Scott Klinger: Trump’s postmaster general continues to wreak havoc as Christmas nears

The old post office in Augusta, Maine, a notable example of Romanesque architecture

Via OtherWords.org

HARPSWELL, Maine

Last year’s holiday season was not exactly a merry one for the U.S. Postal Service. In the lead-up to Christmas, overwhelmed postal workers had to leave gifts sitting in sorting facilities for weeks. They delivered just 38 percent of greeting cards and other nonlocal first-class mail on time.

What should we expect this year?

USPS leaders claim they are ready for the rush. But customers have reason to worry about slower — and more expensive — service.

The service is aiming to hire 40,000 seasonal workers for the holidays. But that’s 10,000 less than last year — and given broader pandemic staffing shortages, recruitment and retention for these demanding jobs will not be easy. While the e-commerce surge that strained the system last year has declined somewhat, postal workers are still delivering many more packages than before the crisis.

And COVID-19 is not the only reason for concern. In fact, the root causes of our country’s postal problems are inaction by Congress and misguided action by USPS leadership.

For more than a decade, Congress has failed to fix a policy mistake that requires the Postal Service to set aside money to prefund retiree health care more than 50 years in advance. This burden, which applies to no other federal agency or private corporation, accounts for 84 percent of USPS reported losses from 2007 to 2020. If Congress had made the same demand of America’s strongest businesses, many would be bankrupt.

A bill to repeal this pre-funding mandate and put USPS on a stronger financial footing enjoys strong bipartisan support. But House and Senate leaders have not brought up this bill, the Postal Reform Act, for a vote.

In the meantime, U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump campaign contributor, is using the agency’s artificially large losses to justify jacking up prices and slowing deliveries.

If you’re planning to send holiday cards a significant distance this season, say from Pittsburgh to Boise, the USPS delivery window is now five days instead of three. These reduced service standards affect about 40 percent of First Class mail.

As part of a 10-year plan, DeJoy is also slowing delivery by 1 to 2 days for about a third of First Class packages. These are small parcels often used to ship highly time-sensitive medications, as well as other lightweight e-commerce purchases.

A big cause of the slowdown: DeJoy’s plan to cut costs by shifting long-distance deliveries from planes to trucks. This is a rollback of the introduction of airmail more than 100 years ago — one of many postal innovations that strengthened the broader U.S. economy.

For worse service, we’ll have to pay more.

In August, USPS raised rates for First Class mail by 6.8 percent and for package services by 8.8 percent. A holiday surcharge will raise delivery costs by as much as $5 per package through December 26. In January, rates for popular flat-rate boxes and envelopes will increase by as much as $1.10.

Next up on DeJoy’s plan: reduced hours at some post offices and the closure of others.

USPS officials argue these draconian moves will boost profits. But even the regulator that oversees the agency has criticized the underlying financial analysis.

Instead, DeJoy’s 10-year plan will more likely drive customers away. That, in turn, will lead to fewer of the good postal jobs that have been a critical path to the middle class, particularly for Black families.

Unless Washington lawmakers lift the financial burden they imposed on USPS, DeJoy will be empowered to keep up his self-defeating cost-cutting spree.

Postal workers and their customers have struggled to overcome the extreme challenges of the pandemic. Now it’s time for Congress to deliver by passing the Postal Reform Act and urging USPS leaders to focus on innovations to better serve all Americans for generations to come

Scott Klinger, who lives in Harpswell, is senior equitable development specialist at Jobs With Justice.

On Ragged Island, Harpswell, Maine, circa 1920

James E. Varner: Trump tool DeJoy assaults Postal Service

The U.S. Post Office in the old mill village of Whitinsville, Mass., part of the town of Northbridge. Like many attractive post offices, it was built as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Opened in 1938, it’s a Colonial Revival masonry building, built of brick and cast stone, capped by a hip roof and cupola and with pilasters flanking the central entrance.

