An Open Letter to Tammy Baldwin: Save Postal Service

Senator Baldwin:

As I said to you at the bloggers’ meeting at the Wisconsin Democratic Convention in June, the US Postal Service is destroying its ability to serve the people of Wisconsin and the rest of the country by decimating its infrastructure: stopping some or all mail processing at plants in Madison, La Crosse, Eau Claire, Wausau, Oshkosh, as well as Kenosha, Portage, Rhinelander, Rockford IL, Duluth and Rochester MN, and Kingsford MI. Of 14 processing plants in and adjacent to Wisconsin, the USPS wants to continue full service at only two: Milwaukee and Green Bay.  And the Milwaukee plant is a leased building; the lease is up in 2015; the building is flimsy and not designed for heavy equipment. It shakes alarmingly whenever a train goes by.

USPS is destroying its entire mail-processing infrastructure.

At the same time, private presort houses such as Pitney-Bowes are expanding: building new plants and moving to larger plants.

Your constituents and the American people need your help to stop the destruction of the US Postal Service.

The leadership of the USPS itself wants to self-destruct. Why? Management has been captured by profiteers: the big advertising mailers like Val-Pak coupons—who don’t need first-class service; the big contractors like Pitney Bowes; and competitors like UPS.

If you don’t help to stop them, these profiteers will drive USPS to destruction and insolvency.

USPS is rushing toward privatization of all mail-processing operations.

Once Pitney-Bowes and others have been hired to do all of the mail processing USPS once did (1) the revenue will be gone: taxpayers will again have to pay for letter carriers to deliver mail; (2) there will be no service such as first-class service used to be.

This is not theoretical. It is happening as we speak. There were roughly 500 processing plants just a very few years ago. About half of them have already been closed or are in the process of being closed. The regions that used to be served by the now-closed plants no longer have what we grew up thinking of as first-class mail service. Instead of one-day service to a nearby town, it now takes several days to mail a letter across town.

The “savings” are a fiction. Destroying the service will give the revenue to private operators. Then there will be no revenue to pay for “last mile” delivery.

The purported “savings”—although more than offset by payments to trucking companies and private sorters—are money taken from the postal workers in Madison and other Wisconsin cities (and all across the country) who will lose their livelihoods.

This is the main thrust of the privatizers’ plan: to replace union jobs in the USPS with nonunion jobs at profiteers’ plants: replace living-wage jobs with non-living-wage jobs; replace jobs that offer benefits with jobs without benefits.

Senator Baldwin, what kind of America will you help create?

Will you help the plunderers, privatizers, and profiteers destroy the nation’s infrastructure, in order to destroy the last remaining living-wage, union jobs?

Or will you stand up for the Wisconsin and American people, fight to preserve their post office and to preserve at least a little of the middle class?

When I said to you in June that USPS is being destroyed in the service of the big mailers, what you said to me was, “Some of those mailers are in Wisconsin.”

The implication is that you may be willing to see the permanent destruction of essential American infrastructure; the permanent dismantling of the ability to provide first-class service, so that a Wisconsin corporation can reap more profit.

Who are your constituents? The big mailers? Or the Wisconsin people? You can’t serve both.

You must choose.

Choose to side with the people of Wisconsin and the rest of the country. Choose the middle class. Choose rural communities. Choose people without broadband Internet. Choose the small businesses for whom receiving checks today rather than 2 to 3 business days from now means quick enough cash flow to stay in business.

Privatized mail service, coming to the U.S. with blistering speed, has already happened to Europe, with dire results.

Likewise, closing post offices especially in rural areas devastates the rural communities and saves essentially nothing.

I see that you have not yet signed on as a sponsor of S.316, the Postal Protection Act of 2013. Will you take this first crucial step? Not only sign on, but persuade your colleagues to do so also. Even the Republican ones. Postal service should not be a partisan issue. We all need it. A world without postal service is a poorer world.

S.316 would undo some of the financial damage inflicted by the 2006 PAEA, and would reiterate USPS’s obligation to maintain current levels of service.

Much more must be done to remove the vultures from the postal eagle’s nest. 

For now, will you co-sponsor S.316.

Can I count on your leadership on this crucial issue?

Thomas Ray Worley
worleydervish.blogspot.com/search/label/USPS

Robber Barony Is Back

http://topincomes.g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/#Graphic:
select:
United States
1917-2009
Average Incomes
bottom 90% average income - including capital gains

Shows the submerged 90% of us earn the same (per family) in real terms as we did in the late 1960s. Yet the typical family now has more wage earners, working more hours.

Same site, select
Top Income Shares
top .01% - including capital gains

Shows the hunting animals eating the entire carcass except during 1942-1981, when we had effective antitrust law, labor law, and progressive taxation.

