Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 7, 2015)
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | August 7, 2015 | PAGE 11 Rally to save postal service celebrates Postal Heritage Day Ben Franklin (aka Ben Poe) joined nearly 50 people at the Main Post Office in down- town Portland July 26 to celebrate the 240th anniversary of the U.S. Post Office. Postal unions have written to President Obama, asking that the occasion be cele- brated every year as Postal Heritage Day. Postal workers, retirees, and community allies turned out Sunday, July 26, to celebrate the 240th anniversary of the U.S. Post Office. In Portland, they marched through the Main Post Office down- town, chanted, ate birthday cake, and listened to postal defenders— including Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general in 1775. “The postal service is under assault,” proclaimed Franklin (aka Ben Poe). “Over 100,000 good union jobs have been lost in the past 10 years as post offices and mail processing plants have been cut and closed. Mail is being delayed. Six day delivery and at-the-door delivery are on the chopping block.” Franklin said the postal service is not broke, and that the agenda of the 1% and their friends in Congress is to cripple the institution to soften it up for union busting and privatization. “The USPS is a $67 billion annual business with over $100 bil- lion surplus in its pension and retiree health benefit funds, over 30,000 post offices and 200,000 vehicles,” he said. “We’re facing a huge transfer of public wealth to Wall Street investors.” The Postal Service was established by the Second Continental Congress in 1775, making it one year older than the United States. “For more than two centuries it has been the government agency that interacts the most with the American people,” said David Yao, vice president of the Greater Seattle Area Local of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), at a Postal Heritage Day rally at Seahurst Park in Burien, Washington. “U.S. post offices are anchors of our communities all across the country, and postal workers are the public servants Americans en- counter on a daily basis,” Yao said. “Our public postal service must be protected as a public service, a public asset, and a national treas- ure.” Recent small victories in the struggle to save the postal service have included a one year moratorium on mail plant closures and a National Labor Relations Board charge against the USPS to stop outsourcing postal retail jobs to Staples Office Supply stores. Postal unions—APWU, the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, the National Association of Letter Carriers and the National Association of Rural Letter Carriers—have called on President Obama to declare July 26 Postal Heritage Day. RETURN TO SENDER: NLRB says Postal Service deal with Staples broke federal law American Postal Workers Union (APWU) has won Round One of a legal fight against outsourc- ing to Staples. In a complaint issued June 26, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) says the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) broke federal labor law when it set up postal sales counters at Staples stores —staffed by low-wage nonunion Staples employees. The NLRB seeks a court order requiring USPS to restore the work to APWU members. Sta- ples sales employees earn about one-third the roughly $25-an- hour wage of APWU members. At USPS — unlike other fed- eral agencies — labor relations are under the NLRB’s jurisdic- tion. Except for the right to strike, most private-sector union “The Staples deal de- grades postal work. It reduces postal retail service to a ‘product’ that low-wage employees sell, rather than a public service performed by highly-trained profes- sionals.” — APWU President Mark Dimondstein rights apply to postal employees too, including the right to bar- gain over changes to terms and conditions of employment. USPS violated that requirement when it set up postal counters at the big-box office supply seller Staples without informing the union or negotiating, the NLRB complaint says. The move also violated a provision of the union contract that covers outsourcing. USPS is expanding its out- sourced retail shipping “partner- ships” at the same time it’s clos- ing post offices and processing facilities. The Staples deal started in fall 2013 with a pilot program to set up mini-post offices in more than 80 stores. That provoked a furious reaction from the 200,000-member APWU and other postal unions. APWU or- ganized protests outside Staples stores, demanding that postal counters be staffed by postal employees. In April 2014, the union announced a boycott of Staples stores and the com- pany’s Quill.com website. The AFL-CIO endorsed the boycott, and so did AFSCME, the Amer- ican Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and Service Employees Interna- tional Union. The decision by the two teachers unions to join the boycott got Staples’ atten- tion, and in July 2014, Staples announced it was ending the pi- lot program. But APWU said that was a ruse — USPS can- celled Staples’ mini-post-office pilot program and reclassified it as part of its Approved Shipper program, in which Staples also sells shipping via UPS. The re- classified program was then ex- panded to all of Staples’ more than 1,000 stores. The boycott continues. The NLRB complaint next goes to a federal administrative law judge, who will hear the case Aug. 17, in Washington, D.C.
