Communities and Postal Workers United (CPWU) Newsletter
Oct. – Nov. 2013

Bronx General Post Office – Not for Sale
Excerpts from Labor Press article by Steven Wishnia

Chanting “Keep the Post Office in the Bronx,” about 75 people rallied Sept. 21 to protest the U.S. Postal Service’s plans to sell the Bronx General Post Office.

The New Deal-era building,is one of about 500 post offices the Postal Service has put up for sale, says Jacquelyn McCormick of the National Post Office Collaborate.

In New York City, the Postal Service recently put plans to close 34 post offices on hold, says Chuck Zlatkin, political director of the New York Area Metro local of the American Postal Workers Union. It’s now planning to “relocate” them, he explains, because it can do that without holding hearings.

Nationally, the Postal Service has hired the CBRE Group to handle sales, and its chair is Richard C. Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). In what McCormick calls a “total sweetheart deal,” it’s about to sell the Stamford, Connecticut, post office to a developer for $2 million less than a local arts group offered.

Metro APWU President Jonathan Smith accuses the Postal Service of “a strategy to discourage the public from coming in” and create resentment of union workers, such as by reducing the number of windows open and thus making the lines longer. In 2011, it moved mail processing for the Bronx to its main facility in Manhattan. The Bronx had to start mail carriers’ shifts an hour later to try to compensate for the late deliveries from Man-hattan, says APWU assistant director Genevieve Gardner.

Most of the post offices being sold have historic value, says McCormick, from both their architecture and their New Deal murals depicting local history and labor.