Why we are forming this committee
We are forming this committee because the attacks on postal workers are accelerating, and the official channels have proven incapable of stopping them.
We are the workers who keep the St. Paul P&DC running: clerks, mail handlers, maintenance workers, custodians and drivers, on every tour and in every craft. Nothing moves through this building without us. Yet we have virtually no control over the decisions that determine our working conditions, our safety or the future of our jobs. Management decides. The union apparatus tells us to wait for grievances, arbitration and negotiations. By the time workers are informed, the decisions have often already been made.
We have seen the consequences of this firsthand. In June, a maintenance worker at this facility reported human feces contamination around AFSM No. 2. Management allowed the equipment to continue processing mail and described keeping it running as an “operations decision.” When the worker continued raising the hazard, management turned the issue against him: police were called, he was removed from the workplace, referred for a psychiatric evaluation, kept off the job for nearly a month and later issued a seven-day suspension. The message to every worker was clear: keep your head down and do not interfere with production. We reject that.
An attack on one worker cannot be allowed to disappear into a private grievance proceeding while everybody else is kept in the dark. The grievance process can drag on for months or years while management continues operating as before. Discipline may eventually be reduced or back pay restored, but that does nothing to mobilize workers while the attack is taking place, and it does little to prevent management from using the same methods against somebody else.
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