In only these forty years was the average family income of the top .01% "only" 165 times the average family income.  Before 1942 and after 1981, the rich took a much larger share.  In 2010 it was 462 times the average and increasing.  (If only the top .01% earned anything, their share would be 10,000 times the average.   That the one family in 10,000 now takes nearly 5% of all the income, is appalling.)

The rich get their income not for what they do, but for what they own.  They claim to be "job creators."  In truth, the only job creator is a customer, who buys something.  We have to get money back in the hands of those who spend it--the nonrich.  When the only people with money to spend have all the stuff they can use, the economy collapses.  These booms and busts happened regularly up through the Great Depression.  It was political action that transformed the working class into the middle class, avoiding the booms and busts.  Deregulation, detaxing the rich, eroding worker rights, free trade, since 1981 are bringing back the bad old days of many serfs, one lord.  Only political action can reverse the trend.  We have to restore antitrust laws, restore workers' rights, establish fair trade not free trade, tax the rich.

Norway has a much fairer balance of power between employees and employers, partly due to nationwide collective bargaining.  U.S. labor laws have been eroded since they were enacted in 1935, by anti-labor court decisions and anti-labor legislation.  Now, management can ignore labor agreements and labor law without serious consequences.

ALEC Corporations: Boycott Them

Corporate members of the American Legislative Exchange Council write model legislation and pressure state legislatures to adopt it. These laws break unions, take away worker protections and environmental regulations, capture control of government for use of corporate interests at the expense of the public good. They include: AT&T, Kraft Foods, UPS, Walmart, Amazon.com, FedEx, Frito-Lay, HP, JC Penney, McDonalds, Microsoft, Miller Brewing Company, Outback Steakhouse, Sprint Nextel, Sony, Time Warner, United Airlines, Verizon, Visa, American Express, KFC/Taco Bell, Walgreens, and hundreds of others. Money you spend there will be used as weapons against democracy, against the middle class, against the environment, against civil liberties. Check the list before you buy. Shop at the smallest, most local places.

Where's the Corruption?

Troll comment seen on Facebook: "With union corruption, it's hard to see how anyone could be proud." I've heard this "baby-bathwater" sentiment before.

Unions are like any other human institution—prone to human failings. But that weakness doesn't mean we should abandon or vilify them. It means we should strengthen them and address whatever corruption we might find. It also does not mean that we shouldn't be proud of the many, many good things that unions have done for working people—the 8-hour workday, the weekend, worker's compensation, safer working conditions, child labor laws, pensions and health care benefits, to name only a few. There's a lot in labor history to honor and celebrate and be proud of.

At one time, labor unions in the United States had more power than they do today, hence their vulnerability to corruption. You know, "Abuse of power comes as no surprise" and "absolute power corrupts absolutely." But now, labor unions can hardly be singled out for corruption and abuse of power. To abuse power, you have to have some. The real point of labor unions is to give power to the powerless, to aggregate against inordinate corporate power.

Nowadays, the search for corruption is an easy one. Anyone paying attention knows that U.S. politicians are far more responsive to corporate lobbyists and monied interests than they are to their constituents. Corporations are writing laws designed to undermine not only workers' rights but those of the poor and the disenfranchised. And politicians are giving their corporate supporters a leg up on the backs of the poor.

In short, my dear troll, if you're concerned about corruption, follow the power. And given that labor unions have very little of that these days, they should be the least of your worries.

Solidarity Begins at Home

I first sang this song two years ago, when the USPS tried to fire Tom because of his union work. (Of course, that's not what they said, but who are we kidding?) It was—and is—my love song to him. I know, I know, freedom doesn't require "getting you a man," and many have written more woman-empowering, woman-friendly verses to substitute for this one, but I can't help it. I love this verse just the way Woody wrote it. Tom was so tickled when I first sang it to him. He threw his head back and laughed and laughed with his huge bark of a laugh. I'm behind him a bazillion percent, and being in this together makes us both very much stronger.

Tom has spent most of the month of August in Norman, Oklahoma. The USPS sent him there to learn how to fix a machine that doesn't work and that they probably won't ever use. This kind of management decision is not remotely unusual at the USPS. Over and over and over again low-level managers (and by "low-level" I mean "slithering-on-the-ground") make ludicrous decisions that make no sense and just piss money down the drain. There are absolutely no negative repercussions for them, and sometimes there are even rewards. And yet the USPS is crying to Congress about its supposed fiscal crisis.

It sure looks to me, and to many others, like the folks in charge are deliberately running the USPS into the ground. I reckon they can't wait for it to go belly up so they can chop the remains up into little pieces and sell them at a bargain to their cronies. The workers be damned. The people who count on their small rural post offices be damned. The U.S. economy be damned. Somehow they think that if they line their pockets and those of a few of their buds, nothing else matters. I feel sorry for those bastards living their sad little miserable lives. They don't have a clue about what's really important.

