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Postal Unions Slam Saturday Mail Cut Plan |
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Six days a week, 144 million U.S. homes and businesses count on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to deliver the mail. Now, in a cost-cutting move, the USPS wants to slash Saturday mail delivery and the nation’s two largest postal unions say it is a disastrous proposal.
Letter Carriers (NALC) President Bill Young says stopping six-day delivery would have a profound impact on the Postal Service, its costumers and Letter Carriers across the country:
The NALC’s position on this issue should be crystal clear: We oppose the elimination of six-day delivery. Downsizing the Postal Service to meet the needs of a severely depressed economy is short-sighted and self-defeating—it will cost us tens of thousands of jobs and open the way to competitors to provide service on the sixth day.
The USPS is conducting a study of dropping Saturday delivery as part of an overall move to cut costs and is seeking comments from various stakeholders. Postal Workers (APWU) President William Burrus says his advice is simple: “Don’t do it!”
In a letter to the USPS, Burrus writes:
The consequences of the proposed change far outweigh the expected monetary benefits associated with delivery reduction….Although the changes are intended to reduce personnel costs, any service organization that reduces service invites its own demise. History will record this act as the first step in the dismantling of the United States mail system.
For more on the unions’ response to the USPS budget-cutting proposals and their impact on service, customers and jobs, click here and here.
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Are the consequences of the AFL-CIO supporting the corporate controlled Democratic Party and Obama becoming clear only when it now threatens your particular job and livelihood?
The Bush and now Obama regimes need your pay check money desperately as the Wall Street bankers and the military-corporations NEVER have enough! They are starting on Saturday shifts at the P.O., but why not shut the whole Post Office Down and “privatize” the whole thing? Why this is a whole new “opportunity” to make money. This is their only concern!
The corporations are mostly paying no federal taxes, thus
there “is no money” for the impoverished public school system.
The big “health care reform” bill that just passed in the house retains the profits of the big drug, HMO, and insurance companies thus undermining totally the effort to minimize the costs that single-payer (no corporate profiteers) health care would of provided. The AFL-CIO again supported the corporate profit plan and not the needs of working people.
The military overseas has been largely “privatized”. Even the CIA is over 60% “outsourced” to for profit-corporations.
In California, the state is bankrupt and over 10 billion in debt. In California pay no taxes on the oil pumped out of the off-shore drilling rigs. There are over 90 BILLIONAIRES (out of 450 world wide) living in California, more than any other place on the planet! Wonder why?
The ruling corporate capitalist elite are LOOTING the treasury and working people (with massive credit card debt), and the DEMOCRATS are not only doing nothing, but are full involved in this destruction of the entire economy that generations of working people have built up over generations of hard word.
In the U.S. and globally the capitalist economic system has collapsed! The same things happening to working people in the U.S. is happening in England and Europe. Millions are losing essential jobs and social services, while public services employment is being slashed. At the same time the wealth of the bankers and wealthy elite are being protected in many ways.
A new socialist economic system is essential to meet the needs of working people and not simply to profit a tiny minority.
Only by taking the profit out of war-making will war end. Only when polluters are shut down will global warming end. (The just passed Obama “cap and trade” system creates billions of wealth for traders in carbon credits, as the planet continues to die.)
The threat to the postal workers and postal system are just one “tip of the iceberg” that is sinking the Titanic capitalism.
We desperately need a new labor party that reflects the need of all working people. Continued support of the Democratic Party
and Obama will mean continued destruction of society and the planet.
There is no end to the increasing impoverishment of working people until the corporate control
People, Human Capital, and Their Worth
By cormackcapital
Labor is often regarded by capital and the GOP most simplistically as a fungible resource. Labor represents another asset that is homogenoeus, interchangeable, and easily replaced. Thus the worker unit is put into play as an asset to be utilized in whatever manner management chooses as appropriate. Nonetheless, in modernity, one has the benefits in some sectors of organized labor as opposed to Dickensian sweat shops of some centuries ago although unionization has been in reverse and under assault over the past thirty-five years. Furthermore, some workers rights are protected by codified law such as the FLSA or Fair Labor Standards Act.
