The Postal Workers (APWU) will hold a national day of action on October 1, with rallies all across the country for better staffing and better service, a better contract that ends the two-tier wage system, and the right to speak to the board that governs the postal service.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to “modernize” the Postal Service consists of condensing it. In the name of saving money, he is pushing to consolidate mail processing plants into fewer, bigger, more automated ones—which means cutting hundreds of jobs each time and slowing down the mail, especially for rural customers.
The state of Wyoming will have no mail plants left at all, so if you mail a letter across town in Cheyenne, it will have to travel all the way to Denver and back.
Already the mail has been slowed considerably. My cohorts and I have been doing mail testing—sending mail from all across the country to see how long it takes to arrive. The first piece of mail I got took more than two weeks.
DeJoy is also cutting post office hours, raising postage prices, and understaffing. Customers get frustrated with long lines and delivery delays—when it becomes a bother to go to the post office, they turn to competitors like Amazon, FedEx, and UPS instead. The end goal appears to be breaking up the public Postal Service for private monopolization.
