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Postal Workers March to Save Saturday Mail Delivery
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More than 3,000 Postal Workers (APWU) members sent a special delivery message to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) yesterday in Detroit—don’t end Saturday service, keep the mail moving six days a week.
Both the APWU and the Letter Carriers (NALC) are fighting USPS’s request to Congress to eliminate Saturday delivery.
In the Motor City for their biennial convention, the APWU members were joined in the march and rally by union members from the Metropolitan Detroit Central Labor Council, Michigan State AFL-CIO and community allies, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson. They denounced USPS management’s plan to cut mail delivery. Says APWU President William Burris:
Ending Saturday mail service would slow service, drive away business, and lead to the demise of the world’s most efficient, affordable, and trusted postal system.
Learn more from APWU’s Five-Day fact sheet and Save Saturday Service pages.
Read the AFL-CIO Executive Council statement denouncing five-day delivery.
Be sure to visit the NALC’s 5-Day Is the Wrong Way website.
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10 Comments
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BRAVO! This is what we need times a thousand. Unity in action across craft lines – out in the public forum of the streets. Unions must find common ground with this fight. The postal unions are the largest federal employee unions, and the largest organized sector of what is left of our economy remains the public employee unions. All unions must grab this chance to make a difference and start to turn the bosses’ vicious onslaught against us around.
Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 ( supposedly by a “lone gunman”, who never had a trial), At the age of 39, he had already played a major leadership role in the massive, powerful, independent movement for Civil Rights, and the powerful elite feared his ability to move the masses. MLK never endorsed candidates, or campaigned for or with them. He was incorruptible, a trait which the rich and powerful truly hate. MLK understood what we all must relearn – power gives up nothing without a fight.
For many years, many postal unionists shared a kind of idea that we were somehow protected from layoffs and speedup and attacks on our union rights. When Hell rains down on unions, there are no exceptions – in fact, this is the opening round of the war to destroy the postal unions and other government unions. The next step will be privatization.
PRIVATIZATION – That’s what they want. Why not? They have privatized war, health care, offshore oil drilling, the financial system – They have put complete control of our society in the private hands of the rich man. IT IS THEM OR US.
This must be expained in the overall context – states and cities laying off teachers, closing parks and libraries, and privatizing government functions, such as tag agency, garbage pickup, prisons and other governmental responsibilities. Their big targets now are to privatize social security and the post office. It comes down to this – in this time of crisis and joblessness, should government do nothing but help the rich, like when the Titanic sank, or should government to a hell of a lot – a hell of a lot – to make things right for working people.
Did anyone notice three interesting things happening at the same time:
1. The volume of mail is falling, Post-Office counter traffic is down and postal workers are concerned about their jobs.
2. Social Security is looking to avoid mailing checks to recipients and go over to 100% direct deposit.
3 Many low-income recipients do not have bank accounts and the banks do not seem interested in their business.
Could we not campaign to have the Post Office offer passbook savings accounts to those people with direct SS check deposit (also, perhaps, to other people who would like to have a passbook they could use all over the nation). Other countries do it. Why not here? The postal workers could certainly use the new jobs this would produce.
we do not need saturday mail delivery. the ‘USA’ IS ONE OF THE ONLY countries in the world that has saturday mail delivery
The question is not whether we need Saturday delivery, it is privatization, which is the ultimate goal of the rich and their empoyees that we are so silly as to call our ‘representatives’ in Congress. I do not know exactly how much I need Saturday deliveries – its relative. But I have a list of things below that we need much less that a reliable public Postal Service:
– Endless wars for private profit in Iraq and Afghanistan
– Cities using public money to buy sports stadiums for rich owners
– Workers lives destroyed by oil and mining companies which bypass safe practices in pursuit of record profits
– Tax breaks and loopholes for the superrich using ‘job creation’ as an excuse, because even though it sounds ridiculous, it still sounds better than ‘Hey – they finance our campaigns.’
