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.