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APWU Blasts USPS Response to Postal Financial Crisis

APWU Web News Article #010-09, Feb. 10, 2009

APWU President William Burrus decried Postal Service plans to address its financial crisis in a letter to the Postmaster General on Feb. 9.

“It is extremely disappointing that not a single step is aimed at reducing the loss of revenue from ‘worksharing’ discounts or from subcontracting,” he wrote, referring to a list of steps the USPS outlined in a Feb. 4 edition of News Link Extra [PDF]. The postal news bulletin reported that the USPS ended its first quarter with a net loss of $384 million and a 5.2-billion-piece mail-volume decline compared to the same period last year.

“Considering the severity of the current crisis,” the union president wrote [PDF], “I fail to understand USPS strategy, which continues to subsidize private mail ‘pre-sorters,’ transportation providers, drop-shippers and others.”

Burrus said he is particularly disturbed by USPS plans to consolidate “excess” capacity in its mail processing and transportation networks while postal policy encourages the growth of private entities that perform these duties.

He offered as an example two of the many consolidations the Postal Service is considering:
“While the USPS is studying the feasibility of consolidating its mail processing operations in City of Industry and Long Beach, CA, into other locations, Pitney Bowes has announced the opening of a new 84,000 square foot mail-processing facility in Corona, CA, less than 50 miles away from the USPS plants.

“The new plant will be financed through worksharing discounts offered by the USPS, and its workers will perform duties that could be performed more efficiently by postal employees,” Burrus said.

“The challenges facing the Postal Service require a review of the entire postal network; simply cutting USPS-operated facilities and USPS employees is unfair and will not solve the Postal Service’s financial crisis. The Postal Service has reduced postal work hours by more than 100 million hours over the last four years,” he noted, “without a single adjustment in the billions of dollars lost to discounts and subcontracting.

“The USPS cannot survive if it continues to subsidize the revenue stream of private service providers through subcontracts and ‘worksharing’ discounts,” Burrus wrote. “The Postal Service is the center of the entire mailing industry. If we fail, the private mailers will fail as well.”

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