You Have Power as a Postal Worker and as a Customer

I am sharing information about how you can help save our public Postal Service by utilizing your power as an APWU member and customer.

There is an attack on many public, government services in this country. It’s about corporate billionaires taking control and taking constitutional rights from the people so that they have no public services that provide prompt, reliable, secure, efficient, and affordable government services. When these services are degraded, these corporate billionaires use poor results as a case for privatization. Private-sector companies have no laws to provide prompt, affordable, secure services. I’m a Vote-by-Mail citizen and I’m very concerned.

It’s difficult to provide First-Class services with consolidations and the degradation of public mail services. These attacks take away prompt, affordable, and secure services from our community, as well as living-wage USPS jobs. They affect the services that: connect you to your family members, no matter where they live; help small businesses thrive; receive medical prescriptions on time; provide mail ballots on time; if you run for office, send out political campaign materials on time; communication with legal services; apply for passports; send and receive money orders; provide overnight affordable express service for emergency needs. I could go on and on.

The Postal Service provides a service for the poor. Ask Reverend Barber, the leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, how many people with minimum wage jobs have the need for public services, as well as those who live in rural areas, or on reservations. People need to connect with family in other countries or provide subsistence to family members overseas or in military service. We need to help save these services before it is too late.

Postal revenues are made off the backs of the communities and the workers across this country. Postal workers are paid, thanks to our customers in every community. All communities deserve prompt, affordable, and secure services.

What Power Do You Have?

You can demand that your senators and House representatives do more than write letters. Request that they vote to place a moratorium on the USPS plan, stop the consolidation of 57 plants that would delay mail service, stop the removal of automation that provides prompt services to the public and takes away jobs. Stop changing plants into Sorting and Distribution Centers (SDCs), with more transportation costs, delayed services, and lost jobs in small post offices. Stop the optimization plan to keep your mail and packages delayed and sitting in post offices overnight. Stop the USPS from silencing the public’s voice after Board of Governors’ meetings, stop the USPS from attempting to eliminate the right to in-person public meetings and input when there is a plan to shut down a post office. The USPS needs to stop their tactics that sabotage the rights of the public to have ample opportunity to attend public meetings when there is a study on possible consolidations to remove mail, automation, and jobs from a community plant. It’s the people's Postal Service, and we have the right to ask questions, review studies, and make comments that affect the public services in our communities.

Contact your local or state union, your coworkers, and your community members, and ask that they step up with you in this fight. The Postal Service is moving fast with no real transparency. We have to be faster to get a moratorium in place until the USPS plan has been thoroughly investigated on its effects to our communities. We can’t afford to lose our very important public Postal Service. ■