Via OtherWords.org

President Trump’s postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, recently testified before Congress about major slowdowns in mail delivery under his watch.

As a 20-year postal veteran, I had only one reaction: DeJoy needs to be Returned to Sender.

DeJoy, a Trump fundraiser who owns millions worth of stock in U.S. Postal Service competitors, has been on the job barely two months. But already, his changes have caused serious delays in delivery.

Ostensibly, these moves are cost-saving measures. But it doesn’t take a partisan cynic to understand how this kind of disruption could affect voting in November’s election. The president himself has said that he hopes as much.

Postal employees pride ourselves on a culture of never delaying the mail. Our unofficial mantra can best be summed up as, “Mail that comes in today, goes out today — no matter what.”

We are now being told to ignore that. If mail can’t get delivered or processed without overtime, it is supposed to sit and wait. That can mean big delays.

For example, letter carriers normally split up the route of a colleague who’s on vacation or out sick. These carriers each take a portion of the absent employee’s route after completing their own, often using a little bit of overtime. Now, that mail doesn’t get delivered until much later.

Then there’s the mail that arrives late in the day. Before, late arriving mail would often be processed for the next day’s delivery, even if that required the use of overtime. Today, that mail sits in the plant at least until the following evening. Mail arriving late on a Saturday or a holiday weekend could be delayed even longer.

In the plants, meanwhile, the short staffing of clerks means it takes longer to get all the mail through the sorting machines. To make matters worse, under orders from DeJoy, mail-processing equipment is also being scrapped.

Even though the processing takes longer, drivers aren’t allowed to wait on it. Postal truck drivers are being disciplined for missing their departure time even by a few minutes — even if they haven’t gotten all the mail they’re supposed to haul. In some cases, the trucks that leave are completely empty!

With package deliveries up by 50 percent during the pandemic, as the Institute for Policy Studies reports, large mail trucks operating between facilities are often already full. Imagine how much mail will get left behind when that’s combined with seasonal holiday mail, or a large number of absentee ballots.

Finally, DeJoy’s proposals to cut hours of operation at many smaller post offices — and the removal of many public mailboxes — will make it harder for the public to access postal services.

When you limit hours to 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and close on Saturdays, you eliminate access for anybody working the day shift. Throw in mandatory closure for lunch breaks in the middle of the day, and it makes matters that much worse for our customers.

Postal workers have been doing their best to keep the nation’s mail and packages moving in these difficult and hazardous times. We don’t deserve these attacks.

DeJoy now says he’ll delay more changes until after the election, but he also had the nerve to tell Congress that he wouldn’t replace the 600 sorting machines he’d already removed.

Delaying more changes isn’t enough. Instead, Congress must approve crisis relief for USPS — and reverse DeJoy’s disastrous service cuts altogether.

James E. Varner is the director of Motor Vehicle Service at American Postal Workers Union Local 443 in Youngstown, Ohio. This op-ed was adapted from a letter published in the Warren Tribune-Chronicle.

Sarah Anderson: The fox is still in the Postal Service henhouse

The John W. McCormack Post Office and Courthouse, an historic building at 5 Post Office Square, in downtown Boston. The 22-story skyscraper was built in 1931-1933 with an Art Deco and Moderne structure. The building was renamed for the late Mr. McCormack, a long-time Massachusetts congressman who was U.S. House speaker in 1962-71. Its original name was the United States Post Office, Courthouse, and Federal Building.

Via OtherWords.org

Skyleigh Heinen, a U.S. Army veteran who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and anxiety, relies on the U.S. Postal Service for timely delivery of her meds to be able to function. She was one of thousands of Americans from all walks of life who spoke out recently to demand an end to a forced slowdown in mail delivery.

The level of public outcry in defense of the public Postal Service is historic — and it’s having an impact.

Shortly after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy took the helm in June, it became clear that the fox had entered the henhouse. President Trump had gained a powerful ally in his efforts to decimate the public Postal Service.

Instead of supporting his frontline workforce, DeJoy has made it harder for them to do their job.

