Workers are battling an overhaul of the US Postal Service (USPS) that would cost thousands of jobs and slow the mail for half the country.
In the name of efficiency, a letter mailed within Cheyenne, Wyoming, would travel to Denver and back. And if you miss a package, your local post office would no longer have it. It might be forty-five minutes away.
In March, Buffalo became the first place to fend off the closure of its mail processing plant, in a team effort by Letter Carriers (NALC) Branch 3 and Postal Workers (APWU) Local 374.
The unions turned out three hundred people to picket in front of the plant, and seven hundred to pack a public hearing, said Branch 3 president David Grosskopf. They deluged USPS with feedback in its online survey.
They lined up the support of their state reps and city council; they got neighboring town councils to pass resolutions too. They even got their senator to call the postmaster general personally — and it didn’t hurt that their senator was Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Within a few weeks, the plant consolidation was canceled.
Postal workers are the nation’s biggest union workforce — 585,000 strong, split across four unions. They’re half women, 30 percent black, and 16 percent veterans.
Thousands of their jobs are at stake under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s ten-year “Delivering for America” modernization plan, which would close two hundred mail processing plants and funnel all mail to sixty mega-plants called regional processing and distribution centers (RPDCs), each with a football field–sized…
Auteur: Alexandra Bradbury
