U.S. Postal Workers gained a star partner in their fight to save the national mail carrying institution. Ed Schultz welcomed actor Danny Glover and Mark Dimondstein, President of the American Postal Workers Union, to The Ed Show last night:
http://youtu.be/Ow7YM2XE8Bc
how about a few words from Democrat Sen Diane Feinstein and Hubby Blum…….their no bid po contract to buy/sell/lease postal property has netted them millions of dollars. Blum buys them for under market value and flips them for 200-500% profit. where is the Postal OIG or the Postal Inspection Service? Crony Capitalism Democratic style off limits? Diamondstein crys about Staples and that witch Liz Powell rants about 1%ers (got her kids into po mismanagement by selling mid-island 117 down the river)………what a joke the po is…….corrupt as the day is long. keep buying UPS & FDX stock.
A communist is the the spokesperson for the USPS? Being a CCA is a grueling experience workload wise while management enjoys the show. No backup, no help and the brunt of everyone’s jokes. I really enjoy the work but the USPS is engaging in unfair labor practices. No days OFF for many CCAs and constant taunting by supervisors to hurry things up with no regard for safety though we are taught its our primary focus. Many uneducated people work for the USPS and unfortunately many of them are in decision making positions.
Good video about the Postal service on the Ed show with Danny Glover and Mark Dimondstein. It IS a manufactured crisis, it is a Republican led assault to privatize the USPS, it is a great institution with many possibilities for growth, not to be diminished in size and function! It is a public service to the people, it belongs to the people, not Wall Street. It is a livable wage and benefit package that also employs many veterans. The only thing wrong with this service is those who are in charge of it. I believe the public have taken it for granted because it has always been here and feel they can now do without it since there is now internet. But the internet with /face book/twitter/google/yahoo etc. with online banking/correspondence/emails are not only ‘easy target for hacking’ jeopardizing your personal information, but most sites “own” your correspondence. How is that assurance of privacy? You can be victimized at any time. At least with the post office there is the sanctity of the mail, not so with internet. When the post offices closes, it is then, when the customers have become so accustomed to their every day activities regarding their correspondences do they realize what they took for granted for so many years is now a valuable asset. I know I did when I absolutely had to get some documents to their destination in a hurry. I went to my local post office looking for their Express mail envelopes. I asked a clerk who said there is no longer guarantee of overnight Express mail, but they do now offer Express mail priority. I asked the clerk what that means exactly. Is it Express overnight or Priority? She informed me it would be Express mail but they could not guarantee it would be there next day but priority processing could take up to three days. I asked her the cost, it would be $19.00 for an envelope. I asked her why I could not just pay for priority then if I was not guaranteed overnight for $19.00, she said that it (priority) couldn’t be guaranteed to get there in the three days. ??? BUT, if I paid the $19.00 for Express priority, there’s a “good chance” it could get there the next day or the day after, up to 3, but no promises. I went ahead and paid for “the possibility” for $19.00 and walked out realizing my documents would be late. They got there in two days. I considered myself lucky. But that is not the good service I had before. (reduced service standards) If the waitress at my favorite restaurant told me my dinner would “possibly” be fresh or “possibly” be good, I would never return, and just go someplace else. Unfortunately, I don’t have many options with my mailings.
Great ~ a has been actor with a soon to be has been union.
If the Post Office doesn’t change with the times it will destroy itself like it already is with the pre funding
It would appear to me that the APWU is much more visible and aggressive in trying to save jobs and the service from itself than the other unions. Of course, their jobs are the ones on the chopping block more than anybody else, so it’s imperative they get in and fight like hell. I support the APWU in their upcoming negotiations and hope they can make management back off.
Glover’s support is nice, too. We can use all the help we can get. Now, the NALC needs to get more visible and tougher too, because they’ll have a prime opportunity to see where the USPS management is going this time. It goes without saying though that management will agree to just about anything on paper and absent federal laws prohibiting a certain action, like closing plants, for example, they’ll do whatever the hell they want to anyway and let grievances pile up.
This is wrong. Labor contracts need to be much more rigorously enforced given the climate in D.C. and big business toward organized labor. When management fails and/or refuses to obey contracts they sign, after a certain amount of grievances are filed, an outside agency with real legal teeth should be sent in to investigate the willful disobeying of the labor agreements and be ready to fine and even imprison officials in extreme cases, where employee safety is compromised, such as the St. Louis office that was probably experiencing a carbon monoxide leak, and rather than fix the problem, after OSHA finally came in, managers painted the maintenance man as a trouble maker, possible terrorist and then fired him for acting in an unsafe manner.
That case is or will shortly be tried in court, the Department of Labor stepping in on the worker’s behalf, who only wanted to work in a place that wasn’t full of poisonous gas. The nerve.
But what I recommend and what happens are never the same thing.
I worked almost 30 years for the postal service now. Just saw the video with Danny Glover and the APWU president. I am a postal mailhandler, and I totally agree with what they said. The postal service has been around since before congress. They need to keep their hands out of this business which they really do not nothing about.