For Immediate Release from Portland Communities and Postal Workers United
Sept. 24, 2015
pictured: Retired Portland,OR Letter Carrier Jamie Partridge, Postmaster General Megan Brennan and Rev. John Schwiebert
Postmaster General Megan Brennan met briefly with protesters after giving a speech to a conference of Portland mailers yesterday. Rev. John Schwiebert and retired letter carrier Jamie Partridge, leaders of Portland Communities and Postal Workers United, were invited in from the picket line to discuss their demands with the PMG. “We appreciate the willingness of the new Postmaster General to meet with community groups impacted by cuts, closures and delay of the mail,” said Schwiebert. “We’ll see if our pleas, petitions and postcards result in preserving the people’s postal service.”
A chanting and singing group of several dozen postal workers, retirees and postal customers held banners and signs reading “No Closures, No Cuts” and “Mail Delay, Not OK” on the sidewalk outside the Portland Art Museum, site of the annual meeting of the Greater Portland Postal Customers Council. Meeting attendees received copies of an Open Letter to the Postmaster General” which outlined PCPWU concerns about mail delay and reduced service standards related to mail processing plant closures and drastic cuts in rural post office hours.
Since 2007, the US Postal Service has eliminated 155,000 jobs while closing 153 (almost half, including Salem and Pendleton) its mail plants and reducing service at half the nation’s post offices. Currently the PMG is considering shuttering another 68 mail plants, including Bend and Springfield in Oregon, plus reducing hours at 5,000 more rural post offices, including 37 in Oregon. The previous PMG attempted to cut one day of delivery and eliminate at-the-door delivery.
“The postal service is not broke,” said Partridge. “But the agenda of the 1% and their friends in Congress is to cripple the USPS, to soften it up for union busting and privatization. The USPS is a $67 billion annual business with over $100 billion surplus in its pension and retiree health benefit funds, over 30,000 post offices and 200,000 vehicles. We’re facing a huge transfer of public wealth to Wall Street investors.”
Recent small victories in the struggle to save the postal service have included a one year moratorium on mail plant closures and a National Labor Relations Board charge against the USPS to stop outsourcing postal retail jobs to Staples Office Supply stores.
Portland Communities and Postal Workers United is part of a national network (Communities and Postal Workers United) to defend and enhance the US Postal Service.
Willing to meet with a retired carrier is better than what Donahoe would ever do, but it’s all smoke and mirrors as usual. Management listens to and answers to nobody, and the last people they are interested in listening to is the people who do the work.
Now a nationwide harassment campaign based around DOIS standards, which can’t be used as discipline by themselves, but will be, since management couldn’t give a shit less for the contract, either, is underway and carriers are being forced or at least bullied into making better office times even as districts order supervisors to short carriers on their volumes.
I have this on anonymous authority, and I can tell readers that management is deliberately telling local management not to give any time allowances for circulars or marriage mail. They are ordering their supervision to give only half the time needed for casing thin pieces of mail. Apparently lots of other short changing goes on that directly violates the M-39 and 1840 process. Thus, those carriers too intimidated or frightened, especially CCA’s, try to work as fast as possible to make numbers that are false. Deliberate falsification of volumes should at least be grievable. It is, actually, but as long as discipline hasn’t been issued in large numbers, it’s doubtful the NALC will do anything about it, even though it is creating a hostile work environment, and some management is becoming almost tyrannical trying to make the demands put on them by district.
Carriers who blame this miscounting on stupidity are completely missing the point. Pay attention here: management overall isn’t stupid, and as long as we treat them like they are, we become careless and set ourselves up for more harassment and discipline. We must be on our toes at all times.
No, this is a harassment campaign as I stated, and if a bit of cost savings can be culled from this program, it’ll put money in pockets for bonuses and for the supervisor/manager trying to climb the ladder, it’s an effort to get their attention at the expense of craft and customers.
We can’t be accurate, reliable and deliver the way management orders CCA’s and other junior carriers. They are not interested in keeping up with COA’s. They don’t care about rampant mail misdeliveries that come when carriers forced to run slam mail into boxes far from the right address. What they do hate is answering the phone and complaints when carriers are doing what they tell them to do.
But here is the big problem, CCA’s. You can and will be held accountable for doing what you’re told. Run a route and a half a day, and sooner or later, you’ll get injured, or so something monumentally stupid because you’re exhausted, and those people you thought were on your side will turn on you like a rattlesnake.
Never believe national level management like Brennan when they talk about the “postal family”, appreciating our hard work, etc. If they could replace us with drones and robots, we’d have been history years ago.
At least our PMG met with one group of objectors,2 USPS’s continually reduction in service-standards 4 letters and flats. Funny,though,I can’t any announced one-year moratorium on Postal plant closures. All I recall is postponing all planned plant downsizings to (TBD). The only exception was Queens,NY,which was downsized,effective Aug.1st. 4 the second-time since Oct.2009.
She meets with a church official and a RETIRED postal employee. Big whoop.