While I'm waiting to pick Tom up at the airport on Saturday morning, this will be running through my head:

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;

Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.

Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,

A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.

Woody was right in one really important respect: Solidarity begins at home! Maybe someday I'll post a video of me singing it, but for now, here's a clip of Woody himself singing my favorite verse.

Attacks on the Middle Class Busting Out All Over

Forty-five thousand Verizon workers are on strike because the company, although it is "swimming in cash," is demanding that they give up a substantial amount of their earnings, benefits, and job security. But just like the USPS and the state of Wisconsin, the "budget crisis" is sheer fabrication. "In the first quarter of this year, Verizon tripled its profits compared with the previous year. Since February, when it began its new deal with Apple to market the iPhone, the company has signed up an astounding 2.3 million new iPhone customers."

According to the Communications Workers of America, "In the last four years alone, Verizon made more than $19 billion in profits and compensated their top five executives more than a quarter of a billion dollars. But apparently that’s not enough. Now they want to outsource more jobs, including sending jobs overseas, slash sick days, eliminate benefits for workers who get hurt on the job and cut the healthcare benefits they promised retirees."

Once again, Ed Schultz, inveterate advocate for middle-class workers that he is, focuses on what Verizon is up to (link to video here):

So, what to do? Send an e-mail in support of the workers to Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam. Sign the petition at Change.org.

Stand up and speak out for the middle class in Wisconsin, at the USPS, and at Verizon. Demand respect and fair treatment for workers everywhere. Organize, mobilize, and whatever you do, don't give up!

Dear Congress,

We here at the United States Postal Service are requesting your approval so we can violate the contracts we negotiated with our employees via the postal unions. We know that the elimination of the layoff protections in our collective bargaining agreements is an extraordinary request, and we do not make this request lightly. In fact, we’ve been working our way toward making this request for many years now. And we're proud to announce that at last we’ve managed to create the “exceptional circumstances” that we hope will inspire you to approve these “exceptional remedies.”

"Thanks to our [mis]management policies—for example, making sure to charge less for services than they actually cost—the Postal Service is facing dire economic challenges that threaten its very existence. [Oh my!] If the Postal Service was a private-sector business, which we hope it very soon will be, it would have filed for bankruptcy and utilized the reorganization process to eliminate, er, uh, restructure its labor agreements to reflect the new financial reality (so brilliantly modeled by Walmart).

We need to reduce the USPS workforce by, oh, say, 120,000 career positions by, let's say, 2015, in addition to the 100,000 we expect to lose through regular attrition and the ones who, you know, go postal. Never mind about all the jobs that will be lost. We can hire some of those people back as casual employees (lower wages, no benefits, no unions!). We suppose that some of the 120,000 could come through buyouts and such, but we would really enjoy laying some of them off, especially those blasted union people. Man, are they ever a pain in the butt!

Unfortunately, the collective bargaining agreements between us and our unionized employees contain layoff restrictions that make it impossible to reduce the size of our workforce by the amount we want by 2015, so we are asking you to wave your legislative magic wand to make what is now illegal legal. After all, some of our best friends contribute generously to your campaigns. And besides, these USPS employees don't need layoff protections when every other self-respecting American enterprise is happily laying people off left and right and shipping their jobs overseas. And if private-sector employees have to put up with that kind of stuff, it's only fair that USPS employees should have to too.

We're hoping that the critical financial situation we've got going here will convince some of you waffly Democrats to go along with our union-busting, privatizing, lining-our-pockets plan. After all, what could be more effective in reducing costs than dismantling the postal service altogether? You wouldn't want another BAILOUT, would you? That would be so upsetting for all those little people who pay taxes. (Never mind that the postal service doesn't use a dime of taxpayer money. That'll just be our little secret, k?).

We expect that with enough per$uading, you good folks in Congress will agree that the present crisis warrants these extremely lucrative, er uh, these extreme measures.

$incerely,

The [mis]managers of the USPS

Please sign the petition to keep the USPS from being destroyed! Thank you!

Moral war?

Every so often someone applauds what he calls a "moral" war, as Krugman does once again here: "the Civil War and World War II are the two great moral wars of our history, and they should be remembered with pride."

Once again, I have to respond:

The Civil War was never about slavery. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."--Lincoln Lincoln preserved the union to preserve its power. Shame on you, Professor Krugman, for calling Lincoln's war moral. You know better. If Lincoln had permitted the states to dissolve the union, we would not have the power to do the great evil we have wreaked in every small country we've meddled in since the end of WWII.