For example, he banned overtime, ordering employees to leave mail and packages behind if they could not deliver it during their regular schedule. Until this point, postal workers had been putting in extra hours to fill in for sick colleagues and handle a dramatic increase in package shipments.

As the mail delays worsened, more than 600 high-volume mail sorting machines disappeared from postal facilities. Blue collection boxes vanished from neighborhoods across the country. Postal managers faced a hiring freeze.

President Trump threw gas on the fire by gloating that without the emergency relief he opposes, USPS couldn’t handle the crisis-level demand for mail-in voting.

Outraged protestors converged outside DeJoy’s ornate Washington, D.C., condo building and North Carolina mansion, and they flooded congressional phone lines and social media. Political candidates held pop-up press conferences outside post offices.

At least 21 states filed lawsuits to block DeJoy’s actions, while Taylor Swift charged that Trump has “chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.”

After all this, DeJoy announced he’s suspending his “initiatives” until after the election.

This is a victory. But it’s not enough.

DeJoy’s temporary move does not address concerns about the threats to the essential, affordable delivery services that USPS provides to every U.S. home and business, or the decent postal jobs that support families in every U.S. community. These needs will continue long past November 3.

Second, DeJoy has made no commitment to undo the damage he’s already done. And he promised only to restore overtime “as needed.” Will he replace all the missing mail-sorting machines and blue boxes? Will he expand staff capacity to handle the backlog he’s created and restore delivery standards?

Third, DeJoy makes no mention of the need for pandemic-related financial relief. USPS has not received one dime of the type of emergency cash assistance that Congress has awarded the airlines, Amtrak, and thousands of other private corporations.

While the pandemic has been a temporary boon to USPS package business, the recession has caused a serious drop in first-class mail, their most profitable product. Postal economic forecasters predict that COVID-related losses could amount to $50 billion over the next decade.

DeJoy has proved he cannot be trusted to do the right thing on his own. Congress must step in and approve at least $25 billion in postal relief — and legally block actions that undercut the ability of the Postal Service to serve all Americans, both today and beyond the election.

For the American people, this is not a partisan fight. We will all be stronger if we can continue to rely on our public Postal Service for essential services, family-supporting jobs, and a fair and safe election.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. More research on the Postal Service can be found on IPS site Inequality.org.

David Warsh: Of Postal Service and Social Security reform

The first U.S. postal stamps, which were issued in 1847

The first stamp issues were authorized by an act of Congress and approved on March 3, 1847. The earliest known use of the Franklin 5¢ (left) is July 7, 1847, while the earliest known use of the Washington 10¢ (right) is July 2, 1847. These issues were declared invalid for postage on July 1, 1851.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

When the 117th  Congress convenes in January, its first order of business just might be to quietly undertake to fix the nation’s system of voting by reforming the U.S. Postal Service.

Critics routinely blame the USPS for losing money.  “It’s a Blockbuster service in a Netflix world,” asserted a Wall Street Journal editorial writer  the other day. What the editorialist failed to understand is that the USPS is isn’t a business, it is a civic institution.

The Postal Service is older than the Navy, the Marines or the Declaration of Independence, as historian Joseph Adelman has pointed out. Its creation, along with a system of post roads, was practically the first thing that the Second Continental Congress took up, after the Revolutionary War began at Lexington and Concord, in 1775.

They did it for a reason, Adelman writes in Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News 1763-1789 (Johns Hopkins, 2019).  Efficient and impartial communication of printed matter was essential to keep 13 diverse and far-flung colonies in touch with current news and opinion. The first Post Office Act, in 1792, set off steady expansion of the newspaper industry, and for the next two centuries printed matter accompanied first-class mail at bargain rates to every corner of the country.

True, a great deal has happened in the last 50 years.  Print newspapers seem to be on the ropes in a digital age. The rapid distribution of e-commerce merchandise has been largely taken over by United Parcel Service, Federal Express and, recently, Amazon. USPS has found a secure place among these newcomers in the package-delivery business thanks to peak-load pricing.

