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November 19, 2024The American Postal Worker sheds a light on school lunch “junk fees” that are another way big banks exploit working people. magazinePostal Banking Our public schools, just like our public Postal Service, should operate as a public service, to educate and develop the country’s children, and not as another cash cow to enrich Wall Street investors. But, like so many other cherished public institutions, our schools and the families they serve are falling victim to predatory financial practices established to rob the working class of our hard-earned money. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently released a report that showed alarmingly high fees associated with digital payments for school lunches across the country. As more of the country’s school systems have moved to cashless cafeterias, schools are relying on outside vendors to process payments for meals purchased at school. These outside vendors have charged families more than $100 million each year in fees associated with depositing money into student accounts to pay for meals. The CFPB found that on average the payment processors “charge transaction fees of $2.37 or 4.4 percent of the total transaction” when parents or guardians add money to a student account. The report estimated that a typical family receiving reduced-price lunch and making two deposits per month would pay more than $42.00 in fees during the school year. For every dollar spent on food, payment processors would receive $0.60, an outrageous waste of many working-class families’ modest resources. “These fees are widespread, regressive, and may be burdensome for families and districts, who have little control over fee rates and few opportunities to shop around,” the report noted. More than 30 million children receive low-cost or no-cost school lunches each day with federal assistance under the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The CFPB report underscored that, while the law requires that districts participating in the NSLP provide fee-free options to pay for lunch, these options are often not easily accessible to many families, leading families to pay more than they should just to feed their children at school. Parents facing these outrageous fees are often powerless to do anything about them. The CFPB report notes that while there are 20 such payment-processing companies active in the country, there are three large companies that dominate the market. School districts have been largely unsuccessful in attempts to negotiate more modest fees, and have found that they save overall by going cashless in their food-service operations. The CFPB itself does not have the authority to crack down on such abusive fees that companies are imposing on working-class families but is using its investigatory abilities to shed light on this problem affecting millions. What the report underscores however, is that a large network of for-profit companies has increasingly inserted themselves into our public spaces. Junk fees, like the ones found in our country’s school cafeterias, are robbing hard working families of their hard-earned dollars, while enriching shareholders and executives at the large financial service companies that operate these payment processors. The Campaign for Postal Banking does not only support efforts to expand financial services available at the country’s 31,000 post offices, but also works together with our allies in a Grand Alliance to Save Our Public Postal Service to promote the common good. Winning postal banking and other important fidnancial reforms would be a counterweight to the greed of the Wall Street interests that extract their profit from the hard-earned livings of working-class people across the country. ■ School Lunch Junk Fees Hit Working Families’ Wallets0Continue reading→

November 19, 2024The Postal Service eliminated the deepest presort discounts used by package consolidators, returning work to the USPS and increasing revenue. magazineA Grand Alliance to Save Our Public Postal Service Since the creation of a Grand Alliance to Save Our Public Postal Service, the Alliance and our allies have opposed postal privatization in all its forms. One form of privatization that had largely gone unnoticed by the public is the Postal Service’s long-standing reliance on the “presort discount system.” That system effectively allowed large sections of the Postal Service’s transportation and processing work to be performed by private-sector companies for private profit, with the Postal Service accepting mail and packages “downstream” for last-mile delivery. This system incentivized private sector consolidators to aggregate mail and packages from many shippers into larger drop-offs into the postal network. They would bypass all or most of the postal processing network and rely on the Postal Service for last-mile delivery. In September, the Postal Service announced it was eliminating the deepest presort discounts that many package consolidators used (or abused) before turning their packages over to the USPS. The USPS estimates that as many as two billion packages enter the mailstream each year after being processed and transported by consolidators, which is roughly 25 percent of the Postal Service’s total package volume. By ending the presort discount for package consolidators, it is likely that much of that package volume will be returned to the USPS for end-to-end acceptance, transportation, processing, and delivery, which would increase the Postal Service’s overall revenue for shipping products. For too long, mail and package consolidators have relied on low-wage workers, and the steep discounts offered by the USPS to turn a profit from work that postal workers can rightly perform. The end of the discount program is shaking up the postal industry, with FedEx poised to eliminate its FedEx SmartPost product. Pitney Bowes has fi led for bankruptcy for its ecommerce division, and other package consolidators are likely to feel the impact soon. Supporters of a Grand Alliance to Save our Public Postal Service should welcome the change as an opportunity for the public Postal Service to claw back more of the work that the Postal Service was created to do, serving 167 million addresses, six days a week, with a commitment to quality, public service to the entire country. Upcoming Fight to Preserve Service Standards As this edition of The American Postal Worker was going to press, the Postal Service had just submitted before the Postal Regulatory Commission its proposals to once again change service standards. As we did in the 2021 service standards case, A Grand Alliance (AGA) will once again organize community resistance to the Postal Service’s proposal to slow down the mail. While this year’s proposal appears to be more complicated than the 2021 case, postal workers and AGA allies should stay alert for opportunities to promote the quality mail service that we are promised under the law. The proposal from the USPS appears to lengthen the delivery time for First-Class mail based on how far the destination address is located from a sorting facility; this is likely to have an outsized impact on customers in rural America. Readers should stay tuned to the APWU website and AGA channels for more information. We will analyze the Postal Service’s proposal in the weeks ahead, plan our response, and engage with postal workers and our allies to promote our vision for robust, quality postal services. ■ Postal Service Eliminates Deepest Presort Discounts for Package Consolidator0Continue reading→