Privatizers Lay Out Their Plan for Destroying Public Postal Service

On June 24, the House Subcommittee on Government Operations held a hearing titled, “The Route Forward for the U.S. Postal Service: A View from Stakeholders.”

In a hearing that was clearly created to promote the views and goals of the big mailers at the expense of postal workers and postal customers, the Republican leadership of the House Subcommittee had the following people testify: Paul Steidler, Senior Fellow at the conservative Lexington Institute; Jim Cochrane, CEO of the Package Shippers Association; Mike Plunkett, CEO and President of the Association for Postal Commerce; Thomas Schatz, President of the right-wing Citizens Against Government Waste; and Elena Spatoulas Patel, Assistant Professor at the University of Utah’s Marriner S. Eccles Institute for Economics and Quantitative Analysis. The only voice representing workers was Brian Renfroe, NALC President.

In a statement submitted for the record, APWU President Mark Dimondstein quickly dispelled the notion that privatization, whether piecemeal or in total, would lead the Postal Service down a better financial path, stating “privatization offers the illusion of profit, but that profit serves a very limited corporate interest while costs will instantly rise for the majority of businesses and customers and the larger national postal industry collapses.” He went on to reiterate that the Postal Service must remain an independent agency in order to fulfill its fifty-year-old Congressional mandate “to provide postal services to bind the Nation together,” to “provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas,” and to “render postal services to all communities.”

Several witnesses at the hearing made dangerous proposals for the future of the Postal Service, including: hiring freezes, public/private partnerships, (code word for subcontracting our work) and matching labor costs with postal revenues. For those following closely, these were blueprints for how they plan to privatize the postal service.

Multiple exchanges between committee members and witnesses took place that admonished the Postal Service for the size of its workforce, specifically regarding the conversions of non-career workers to career employees. One particular exchange that should raise red flags for every APWU member took place between James Comer, Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Jim Cochrane, CEO of the Package Shippers Association, where they discussed the prospect of a private sector solution to the sorting of the mail. This would have a direct and devastating impact on APWU members.

Despite these areas of concern, there were some notable moments during the hearing that highlighted areas where Congress could work with the Postal Service to improve its financial standing. Allowing the Postal Service to invest retirement funds in safe, TSP-like funds instead of the low-yield treasury securities they are limited to investing in now would generate a significant amount of money. Additionally, Congress should direct OPM to fix the misallocation of pension expenses that has plagued it for decades.

In his statement, President Dimondstein advocated for the expansion of non-postal services to local, state, and tribal governments. The opportunities are numerous and could utilize the vast postal retail network to offer a variety of services, such as hunting/fishing licenses and identification verification for government services, as well as resource distribution during natural disasters.

The APWU is ready to work with Congress and the Postal Service to share ideas and advance common goals to benefit the public Postal Service while continuing to push back against any changes that would have detrimental effects on the membership and the people’s rights guaranteed under the law to universal postal services no matter who we are or where we live.