The Struggle For Our Livelihood
By Dan Kuralt
Springfield, Ma. Area Local
 

For a number of years now, the Postal Service has been more intent on reducing work hours and man-years through automation than they have been in providing service. Automation has contributed to significant delays in mail delivery to the point where citizens are making time sensitive bill payments online rather than through the mails.

Example: A few months back I mailed a payment for a credit card from Springfield, Ma. to Stamford, Ct. It takes a truck a couple of hours to travel the distance between those cities. It took my letter three weeks to arrive. A few years back a bill payment took five months to arrive! I mailed a couple of letters for my son, who lives with me. The letters were dropped in a mailbox in the lobby of the plant where I work and they arrived right back in my mailbox several days later. Untouched by human hands, save for the carrier, who apparently didn’t look at them! The automation picked up the return address rather than the addressee.

I wrote to the Northeast Area Vice President of Operations, whom I know, and guess what? He didn’t care! As a result, despite my misgivings, I make all of my time sensitive payments online.

The Postal Service is pushing work away at an alarming rate and I am not surprised that they have to ”reposition” the work force. I am not surprised that volume is dropping and going online.

When someone comes up with a good way to stop the giveaway of mail and the resultant loss of jobs, I will be as eager as anyone to fight the fight. Until that happens, I do not see how we are going to stop excessing or any of the other problems related to declining volume and agreed to in the contract extension.

We could have an impact if we were willing to mobilize our membership nationwide in a campaign to press Congress to intervene in some of this. When the Presidential Commission weighs in we may have an opportunity to counter what they say and influence Congress to make changes that are beneficial to the Employees and the public, as well as the future of the Service.

That will take a massive letter writing and lobbying effort which our membership has shown they are unwilling to do unless the letters are written for them and all they have to do is sign them. My local did that a couple of times and we got 90% of our members to sign and we mailed the letters in to our Congressmen. They were impressed.

I have argued in the past that APWU national must do the same thing that Ken Fitzpatrick and I did in our local and draft and prepare such letters for our membership. They must ship each local prepared letters with the names of the Congressmen and Senators on them as well as the members and ship them to locals, or give a sample letter to the locals themselves for preparation and mailing.

Given the reaction I got from various local officers, nationwide, to the suggestion, I do not hold out much hope that many of them will follow through. It would certainly be nice to be surprised though!