail processing facilities and reduce the hours of operation that a post office can be open, slow down First Class Mail and degrade services customers will start looking for other ways to deliver items that they have used the USPS for the past 240 years!

Michigan… Under Attack!

In late 2010 the Postal Service management launched their attack on several mail processing facilities here in Michigan. Gaylord, MI was the first mail processing plant to be cut in Michigan.

Several years prior, the U.S. Postal Service, Greater Michigan District, tried to close Gaylord. They attempted twice but the local union was able to tear apart the USPS’s Area Mail Processing study (AMP), because the data the USPS used was very creative and was loaded full of fuzzy data and math. The third time the USPS failed to follow the law and their guidelines and denying the union the AMP study data that was used to determine the reason to close the plant.

The USPS followed this same plan across the country and by refusing to provide the AMP studies to stop the plant closing until a Federal Judge ordered them to do so in 2013. The USPS responded to this by providing the AMP studies, only most of the data in them was redacted making the study useless. After another ruling by the judge the USPS provided the complete AMP study but only under the rule that it could not be shared by anyone other than the person who signed for it.

Here in Michigan the USPS closed Flint, Saginaw and Jackson mail processing facilities. The next plants “under the knife” are in Lansing, Kalamazoo and Iron Mountain. The last three are scheduled for closer by August 2015 unless Congress acts.

So here we have the “Most Trusted Government Agency” for several years running and what is the leadership of the USPS doing… Everything they can to destroy it!

A Grand Alliance

The post office is not merely a thing. It is a living, breathing organization that if properly nurtured will grow and expand to help keep America and the world connected and in doing so treat everyone, regardless of their address, as an equal throughout society. It’s this idealism, this inherently public nature of the postal service, that is the heart of its appeal and its significance–and it is the only thing that will save the service from being shrunk to just another corporate profit center by Congress and top USPS officials.

• Just over a year ago Mark Dimondstein, the fiery, newly elected president of the American Postal Workers Union, roused his members with a populist call to action. “Writing to Congress is not enough,” he declared. “Lobbying is not enough. History shows that only movements move Congress. We in labor must build a grand alliance with low-wage workers, retirees, civil rights organizations, women’s groups, rural communities, Occupy, veterans, family farmers, faith leaders, seniors, small business and other allies to restore the primacy of the public good–including the right to a vibrant, expanding public postal service.” Sure enough, last month, more than 60 national people’s groups joined with APWU to launch a remarkable grassroots campaign: “A Grand Alliance to Save Our Public Postal Service.” It takes a movement to advance democracy–and this is a democratic movement that needs and wants you: http://agrandalliance.org/

So what can you do?   As it turns out there is a lot you can do:

• Call your Congressman and Senator
• Go online and join the Grand Alliance
  – http://agrandalliance.org/
• If your mail service is slow, file a complaint with the USPS

It is Your Post Office… It is My Post Office… IT IS AMERICA’S Post Office… Fight for It!

“There are major efforts being made to dismantle…anything that benefits the population. Efforts against the US Postal Service are particularly surreal.”

–Noam Chomsky, OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity        

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.