Aside from the mobility of labor that has been around for centuries, globalization has brought with it outsourcing and offshoring for labor operations throughout the OECD and developed world. Call centers and manufacturing capabilities abound throughout emerging markets. And with that, the SG&A expense is reduced for the enterprise thus increasing its profitability and lowering its breakeven point.
Locally, however, we have the story of a young woman in Miami being told that her position has been eliminated effective next month as it, along with the entire department, gets outsourced offshore to India. Moreover, she will be required as part of any severance to go to India and train her replacements!
Aside from the illegality and lack of morality in attaching such conditionality to severance packages, let us examine these supposed winds of change or subjugation in greater detail. Amongst others, the trend raises three questions. What is the human impact? Should anyone even care? What can be done or offered as a remedy?
Two years ago, a major story crossed the wires of CNN entitled, “Making Less Money than Dad.” The article gave statistical evidence to substantiate the first ever phenomenon of the average American thirtysomething earning less in compensation than his father as of the middle 1970s. http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/25/pf/mobility_study/index.htm As such, it is now incontrovertible that per capita incomes in real terms coupled with living standards and the quality of life have been going down for longer than a generation. Erin Burnett of CNBC reacts to this trend with the nearly rhetorical query of, “Isn’t it just the case that Americans are going to simply have to accept the concessions of lower salaries and lower wages?”
Proponents of the so-called free market say that one of the most value-added features of the American economy is flexible labor. Western Europe, by contrast, is characterized by strict labor laws whereby it is more difficult to fire people. Benefits of cutting people loose are described the Harvard Business School as “downsizing necessary to free up slack resources, which could then be reinvested to create competitive advantage.”
Such clinical and dry assessments horribly fail to take into account the human cost of what the Austrian School’s Joseph Schumpeter fondly referred to as the “gales of creative destruction”. Schumpeter wrote that consumer-demanded innovation forced into obsolescence the skills of workers in dying industries to now re-train for more creative and more productive ventures. Again, the almost antiseptic notion that the trusted worker can, without hindrance or hesitation, turn on a dime, retool, and retrain in perpetuity, comes off as something emanating from a fiction novel of Ayn Rand.
Reality-based applications show us a different outcome. The false presupposition that anyone and everyone can acquire new skills at the drop of a hat is grossly misleading. For several reasons, large amounts of the downsized will not be able to adapt, adjust, retrain and retool, particularly when the new reality awaiting them on the other side is not something substantial but rather an hourly job and not a career at Wal Mart.
Laterally, one must pose the question as to what is the responsibility of corporate benevolence? That is to say how much of a burden should be borne by management in assisting with the retooling and retraining of the worker units whom they are ostensibly dismissing due to uncontrollable changes?
According to the libertarian leanings of the Chicago School and the Austrian School, there is “nothing that you can do about it” when it comes to innovation, globalization, outsourcing, downsizing, declining wages, falling standards of living, lower quality of life, and the overall competitive devaluation that is entailed in the race to zero. As was once rebutted to me some eleven years ago by the former CEO of Atantic Duncans International as part of a training exercise in Socratic thought, “blind adherence is never the answer.”
Ideological purists have little place in the day to day lives of a thinning middle class. These partisans bury their heads in the sands and bring nothing to the table. Such are the shortcomings and inequities of a free for all market where a Canadian or British CEO may earn 30 times the compensation of his average worker whereas the American CEO takes down a ratio of 300:1 and all of that in the face of the median and per capital experiencing a decline.
Hence the dry but antiseptically fungible resource of labor, as utilized by capital, needs to be revisited in the context of human capital and not simply labor, the multi-dimensional value of which is far greater than a mere asset owned by and at the discretion of management. Schumpeter’s theory and Ayn Rand’s disciples fall short in another area as well. Applied results show that retraining and retooling has led to retail and service sector jobs of a downwardly mobile nature where the hourly wages do not even enable a subsistence life. Finally, it raises another aspect not addressed by the theoreticians and fiction novelists and that is the living wage.