We entered WWII to punish the Japanese, who attacked our war-making capability in the Pacific. We prided ourselves in fighting the evil Hitler. In beating him, we became him. The list of countries the U.S. has attacked with our military, CIA, gifts and sales of weapons, gifts of money for weapons and military . . . is almost endless. The tail of war profiteering has wagged the dog of U.S. policy since Eisenhower succeeded in his quest, begun in WWI, to create the military-industrial complex he warned us of too late. "I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."--Mohandas Gandhi The enemy is not an evil dictator. The enemy is evil itself. We do not win by doing evil.

--TomRW

Union Yes

Stanley Fish: University faculties need to unionize, so instructors have a voice in increasingly corporate universities.

William Cronon:
"McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him.

"The turmoil in Wisconsin is not only about bargaining rights or the pension payments of public employees. It is about transparency and openness. It is about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Joe McCarthy forgot these lessons of good government, and so, I fear, has Mr. Walker. Wisconsin’s citizens have not."

William Cronon is a professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

--TomRW

Rules Schmules

My husband, Tom, goes back to work today.

He was fired from his job as an electronics technician at the U.S. Post Office for following safety protocols and instructions from the person who was his supervisor at the time. I kid you not. He was fired for powering down four machines that needed maintenance. The rules are that if there's no mail processing being done at the time, the machines need to be powered down before any maintenance is done.

Ten days earlier Tom had been instructed by a supervisor-at-the-time not to follow those safety protocols. He followed her instructions and then filed a grievance, because he was instructed not to follow safety protocols. Tom was off work the entire following week.

After he came back to work, he was given contrary instructions from another supervisor, so he followed the safety protocol and powered down the machines before beginning work on them.

He was fired, then, for not following instructions that were contrary to safety protocol and had been given to him ten days earlier by someone who was not his supervisor and was not in the building at the time.

All this happened back in April. (I wrote about it here.)

Moreover, management didn't follow its own rules for issuing discipline. Before an employee is fired, there are a number of intermediary disciplinary steps that have to take place. They just skipped those bits.

Tom is a union steward for the American Postal Workers Union, and he's a really good one. The week Tom was fired, another union steward was fired as well, for equally ridiculous reasons, and he was reinstated less than a month later.

We heard word this week that management's step three designee unilaterally reduced Tom's firing to a fourteen-day suspension. So now the union will grieve that.

Since his firing, Tom and the APWU filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA has since slapped a fine on the mail-processing plant for not following clearly stated safety protocols. Touché! So the plant has to pay a fine. Ah, sweet vindication. But what, you might ask, are the consequences for the people involved? Disciplinary action? A dock in pay? A stern warning? No sirree. Not even a slap on the wrist.

In all this time that Tom has been off work, there has been a lot of union work not getting done. Other union workers have picked up some of the slack, but not all of it. The union insists that management follow the rules, and management believes that they don't have to. When they don't follow a rule, the union files a grievance. There are lots of rules. And lots of grievances.

The amazing thing is that there are absolutely no consequences whatsoever for these people not following the rules. So you fired this guy for no good reason, and now he's being reinstated. And the P.O. has to pay him for the work he missed but didn't do. And the P.O. has to pay an OSHA fine. So what? It has no effect whatsoever on the people (or person) who didn't follow the rules.

So if all the union can do is file grievances, grievances that have almost no teeth to them, why oh why would management even care whether those grievances are filed? What they gained from Tom's firing was a few months of respite from the mountain of grievances filed because they don't follow the rules. That's all. This whole thing was just about petty power plays.

To give themselves a break from the overwhelming number of grievances, they fired Tom, for what they knew at the time would be a very limited amount of time. They may have hoped that Tom would lose his house or have his car repossessed or experience some such financial or emotional calamity. I'm happy to report that we're no worse for the wear, no worse whatsoever. We cut back on our spending, dipped a little into our savings, and stopped making any but minimum payments on the credit card. We have weathered the storm. So far anyway.

But alas, today Tom goes back to work today to what can only be described as a hostile work environment. I have no doubt that there are more exciting installments to come.

In a way, the folks in management are right. They don't have to follow the rules. Rules are things with consequences, teeth, ramifications. And there are absolutely no consequences when management doesn't follow the rules. Other than the minor annoyance of a huge pile of grievances.

Don't anybody wonder why the U.S. Post Office is hemorrhaging money. And happy Labor Day!

Hero Update

Here's a photo of Tom marching yesterday in the May Day Rally in downtown Madison. He's the one to the left of the "Union Yes" sign, appropriately enough, with the beard and cap.


Tonight we're going to the May Day Sing-Along with Vicki Guzman. Nothing we'd rather sing right now than "Oh, you can't scare me, I'm stickin' to the union..."