But now the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that, thanks to voting by mail, old-fashioned first-class mail is a service that the U.S. cannot do without.  Thus putting the USPS on a long-term sustainable basis is a first-order problem of democracy.

How might it be done?  The election is fast approaching. The composition of Congress won’t be completely clear for some time after that.  But a look back at the little-remembered last time the sinews of American democracy were seriously threatened, in 1983, might be instructive. Still Artful Work: The Continuing Politics of Social Security Reform (McGraw Hill, 1994) provides some clues as to how such compromises are achieved.

Towards the beginning, Paul Light, now a political scientist at New York University, who followed the negotiations as a young Congressional Fellow, provided a capsule glimpse of the feel-your-way by which such things happen.

1. Reagan proposal to solve the Social Security crisis through deep budget cuts in May 1981

2. Passage of a scarcely noticed bill in December 1981 that would trigger a Social Security emergency in mid-1983

3. An attempt to tackle Social Security through the budget in April 1982

4. A break for the midterm congressional elections

5. The birth and death of the National Commission on Social Security Reform in 1982

6. The rise of a secret negotiating “gang” as a shield for talks between Reagan and [House Speaker Tip] O’Neill in January 1983

7. Navigation of the Social Security agreement through the interest-group-infested waters on Capitol Hill in March 1983

8. The final House-Senate conference just before the Easter recess in 1983

Congressman Barber Conable (R.-N.Y.) was an architect of the ultimate deal. He told Light that the final compromise “was not a work of art, but it was artful work,” providing the title for the book.  The analogy is not precise: Postal Service customers are not involved financially the same way as are Social Security recipients. But both selves are involved emotionally, and both vote.  Meanwhile, that earlier reform is itself none-too-gradually running out of time. Soon another Social Security fix will be required.

Here’s to the opportunities that lie ahead!

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.      

© 2020 DAVID WARSH

Mail call

The central U.S. Postal Service office in downtown Taunton, Mass. Built in 1930 with funding from the Works Progress Administration, it’s a lovely example of Classical Revival architecture, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Trump and some other bogus “conservatives’’ seem to want to kill the U.S. Postal Service. As I noted here a couple of weeks ago, in the case of our leader it’s because he’s hates Jeff Bezos, the Amazon mogul/monopolist whose Washington Post insists on reporting  on him in more rigorous ways than Pravda covered Stalin. Amazon is a big Postal Service customer. Trump has suggested forcing the Postal Service to boost its  delivery prices so much so that they might exceed  those of UPS and FedEx. But then, the GOP, especially since the rise of the anti-government Tea Party (anti-government except for Medicare and Social Security, which disproportionately benefit its members), has long been gunning for the service, which goes back to the writing of the U.S. Constitution.

The share of the nation’s workers represented by federal employees has fallen to record lows in the past decade, which is one reason that service has declined at some agencies – e.g., even before the pandemic you often had to wait more than an hour to ask a question of an IRS agent on the phone. Now, during the COVID-19 crisis, the agency takes no calls.  Of course,  Tea Party types hate the IRS, but how do they propose to fund the government? And remember, it’s Congress, not the IRS, that makes the tax laws. Then there’s the sorely understaffed Social Security Administration.

The argument is that the Postal Service should  always be profitable, a demand not made of Trump Organization operations…. But the agency, like, say, the Defense Department,  the Food and Drug Administration and the Interstate Highway System, is a necessary public service that also helps tie together the country. It’s a mostly reliable entity that’s essential for the private sector – both individuals and businesses.

Look at the 2006 law pushed through by the GOP that requires the Postal Service to prefund its employee retirement health-care cost for 75 years into the future!  Imagine a private company having to deal with that. And do we really want to have the mail controlled by private companies (which might be  big campaign contributors)?

There are some services that only government can provide on a broad and coordinated enough fashion to adequately serve the public outside the vagaries of the market.