For decades, the Cato Institute has deified the Hong Kong model of unfettered and unbridled capitalism as the the be-all and end-all for all of humanity. Aside from the fact that free for all marketeering has just self-destructed, Hong Kong is a unique society of bankers, brokers, traders, mutual fund managers and corporate executives. That level of homogeneous strata does not offer itself as a valid comparison to the U.S.A which is heterogeneous by contrast.
Traditional Republican orthodoxy concedes by default that nothing is soluble except through market forces. It blissfully ignores critiques of its abject failure to address human capital and the living wage for a declining middle class. Those even further to the right of center have gone so far as to say that in a developed economy, there is no room for manufacturing any longer because it is too expensive to pay labor a living wage when that modality of production and service can be performed much more inexpensively in a developing market.
The next step in their approach would be that no labor of any kind whatsoever should exist in a developed market and indeed the sole function is to provide managerial oversight and supervision in a corporate capacity. Problematic with their slippery slope is that there are only so many managerial and supervisory positions available; hence, presumably therefore it follows that only a certain percentage of the population would be eligible for employment and the majority would consequently subsist in some form of poverty and relative decline.
For the heterogeneous state, that majority would then have to be exiled and exported to foreign domiciles in this glorified Cato model because most labor and all manufacturing functionalities that are non-managerial don’t really exist on the tiny island of Hong Kong; they exist in Shenzhen and also Guangdong Province on mainland China.
Now envision and think about what the America duplication of that model would entail. HQ would be inside the U.S.A. and everything else for lower labor costs would have to be based on and throughout the South American Continent. At this stage, one would hypothetically have to integrate HQ U.S.A. with 100% of all manufacturing functions in multiple different countries, different governments, a different language for the conducting of business, and an overall matrix-style nightmare of incongruencies.
For the sake of argument, Cato supporters can posit that GE has effectuated this transition over the past generation. The difference here is that this is a full and complete sellout of first the manufacturing, then other ancillary operations, and then finalized with HQ. The country in such an example would continue to export less than nothing whilst the structural twin deficits explode ever further. Incrementalism does remain in effect. Several Fortune 500 companies already have moved their HQ facilities to such non-U.S. domiciles as Bermuda, Grand Cayman and Dubai. Cases in point include Transocean, Noble Drilling and former VP Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.
Compounding this even moreso is the fact that Hong Kong is a very financial services-centric state. That sector mushroomed in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. to an outsized portion of both economies. It is now massively receding in both cases. Hence the misguided desire to replicate Hong Kong is unfeasible and unrealistic to say the least. As such, the Chicago and Austrian Schools leave too many wanting and far more dilemmas unanswered.
http://cormackcapital.wordpress.com
The USPS a physical asset in the nation’s infrastructure and has been since the Pony Express. The invention of the computer should not wipe out the asset any more than the invention of the automobile when horse back and buggy was the custom. Granted the USPS has to do its part to be as lean as possible but the US has taken billions and reloaded the coiffuers of AIG and banks that “lost” the money without much detail except we know about the bonuses for failure and awards for empty suits. AIG is not the USPS, it is a private entity with overpaid vultures swooning the treasury of the business - OPM. Losing Saturday would be the end of the USPS because small parcels needed to offset the mail reduction must compete. The USPS is like the Town Hall, Public Works, State House, and the many of the other assets that look inefficient at times but our nation is here because of the Pony Express and will survive so long as we do not forget the infrastructure that go us here. It will adapt, but it must not be dismantled.
USPS long ago outsourced much of it’s process. Long distance hauls where sold to private companies (shuttles between large cities). Rural jobs where switched to contract employees (lost federal employee status & non union members). Most jobs related to air mail where handed to it’s competition for free (and airlines). Not a surprise when one remembers that a GOP has sat in the White House for the vast majority of the past 40 years. Carving up public dollars for private contracts and gutting the Unions is a mantra for big business. Waiting to see President Obama’s move in regards to USPS. Sen. Franken took power 7-1-9. Ideally USPS would return it’s employees to Civil Service payrolls ASAP (lost that under Reagan). A “Postal First” house bill was talked about where the USPS would be obligated to make 40 hour jobs regular Federal Employees. Bush appointees (PMG Potter,Postal Regulatory Commission, Board of Governors) are in a race to outsource as much of the USPS as possible before they are replaced (the President does have bigger problems). The USPS had 700,000 in 2000. They now have less than 400,000 full time federal employee status jobs. This from a federal agency that has President Obamma as it’s CEO. This is our chance to create jobs for Americans. Full time Union with insurance, pensions and federal job protection. It’s our time to gain back what we have lost to the Republicans.
