Postal Workers to Stage Hunger Strike in Appeal to Congress

A mailman carries his deliveries along a snowy neighborhood during a Chicago winter. There are no snow days for mail carriers. (Tim Boyle/Newsmakers)

No one disputes the fact that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is facing a dire financial crisis. However, identifying the cause has been a subject of controversy. While lawmakers believe the Postal Service is plagued by an outdated business model, many postal workers say the nation’s mail carrier is actually the victim of a man-made disaster.

Jamie Partridge, a retired letter carrier from Portland, Ore., says that email, private competition, and the recession have had little to do with the enormous and still growing Postal Service debt. According to Partridge, Congress is to blame for the $21 billion in losses the USPS has incurred over the past five years, and he’s looking to lawmakers to fix it.

Later this month, just before the U.S. House of Representatives adjourns for the July Fourth weekend, Partridge will join other postal workers and supporters on a hunger strike at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

“We’re hoping to get Congress to stop starving the Postal Service,” Partridge said, keeping with the hunger strike theme. “They are cutting our hours in half, and we just got word that as of July 1, new delivery standards will be in place. People will be paying their bills, expecting them to be delivered the next day, and it won’t be happening.”

There are now bills before both the House and the Senate aimed at balancing the USPS budget, but the fixes they offer are similar: Citing years of dwindling sales, lawmakers have prescribed closures, service cuts, and reductions in employee pay and benefits, as cures for financial insolvency.

But critics, like Partridge, say the primary reason behind the Postal Service debt is a 2006 Congressional mandate requiring the USPS to prepay 75 years’ worth of future retiree benefits in just a decade. The cost is significant. A statement last month from the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) notes that, for the first half of this fiscal year, prefunding accounted for $6.2 billion of the $6.5 billion in red ink.

It’s a big bill, but legislators say it’s designed to stave off an even larger one and possibly another massive bailout. According to lawmakers, without the prefund measure, USPS liabilities would grow to $100 billion by the end of the decade. With annual revenue losses projected to continue into 2020, there are concerns that the USPS might look to taxpayers to cover the cost.

While no one is interested in encouraging another bailout, critics of the prefund mandate say that it actually serves another agenda.

“They want privatization,” says Tom Dodge, a postal worker from Baltimore who will also be participating in the hunger strike. According to him, corporate interests have colluded with Congressional leaders to undermine the USPS and break up its unions.

“The problem is companies think they can do this better than the government can. But that depends on who’s running the company,” Dodge said. “The post office has been running for 200 years. What else can you buy for 45 cents these days? If we are privatized, the rates are going to go up. People don’t realize how much that’s going to change the economy.”

According to the NALC, the service reductions that are suggested in proposed legislation would not fix the Postal Service’s problems. Instead, they say it would make things worse by driving customers away and reducing revenues.

But lawmakers, including Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, say cutbacks are the only way for the USPS to make good on its debt. Legislators point out that aspects of private carriers, functioning on a smaller labor force with fewer benefits, demonstrate a successful model that the Postal Service can adopt. Of course, USPS employees are not convinced.

“To say that [postal workers] are overpaid is horrible,” said Dodge. “Let the people in Congress get out here and do this job and see what they say then. We’re out here in snow, rain, all kinds of weather. Who else does this kind of job? It takes a special person.”

Additional reporting by Denise Darcel

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• Sargee7

  The 2006 Postal Reform Act that all the complaining is about was sponsored by three Democrats, among others, Henry Waxman, Danny Davis, and Tom Carper.  It was praised by the Letter Carriers Union.  Look and see for yourself.
  http://www.nalc.org/news/release/pr020906.html

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Val-Nostdahl/1025990186 Val Nostdahl

  there is not much you can do when legislation is coming down after you have been forced to pay in more to your retirement funds to balance the deficit, which happened in 2000, 2001, under the budget reconcilation act of 1997, then when congress is informed that those accounts are overfunded or overpaid, fers, or federal employee retirement system by 15 billion and csrs by 55 billion plus another overcharge by the govt of 85 billion, then congress goes full steam ahead with the legislation.

• midtownmadman

  The post office might not be starving if it were run properly and hired postal workers who know how to deliver mail. Apologie sto the good postal carriers, but my post office is the FDR Post Office and for years our mail has been missing and misdelivered. Complaints fall on deaf ears. Postal carriers cannot be fired. The post office should be run by the private sector who would turn the deficit around and hire postal carriers who care about their delivering the mail.  RE: Letter carriers Union — stop protecting members who are inept just so you canmake money.

• http://www.facebook.com/lkash1 Lisa Deutch Kashinsky

  How can you say, “the Postal Service should hire workers who know how to deliver the mail?” Are you aware of how many changes have taken place with automation? Back in the “good old days”, we spent about 4 hours in the office prepping the mail and 4 on the street.
  We would have the time to check on forwarding orders, vacation holds, etc…
  Now? You spend about an hour in the office (if that) and the rest of the time on the street. You are not allowed to even go thru your DPS mail until you are on the street. Of COURSE we care! I think your comments reek of judgement and ignorance. Please educate yourself on the facts.

  27 year Letter Carrier

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Val-Nostdahl/1025990186 Val Nostdahl

  how would you suggest it be run properly, I am just curious, you see up until 2006 which is the year the postal service made a huge profit and was run properly, and before that in the background it was estimated that over 200 billion in cuts in pay, health benifits and retirement were made by postal workers , their families and retirees and thier families, they had a pay as you go system in the Post office that worked well for some 300 years, then they were made to pay in to thier retirement funds 15 percent more in order to balance the deficit of 2000, 2001. That was then stopped and new legisatiion took effect, in which another retirment fund was set up out of the profits that the USPS made, meanwhile Congress also allowed bonuses at the top executive leval increase pay and benifits for the pmg and 12 others, while deciding to take the profits, and legislative them away in order to give a false apperance of the USPS not fuctioning right, and decided that the workers who had paid in and overpaid to retirmeent funds and now had a 3rd escrow account set up for employees not working for the USPS or born yet, for the next 75 years, went along with reduction in staff of those who deliver and work the mail routes, along wtih that some even had their paychecks changes and legally could not get any help from the court systems, meanwhile managment was put in to place that would not honor contracts signed, berate people that work for them even though they are shorthanded, not allow older carriers to train new ones, and mess up the routes , by not having enough people to do the routes so that some day there are simply not enough warm bodies to do all the mail, This was done with the intent meanwhile of taking lobbies money from priviate sector business that wants to take over a federal agency for sale by the govt. Pretty soon you will not only have missing mail , you will have a post office sold off which breaks the constitution, I want to know how this turn the deficit around when postal workers have 3 retirement funds and are not getting replacement of people to do the work , I want to know why a private business has a right to lobby and buy out a fedearal agency, I want to know why my good postal worker spouse had to do more then his fair share of work and die. He knew how to deliver the mail , he just didnt know his whole agency could be sold down the drain by its own goverment.

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Val-Nostdahl/1025990186 Val Nostdahl

  http://www.postalmag.com/joygoldberguspsstress.pdf, or awpu 3800 library , first area tricounty local , pa, stress in the workplace , the ongoing violation of the guiding principals of the usps is creating a toxic work environment, postal comments to the federal trade commision, august 6, 2007, http://www.billburrasjournal.org-misc, or look up bill burras journal online , misc, read eleveator, scroll down, then go to ALEC/Koch Cabal The Priviitization of the USPS for Ups and FedEx. Finally go to http://www.savethepostoffice.com