The mobster vs. the monopolist

Mural "Purchase of Land and Modern Tilling of the Soil" (1938), by William C. Palmer, in the lobby of the Arlington, Mass., Post Office, a Colonial Revival building (see exterior below) that was opened in 1936. Many post offices erected or renovated during the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration had art work such as this mural, in part to help keep artists employed during the Great Depression.

From Robert Whitcomb’s Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com:

Maximum Leader Trump hates the U.S. Postal Service, which he alleges undercharges Amazon, run by Jeff Bezos, whom Trump envies and so detests And Mr. Bezos owns The Washington Post, which tries to vigorously report on the Trump mob. So the mobster-in-chief rejects a bailout of the Postal Service, which is far more essential to America than many of the institutions being bailed out. And he would love to hamstring efforts to encourage voting by mail this  pandemic year in lieu of the usual crowds at polling places, because he thinks, correctly, that those votes will tend to be against him.

Oh yes. Trump votes by mail himself. I myself think that voting in person is better – except in a pandemic. That’s not only because it might be less vulnerable to fraud but also because showing up to vote at a polling place is a celebration of democracy.

In any event, the Postal Service, whatever its flaws, is an important part of America’s connective tissue, especially for the underprivileged, and needs to be protected.

By the way, none of this is to say that Amazon, like Google, Facebook and some other tech-based companies that have become so huge in the past two decades, aren’t too powerful and shouldn’t be broken up, as the now hollow Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department would have done a half century ago.

Keith Combs: Honor vets by protecting the Postal Service

Via OtherWords.org

If you’re looking for a way to honor veterans, here’s one: Protect the U.S. Postal Service.

I’m a veteran from a family of veterans. After serving in the Marine Corps, I got a good-paying postal job that put me on a solid path to financial security. Now I lead the Detroit Area Local for the American Postal Workers Union. Our 1,500 members include many veterans, some of whom I served with myself.

Across the country, nearly 113,000 veterans now serve as postal workers. With former military members accounting for over 18 percent of our workforce, the Postal Service employs vets at three times their share of the national workforce.

Why? For one thing, military values include hard work, showing up on time, and taking pride in your work set you up perfectly for postal jobs.

For another, the USPS gives veterans like myself preferential hiring treatment. Disabled vets, like many I work with in Detroit, get special consideration too. And once they get here, they get generous medical leave and benefits, including wounded warriors leave, among other hard-earned benefits won by our union.

Unfortunately, these secure jobs for veterans are now under attack.

A White House report has called for selling off the public mail service to private, for-profit corporations. And a Trump administration task force has called for slashing postal jobs and services for customers.

In particular, they want to eliminate our collective bargaining rights, which would jeopardize all those benefits we’ve won for veterans and other employees. They also want to cut delivery days, close local post offices, and raise prices, which would hurt customers.

This cost-cutting could also threaten another valuable benefit for service members: deeply discounted shipping rates on packages they get overseas. Currently, shipping to U.S. military bases in other countries costs the same as a domestic shipment, and USPS offers cost-free packing supplies to the folks who send these care packages.

Instead of slashing and burning the USPS, we need to be expanding and strengthening it.

One idea is to let post offices expand into low-cost financial services. Veterans are four times more likely than the national average to use payday lenders for short-term loans, which typically charge exorbitant interest rates.

But if post offices could offer affordable and reliable check cashing, ATM, bill payment, and money transfer services, we could generate all kinds of new revenue — while protecting vets and their communities from predatory lenders.

From discounting care packages to employing disabled veterans, our Postal Service plays an important part in the lives of our service members. USPS does good by Americans who’ve dedicated a portion of their lives to armed service, and by the millions of Americans who rely on them.

I hope you’ll join me in applauding these veterans — and the postal service. Let’s build the USPS up, not tear it down.

Keith Combs is a 30-year postal worker and president of the Detroit District Area Local of the American Postal Workers Union.