Duluth Postal Services employees and leaders from across Minnesota rallied against closing Duluth’s mail processing center Monday.
About 100 people gathered with picket signs outside the federal courthouse in Duluth, many of whom were some of the 70 postal service employees who could lose their jobs if the processing center closes in 2015 like it is scheduled to.
Jason Johnson has worked as a mail clerk in Duluth for the last 20 years. He said he isn’t sure if he’ll lose his job with the closure, but he is uncomfortable with the possibility.
from WDIO-TV
“Well obviously it’s disconcerting and it’s frustrating because it’s all for nothing,” Jason Johnson said. “You know, we’re losing money only because of this prepayment fiasco so it’s not really about money at all. It’s about politics.”
Duluth’s mail processing center has faced closure before, but now, the United States Postal Service said they could save nearly $750 million each year with this next round of nationwide closures. The closure would also make St. Paul processing center the location for sorting mail coming out of Duluth and surrounding cities, which could cause a delay.
Well, this is the management of the Postal Service we all know and hate. The public is getting a mouthful of what employees of the USPS have had to keep under their hats or write anonymously about for decades, and that is: management, particularly in the upper reaches, and way too often on the workroom floor, are among the meanest, abusive incompetent of their kind in any business. They are not selected because they can do their job – it’s that those who do well as carriers especially are not wanted because it’s our work they leech off. We do our work, they give themselves bonuses and have the nerve to think it’s their brilliant organizational and leadership skills that make it all possible.
Make no mistake, public: they are anything but. If the Service works at all it’s because carriers do what needs to be done (most of the time, we have some jerks, too) despite management’s interference, which often only screws everything up because they never carried mail or sucked up long and hard from the get go to get inside and start abusing former workers and friends. It’s a system of suck ups and snitches, and a healthy dose of relatives getting preferential positions. The “relative” part is so bad in my state that half the management staff it would seem statewide are cousins, uncles, fathers, mothers, etc.
You, the public are our best weapon to keep the Service from deteriorating further. Management can keep us under wraps, but they can’t bully you. We need our Postal Service, and long time vets like myself are proud of the job we’ve done. We simply can’t sit aside and let Donahoe and Co. destroy what we’ve accomplished.