Postal workers fight to keep delivering the mail

• Reprints

Updated: October 31, 2011 12:12PM

Like you, I didn’t worry much about it when the U.S. Postal Service announced the potential for big cutbacks.

Who gets mail anymore? When was the last time you got a letter you were eager to read? Junk mail, bills — we pay most of ours online. The volume of first class mail has dropped 25 percent in the past four years.

Sure, people feel residual affection for the local postman, whose job harkens back to an era when there was a milkman and a butcher and a baker and a candlestick maker.

But postal carriers (I’ve always disliked that term; PC, sure, but it also makes them sound like they’re spreading postalosis) are like congressmen: you tend to appreciate your own, but as a group they can go hang.

Then I turned a corner this past Tuesday and saw 500 postal workers gathered in front of the Thompson Center, a crowd of zippered blue sweaters and sensible shoes.

I might have kept going, but they seemed to be chanting to reduce funding to their own retirement health care. That made me pause.

The postal service uses no tax money and makes a profit, or would. But in 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, designed to increase the post office’s flexibility. Tucked in was a provision forcing it to fully fund its retiree health benefits for the next 75 years, which costs the postal service some $5 billion every year.

Now a bill, HR-1351 — stalled in our gridlocked Congress — would end the obligation to fund health care for employees not yet born, employees the service may never hire.

“We don’t want no handouts, we don’t want no bailouts,” said Sam Anderson, president of the Chicago branch of the American Postal Workers. “All we want is our money.”

The postal service employs about 560,000, down 110,000 through attrition over the past few years. Earlier this year, it floated a report suggesting the workforce will have to be decreased “more aggressively,” according to Chicago district spokesman Mark Reynolds.

“It suggested we need flexibility in terms of layoffs to stay alive and hopefully profitable again,” he said. Layoffs require Congress’ approval, which is pending, in the form of HR-2309, which would allow the postal service to void its union contracts, fire people at will, close post offices and constrict delivery.

“It would destroy the postal service,” said Mack Julion, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers’ Chicago office.

The unions insist that, without the funding obligation, they would be profitable to the tune of $611 million since 2007. Eliminate the funding requirement, the problem’s solved.

Not so simple, says the postal service.

“The unions believe if we get money back we’ll be fine, that we don’t have to reduce delivery to five days and close retail units,” said Reynolds. “We don’t believe that. We want long term legislation to address our operational ability. We could save $3 billion a year by going to five-day-a-week delivery.”

Cuts would also be a kick to the struggling African-American middle class. Carrier salaries start at $44,200. Tuesday’s protest was an overwhelmingly black crowd — Julion estimated that about 70 percent of letter carriers in Chicago are African-American. Here is one place management and union agree.

“The postal service has been a gateway to the middle class for generations of Americans; my grandfather used to work for the post office,” said Reynolds. “When the American economy sneezes, the black economy catches a cold.” “It’ll hurt,” said Julion. “It is a very diverse workplace.”

The Internet may be skyrocketing, but the postal service is still a national resource, one that many people continue to rely upon.

“We’re still important because, No. 1, everybody isn’t online and everybody isn’t going to be online,” said Reynolds. “No. 2, we deliver everywhere. We serve the bottom of the Grand Canyon, we serve people living on summer cottages in Lake Erie islands, we do it through rain and sleet and snow — that’s 150 million delivery points we service. When the post office was created 200 some odd years ago, the notion was this would bind the nation together, as the nation has grown we have continued to fill that purpose. We are additionally the straw that stirs the drink of a trillion dollar mailing industry. Two of our biggest customers are UPS and FedEx — they’ll deliver packages to local post offices and we take the packages to the customers. America still relies upon the postal service and we still want to be here for America.”

At the protest, a reader from Indiana came up to say hello. I asked her why she was there. “I got an email telling me about it,” she said.