Letter Carriers fight back
Postal service tries to ditch door delivery in Portland
By JAMIE PARTRIDGE
Despite telling local KATU News
that it’s “just an idea ... we’re not really
pushing for it ... it’s just a discussion,
they’re just talking about in Congress,”
the Portland District of the U.S. Postal
Service is indeed soliciting property
owners and managers to convert from
at-the-door to at-the-corner “cluster
box” mail delivery. And the local Letter
Carriers union is fighting back.
According to Jim Falvey, president
of the National Association of Letter
Carriers (NALC) Branch 82, “the Port-
land District has instituted a program
that involves the solicitation of property
managers and/or owners whose loca-
tion has multiple delivery points. One
example was Royal Villa, a 55-and-over
retirement community located in King
City near Tigard, with about 250 door-
to-door deliveries. Postal management
solicited the property managing firm
and offered to install cluster boxes free
of charge and maintain them at no cost.
In return, the postal service wanted to
eliminate door-to-door delivery.”
Postal management does not have to
ask or even inform residents that this
conversion is going to occur, if they get
the cooperation of the manager or
owner of the property.
Arena football players
affiliate with AFL-CIO
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The
Arena Football League Players Union
(AFLPU) will join the AFL-CIO after
its board of player representatives
voted unanimously to affiliate with the
56 unions and 12.5 million members of
the national labor federation.
The AFLPU, which began opera-
tions in 1987, now has 14 teams — in-
cluding first-year team the Portland
Thunder — and is looking to expand
into China. The union represents some
350 players, more than 90 percent of
the league’s players.
Ivan F. Soto, executive director of
the players union, explained the move:
“It was just a natural fit for us. With the
rapid growth of the league we’re start-
ing to see, we felt it was good to align
ourselves with an organization that can
help us domestically and internation-
ally.
“We’re happy to have the backbone
of the AFL-CIO behind us. That’s what
solidarity is about — trying to grow the
pie for everybody, especially the play-
ers, the labor.”
Soto added that arena football is a
dangerous sport and that the players
“don’t earn the kind of compensation
that National Football League (NFL)
players do.” Joining the AFL-CIO, he
said, was a way to make sure that
games are played with properly trained
union players with sufficient protec-
tions.
The NFL Players Association also
is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
JUNE 6, 2014
Falvey was incensed to learn that
residents of Royal Villa, many of whom
are frail, would be forced to walk some
distance in the wind, rain, snow, ice,
dark and other dangerous conditions to
retrieve their mail. And, of course, he
was angered that letter carrier work
would be reduced and jobs eliminated.
Alerted by a local mail carrier who
found out through a USPS manager’s
slip of the tongue, the union president
contacted Royal Villa’s property man-
ager and convinced her to stand up to
the postal service offer of free mail
boxes.
The Letter Carriers union, both lo-
cally and on a national level, is mobiliz-
ing to fight cluster box conversions,
which would change the one-third of de-
liveries now at-the-door, and eliminate
80,000 mail carrier jobs. [KATU News
reported that 394,821 total deliveries
across Oregon and Southwest Washing-
ton, as far north as Castle Rock.
USPS, according to a recently re-
leased Government Accountability Of-
fice report, could save up to 55 percent
per delivery by converting from at-the-
door to cluster boxes. Postmaster Gen-
eral Patrick Donahoe, President Obama,
and committees in the U.S. House and
U.S. Senate — led by Rep. Darrell Issa
(R-Calif.) and Sens. Tom Carper (D-
Del.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), are all
proposing legislation to allow this serv-
ice cut, based on an alleged postal fi-
nancial crisis.
Congress itself is responsible for the
postal “debt,” through a 2006 mandate
to pre-fund retiree benefits 75 years in
advance. Without this mandate, union
officials say, the postal service would be
profitable.