– Corporations who murder workers, pollute our environment, destroy our economy, and rob from the public till – with no regulatory enforcement except the occasional small fine
– Corporate ownership of the media, used to divide us with racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-unemployed, anti-Gay, and anti-working class hysteria.
As the son & nephew of postal workers, who have retired, we must have the mail go through. Too many people today depend on getting their medicines through the mail. Why don’t they raise the junk mail rates?
Hey bobb, the USPS is the ONLY agency that knows where everyone lives anywhere in the USA and territories. In the event of another disaster of any kind, we can get these people their mail, supplies and medicines faster than anyone! Lose one satellite for communications and you tece’s are done!! The post office is really open 7 days aweek to keep the flow working to provide the BEST SERVICE in the WORLD!! The world doesn”t stop on Saturday’s!! Yes it’s about job’s, but it’s also about providing service to ALL HUMANS in the US and Teritories, not just the privlidged or the electronicly supperior. Best of all, the safety of the old, sick and forgotten is seen everyday by the mailman and they have save many a life, put out a fire or saved a child. Maybe your grandmother will lie on the floor over the weekend with no saturday delievery or your child is out playing and disappears, but the mailman saw her on her bike on the next street or your dog is hit by a car and your mailman knows its your doy and gives you the bad news. Think about those things before you go off half cocked. Oh, remember too, on Sept 11. we didn’t go home like most of the nation after the planes hit the towers, we took the MAIL OUT TO THE STREET so people knew that America was still working and we would provide you with information as best we could from shore to shore. Katrina, we moved the mail and found our customes all over the country, they got their mail. Just like any disaster, Dec 7, 1941 and everyother scary moment, we are on the street keeping American infomed, and connected!
@williamrayson – You said “Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 ( supposedly by a “lone gunman”, who never had a trial)”. Supposedly? Do you have any information the FBI should know about? You also said “They have put complete control of our society in the private hands of the rich man. IT IS THEM OR US. 1. Who is “they”? The Democrat controlled White House and Congress? You’re right. 2. What’s wrong with rich men/women, or wanting to be rich men/women, or wanting our children to grow up and be wealthy due to their own hard work? Have you ever had a poor man offer you a job with benefits, or do you just believe that once a man offers to give you a job, you have every right thereafter to try to take him/her for everything she/he is worth just because you felt cheated by everyone else all your life? If there is one thing Dr. Martin Luther King emphasized, it was INDEPENDENCE! The freedom to be able to go to the same schools and have the same opportunities for ourselves and our children that the “white” man had. Well, we’ve got it now, but I suppose some people will always feel the need to be taken care of by one master or another, be it stealing from a rich man or having the the government do it for you, from cradle to grave…what a life.
My father was a civil rights lawyer who raised money in Chicago and drove it down to Mississippi to post bail for civil rights marchers – workers like you and I – who made history by marching and getting arrested again and again and again. He took me to my first civil rights march when I was 11 and at 12 I heard MLK address a crowd of 75,000 at Soldier Field.
You and Glen Beck can spew your right-wing, anti-working class drivel all you want, but don’t pretend you care about or understand, much less represent. his legacy, or anything he was about.
The ‘they’ that I referred to is the ruling class, the superrich (who, by the way do not ‘work hard for their money’), who control both official political parties, all political debate and the media to boot. They make a lot of hay by convincing morons that if they let the rich get away with anything and everything, maybe somehow, some way that will get rich too. If they can’t convince you of that, they convince you that after you die, a paradise awaits. Like Joe Hill said, “Work all day, pray, eat hay. There’s a pie in the sky when you die – It’s a lie!
@ dusty mccall – if I can add to your post, I’d say wait until the next big earthquake here in California, when some of the cell-phone relay towers and internet connections are cut off. If it’s the “Big One” all the scientists are expecting, the only forms of communication may just be from mailman to mailman, from one town to the next…