By Julie Bates, Otherwords.org. October 8, 2018, https://inequality.org/research/your-postoffice/?source=newsletter
Take it from a postal worker: If the US sells its public mail service, consumers will lose big time
This summer, the White House proposed selling off the United States Postal Service to private corporations.
As a 22-year postal worker, I’ll be joining my coworkers, our families, and neighbors across the country on October 8, rallying in support of our public Postal Service. Our message to those who want to sell off our national treasure to the highest bidder: US mail is not for sale.
Many may think that in the internet age, the Postal Service has outlived its usefulness, and that the decline of letter mail is the cause of the Postal Service’s financial troubles. But the Postal Service actually turns a profit on its deliveries.
The truth is that the USPS’s problems were largely created by Congress. A bipartisan 2006 law, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, law mandated that the USPS pre-fund future retiree health benefits 75 years into the future. That means we have to fund retirement benefits for postal employees who haven’t even been born yet.
It’s a crushing burden that no other agency or company – public or private – is required to meet, or could even survive.
The mandate drained $5.5 billion a year out of Postal Service funds and accounts for more than 90 percent of its losses. In fact, if it weren’t for this manufactured pre-funding crisis, the USPS would have reported profits in four of the last five years – all without receiving a dime of taxpayer money.
While it’s true that the way people use the mail is changing, the Postal Service is still a vital part of the country’s infrastructure.
Package volumes have exploded with the e-commerce boom. Companies as large as Amazon and as small as a one-room Etsy vendor rely on the Postal Service. USPS delivers 30 percent of FedEx Ground packages and 40 percent of all of Amazon’s many shipments. Vitally, the USPS is at the heart of a $1.7 trillion mailing industry that employs more than 7.5 million people.
The people of this country love the Postal Service. A recent Pew survey showed 88 percent of Americans view the USPS favorably.
One reason for this success is our commitment to serve 157 million homes and businesses six – and sometimes seven – days per week at affordable, uniform prices. Our public Postal Service reaches everyone, everywhere, no matter one’s health, wealth, age, or race. We should never lose sight that it’s veterans, seniors, and people in rural areas who rely most on the Postal Service for essential goods and life-saving medications.
What could the public expect if the Postal Service were sold to off to private interests? Higher prices, slower delivery, and an end to universal, uniform, and affordable service to every corner of the country.
And who would pay the price? All of us.
Postal services that have been privatized abroad provide a cautionary tale: In the UK, postage is up nearly 80 percent since 2007. The privatized Portuguese post has closed nearly a third of their post offices.
Our postal system is older than the country itself. It was a vital component of our country’s public good then. It still is today. And along the way, one fundamental fact has always been true: Our postal system has never belonged to any president, any political party, or any company. It’s belonged to the people of this country.
Postal workers are rallying to urge lawmakers to stop the selling off of the public postal service for private profit – and to remind everyone the Postal Service is yours. Keep it.
Julie Bates is a 22-year postal worker at the Des Moines, Iowa, post office.
Our Comment
The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act is yet another example of a creative move designed to make something regressive seem responsible and progressive. How could accountability and enhancement be anything but good?!
It depends entirely on how one defines accountability and enhancement. When those terms translate into “a crushing burden that no other agency or company – public or private – is required to meet or even survive” – and problems thus created are then used as an excuse to privatize a valuable and profitable public service, the terms “accountable,” and “enhanced” become suspect.
Julie Bates’ analysis is a timely cautionary tale for Canadians undergoing a postal strike at a particularly busy time of the year.
Canada Post has been under siege for some time. Aside from the neoliberal ‘principles’ of union-busting and privatization, might another incentive for that be its potential to serve as a public banking service?
The right to strike is a right denied when the government can legislate to end a strike, after letting it proceed long enough to impoverish workers and incite public impatience with strikers. And, why negotiate when you know that if you stall long enough, the government will save you the trouble?
We are not victims of postal workers ‘holding us up for ransom’; we are victims of an increasingly unfair system that fosters cooperative actions by the corporate sector, but comes down hard on a workers’ “collective.”
We owe it to ourselves to explore this bias, and to support workers struggling for social justice in the work place.
(This point is developed in Harry Glasbeek’s recently published, Capitalism: A Crime Story.)
Élan