I agree with most of the authors views, however this is not the 1st step in dismanteling USPS. The post office is PRIVATELY not publicly owned!! The government sold it off years ago.
JerryWells
To come on a UNION blog & talk that insane Rush Limbaugh trash is just laughable. Rush uses high school level taunts to rally like minded simpletons to Big Business’s cause. It’s no surprise since Rush only went 1 year past high school. Those that put GOP before USA aren’t Americans. If you want to move in Rush’s ideal corporate world then move to mainland China. Take Rush with, just remind him how they treat drug addicts over there.
Before the post office cuts Saturday delivery they should slash some of their wasteful spending. The idea that they pay millions of dollars for employees homes when said employees are transferred is ridiculous. And just who is it within the postal department that’s being paid enough to even buy multi-million dollar homes anyway? It sure isn’t my mail person who gets out there day after day in every conceivable kind of weather to see that I get my mail! Guess the postal service is no different from other ‘big businesses’ in this country. Paying too few too much and expecting the rest of their employees to ‘make do’!
TO apwuman:
“Rush Limbaugh trash”? I am sorry in that I wrote my “comment” during my lunch break at work, and perhaps tried to put too much in a comment, and perhaps need to focus comments to one idea.
The attack on postal workers, to reduce “costs” by reducing service, is typical of what happens when a public service or public utility becomes “privatized”.
A privatized enterprise is run like a business, and often becomes a for-profit business. The original purpose, such as providing universal mail delivery, such as providing health care for all people, or providing free public education to all, is quickly forgotten.
We have now a “privatized” health care system, for example, which some 50 million cannot afford to pay. Why? Because the owners drive to maximize profit even if it means causing the pre-mature death to tens of thousands.
The postal service is an essential social service that is considered to be “unprofitable” by the corporations who run the federal government. They do not want to pay taxes for public services.
The ruling corporate elite does not want to pay any taxes, especially taxes for which they make no profit.
Thus highly profitable wars continue and are expanded, while the public school and health systems have collapsed. The tax money needed to satisfy the needs of the people is “no longer available” to state and local governments. Thus essential social services are being gutted.
There is no simply solution, no quick fixes, to the massive assault on working people today. The Republicans and now the Democrats are owned and controlled by corporate capitalist profit maximization interests.
Thus the need to end this capitalist economic system, which has collapsed here in the U.S. and globally, and to transition to a
socialist economy that is organized to serve the economic needs of the people who produce the goods and services that maintain society.
Rush Limbaugh does not know what “socialism” is all about. More importantly, Rush and the corporate owned mass media do not want you to know what “socialism” is about, as evidenced by the right wingers calling Obama a “socialist”!!
Such deliberately ignorant commentary is designed to keep his working class listeners ignorant of the root causes of the economic crises that are destroying us all.
Try reading the daily World Socialist Web Site at :
http://www.wsws.org
I’ve been a letter carrier for 15 years. I can almost count the Saturdays that I’ve been able to spend with my family on two hands. I would love to have Saturdays off.
Why don’t we return as a nation, to the way of life as prescribed by God? If we do, He promises to sustain us. We may not have a $200,000 home with two cars and a boat. Aren’t you tired of working your tails off for that? Let us get back to a simpler way of life, grow a garden in your back yard, instead of having a pool. Excercise instead of watching your 42 inch flatscreen. Wake up, America!
Cutting 6 day mail service is an awful idea.
Postal service should be a government service and if it cannot pay all costs out of the revenue generated by mail, taxpayers should kick in some additional revenue like we do for police protection and the military!
However, I certainly would not mind paying more for postage. Businesses certainly should pay more.
If the privatized system cannot keep 6 day service then end privatization instead of reducing services to American citizens.