7/14/2015 – The APWU is part of a group of 50 postal unions, management associations, and mailers that has asked Congress to help the agency during the current nationwide financial difficulties by giving legislative relief to its retiree health-insurance liability.
In a Nov. 17 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), the group said that the “$900 billion mailing industry, millions of jobs, continued efficient universal postal services, and the long-term survival of the Postal Service are at stake.”
“The 2006 postal reform law required the Postal Service to pay off, over the next ten years, its actuarial unfunded liability for retiree health insurance coverage,” the letter said, while noting that in today’s economic climate, the 10-year payment schedule has become unrealistic.
“The Postal Service has proposed an adjustment to that payment schedule which would preserve the law’s requirement for full funding of retiree health benefits, but lessen the financial demand on the Postal Service for several years,” the joint letter said. “It does not relieve the Postal Service of any existing financial obligation. Employee and retiree benefits are fully protected.”
The letter pointed out that since the Postal Service proposal does not adversely affect the deficit, it is simply a cash-management change, “not a bail out.”
“Swift legislative enactment of the proposal is critical to the Postal Service, its employees, and the mailing industry.”
The letter to Reid and other congressional leaders was signed by representatives of the APWU, the National Association of Letter Carriers, the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, the National Rural Letter Carriers Association; several management associations; Pitney Bowes, Newsweek, and several other large mailers; and industry groups, including the Magazine Publishers of America and the Newspaper Association of America.
source: American Postal Workers Union
Prefunding obligation not presuming. Sorry
We’ve been trying to get postal reform for the last 5 years and nothing has changed. We haven’t made the last several prefunding payments and there hasn’t been any consequence because of it, and the presuming obligation ends next year so why are we still messing with this? Miss the next two payments like the rest and then forget about it.
Where were all the postal unions back in December 2006 or when Obama Took Office in January 2009, with an overwhemlingly Democratic party controlled Congress?
I, for one , can’t understand why the Postal Service must prefund it’s health care costs? No other organization in the world must do as the Postal Service must! The requirement of pre funding is but an artificial, invented, manufactured, asinine, unnecessary cost placed on the Postal Service to destroy it ! Remember, the idea came from ex president Forrest Gump and his Ratpublican friends. Even the so called Democrats voted for the worthless bill. Time to make congress pre fund their health care plan. Let them take their own medicine! Never ask a man to do what you wouldn’t ask of yourself! Better yet, every American should be required to prefund their health care!