WASHINGTON—U.S. companies fighting Chinese knockoffs have cheered President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Universal Postal Union (UPU), an agency that governs international postal rates.
A small business owner from New Jersey is confident that the move will eliminate over 90 percent of the counterfeit problem he faces.
Trump announced in October last year that the United States was starting the yearlong withdrawal process from the postal union, a 145-year-old organization that’s now an agency of the United Nations.
Under the UPU framework, mail services for small packages shipped from countries such as China to the United States cost significantly less than what the United States Postal Service (USPS) charges American mailers for a similar service. That inequality in shipping costs puts U.S. businesses at a significant disadvantage.