Thursday, June 12, 2014
Your June 3 editorial, “Welcome to the real world,” calls postal workers “childish” because we oppose a no-bid deal that shifts postal duties from highly-trained U.S. Postal Service employees to low-wage Staples workers — who have little to no instruction in how to handle the U.S. mail.
Next time, you might want to do a little more homework before you disrespect hundreds of thousands of dedicated public servants.
Your claim that “the Postal Service is losing money hand over fist” is dead wrong. The USPS makes a profit on its core business — collecting, sorting and delivering the U.S. mail. Its on-paper-only financial losses come from an absurd prefunding mandate that Congress imposed on the USPS in 2006 but that is required of no other private business or public enterprise.
You are naïve to accept USPS statements that they will not close U.S. Post Offices. Hours have already been significantly reduced in San Francisco area Post Offices located near Staples stores. It’s obvious that closing U.S Post Offices is next on the agenda.
You may not be bothered by the destruction of public resources, but we are. We believe consumers will be too, since their access to postal services may soon be at the whim of Staples, a deeply troubled private company that has already announced it will close more than 225 stores by the end of 2015.
Postal customers have a right to have their mail handled by highly-trained, experienced USPS employees who have taken an oath to protect the sanctity of the mail and who are accountable to the American people.
You can call us names all you want. We intend to stand up for quality customer service, good, living-wage jobs and a vibrant, public Postal Service.
Mark Dimondstein
President
American Postal Workers Union
Washington DC
Editor’s note: For the record, we called the behavior of the American Postal Workers Union “childish,” not that of hard-working postal employees. There is a significant difference.