Have you seen the postal contract service centers cropping up at suburban strip malls? This is part of an ongoing congressional effort to privatize the entire USPS and divest it of the Postal Service Union. The Republicans want to convert the USPS civil service jobs into minimum wage jobs so that Republican contractors can pocket the savings. The new privatized post office jobs will provide no benefits, no security, no skills, and no upward mobility.
The national postal workers union has just signed a four year contract for its members, but feels their future is uncertain after that. Meanwhile it is responding to urban growth with outsourced contracts.
Do you think your experience at the post office will change if it’s staffed by unskilled workers watched over fast food restaurant type supervisors? The whole city loses with inferior services, but that’s not the worst of it. Fewer dollars into the labor pool means workers who have less to spend around town. A community of poverty wage workers can’t support anything more than cable, pizza and Lotto tickets. It perpetuates poverty which means less education, less productivity, lower expectations, more crime and richer Republicans in their gated communities.
It’s certainly not suprising…we teachers will probably be the last union left. But then again, I can’t say our current education system is exactly working well with the underachiever students or the insouciant crowd. The USPS just needs to update a few things. For example, it costs nearly the same amount of money to send something via FedEx ground, and that package can be tracked, but with the USPS you can’t have it tracked unless you pay a surcharge. I’m not sure everyone at the USPS is always paying attention as much as I’d like to see. Example: Recently I sent a book but wasn’t told that I could send it bookrate for about 1/3 of the cost. Then a friend told me that there is a book rate. So the next time I went in, I asked and was told yes, you can send it cheaper. Shouldn’t the “knowledgable” postal worker have mentioned that to me the first time I was in there? Plus, downtown–jesus h the lines are long. You’d think they’d put more people on during “peak periods”. NOT.
USPS is like the education system or the DMV…slow to change and some people who get their tenure just stop giving a hoot about how well they perform and then you just can’t get rid of them. Of course this is probably a small number, but then again, shouldn’t you be able to get rid of the lazybones more easily??? Something to ponder. Some postal workers earn more than teachers who have to have a lot of education and training. That doesn’t seem right.
Workers for one postal union http://members.aol.com/unionweb/wopu/index.html
As a brief one time ‘mail handler’ when I was 19 y/o let me offer this relevant site to the conversation here.
It’s just the continued war against the commons waged by people with more money than conscience.
Someday, the entire nation will collapse into a cesspool of poverty for 85 to 90% of the population ignored/hated by the remaining 10 to 15%, who will own all the property and receive most of the income.
Wait: isn’t that the current state of affairs?