THE ‘DON’T BUY STAPLES’ CAMPAIGN by postal worker unions got a significant boost May 30 when the national
AFL-CIO announced its support of the boycott. The unions are fighting a U.S. Postal Service deal that privatizes
postal jobs by turning over some retail postal service work to the office supply chain store. In the photo above, 70
protesters marched around the Staples store at Portland’s Cascade Station on May 18 chanting, “the U.S. Mail is not
for sale.” In pilot openings last fall, 82 post offices were launched inside Staples stores with low-paid, nonunion, non-
postal workers. None of the pilot stores are in Oregon. USPS plans to open post offices inside all 1,600 Staples stores
nationwide beginning this September. Another rally and picket is slated for Friday, June 20, at 5 p.m. at the Staples
store at 122nd and Northeast Glisan, Portland. Postal unions also encourage everyone to sign an online petition at
www.StopStaples.com.
At their state convention, the Oregon
State Association of Letter Carriers
(OSALC) resolved to fight for at-the-
door delivery which, “facilitates quality
service, such as individualized parcel
and bulk mail drop and pick-up loca-
tions” as well as “residential customer
contact, which protects the health and
welfare of neighborhoods, especially
looking-in on the frail and seniors.”
OSALC also noted that “cluster box
mail receptacles are less secure than at-
the-door and are more often targets for
mail thieves” and “mail is more likely
to accumulate day-to-day and more
likely to be dropped on the ground,
leading to litter problems.”
Following the lead of Canadian
postal workers, who are also facing the
elimination of at-the-door delivery, OS-
ALC is encouraging local branches to
mount campaigns to inform business
and residential customers about the
dangers of ditching door delivery. For-
tunately, postal regulations require that
property owners or “owners’ associa-
tions” or “managers” approve, in writ-
ing, the conversion from at-the-door de-
livery. Unfortunately, the USPS can
insist that any new housing, where de-
livery has not been established, can be
forced to receive mail at a cluster box.
(Editor’s Note: Jamie Partridge is a
retired letter carrier and an organizer
with Community and Postal Workers
United.)
Good luck with that: One wage and hour investigator for every 123,000 workers
At an academic conference May 29
in Portland, newly-installed U.S. Wage
and Hour Administrator David Weil
outlined the task ahead of him: To en-
force minimum wage, child labor, and
overtime laws for 135 million workers
in 7.5 million establishments … with
1,100 investigators.
“We can never be in enough places
to enforce the law on our own,” Weil
told attendees at the 66th annual meet-
ing of the Labor and Employment Re-
lations Association (LERA), “and you
could double our allocation and it
would still be that same small statistic.”
The national conference was held in
Portland May 29-June 1 at the Hilton
Portland and Executive Towers. It drew
nearly 400 representatives from labor,
management, government, academics
and neutrals to Portland.
Weil said he plans to continue the
approach of his predecessor: educate
employers and worker advocates about
the law, and use “strategic enforce-
ment” and “directed investigations” to
increase compliance.
Weil said that contrasts with the
Wage and Hour Division’s historic ap-
U.S. Wage and Hour Administrator David Weil spoke at the national
conference of the Labor and Employment Relations Association, held this
year in Portland.
proach, in which investigations were
done only in response to complaints,
and tended to focus on back pay
awards without trying to understand
what was leading to violations of the
law.
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
Weil — a professor in the Boston
University School of Management —
has written a good deal about labor law
enforcement in the modern era of lower
worker expectations and increasingly
fragile employment relationships. And
in a 51-42 vote on April 28, he became
the first Wage and Hour administrator
to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate
since President Barack Obama took of-
fice in 2009.
Obama nominated two others to
head the agency, which is housed
within the Labor Department, but the
Senate never voted to confirm them.
The U.S. Constitution gives the
president the power to make appoint-
ments “with the advice and consent of
the Senate.” But Republicans were able
to block consent of hundreds of Obama
appointees thanks to the Senate’s self-
imposed filibuster rule, which in prac-
tice allows any and all action to be
halted by 40 of the 100 senators. This
year Senate Democratic leadership fi-
nally did the obvious: It used a simple
majority vote to change the filibuster.
But it only did so for Senate confirma-
tions of presidential appointments.
Legislation, the Senate’s real work, re-
mains almost totally stymied. And it
would take legislation to add enforcers
to the Wage and Hour Division. Weil
said Obama is proposing funding to
add 300 more investigators.
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