Mitch Perry
A handful of U.S. Postal Service workers demonstrated with signs in front of a downtown Tampa post office on Thursday afternoon. They were calling attention to conditions affecting employees and the public a week before the American Postal Workers Union‘s (APWU) contract with the Postal Service is set to expire next Wednesday.
The union is calling for extended hours at post offices to shorten customers’ wait time in line and a stop to closing mail sorting centers.
Members also have concerns about privatization of such services.
“How’d you like for somebody to handle your mail who makes $8 an hour, and there’s a check in there for $1,000 and you don’t know who’s handling your mail?” former Postal Service worker David Bernstein said.
He referred to jobs being outsourced to businesses such as Staples and Walmart, where postal workers’ jobs can be done for less by employees making minimum wage. “That’s a bad situation,” he said.
The Postal Service has been losing money for years, but the vast majority of those losses stem from a mandate imposed by Congress in 2006, which requires the Postal Service to prepay retiree healthcare benefits for 75 years into the future.
“We’re the only semi-private government agency that has to pay that money,” Bernstein said. “We’re the only company that I know of in the U.S. that has to do that so far in advance.”
Members of the APWU say it’s time for congressional action to right the situation.
“We’ve got people who want to treat this as a business, and bust it up for Wall Street, and I can promise you that the prices that you currently have with the U.S. Postal Service will pale in the future if this is allowed to happen,” said Don Barron, executive vice president with Tampa American Postal Workers Union 259
Since 2012, 140 mail-processing centers in the U.S. have closed, and 82 are considered for closing this year, including the post office at Dale Mabry and Ehrlich in Tampa, Barron said. Union officials say no fewer than three post office locations in the downtown have closed in recent years (including one on Florida Avenue just up from the Tampa Marriott Waterside).
“I’m standing with the the postal workers,” said Norwood Orrick, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 824 in Tampa. “The Postal Service actually is a very profitable operation if you take away the fiscal constraints, certainly can afford to pay their workers a good decent wage and keep them in the middle class.”
Postal Service workers reached a peak of 909,000 in early 1999, according to the Labor Department. Members of the APWU say their work force has now dropped to 450,000 with more reductions coming with the planned post offices scheduled to be closed down this year.
“We have to concentrate on making sure that people get the service that they deserve,” Barron said. “Not to continue to reducing it to the point where people are looking for other places to go.”
