The U.S. Postal Service has declared a moratorium on closing post offices and processing plants until May 15.
Meanwhile, Congress tries to fix the financial crisis it helped create by requiring postal employees to pay $5 billion a year into a fund for the health benefits of retirees who haven’t been born yet.
Unfortunately, the moratorium comes too late for more than 500 post offices that have already closed this year, and it won’t save a hundred others that have already been told they’re closing.
But it is a reprieve for more than 3,000 post offices that were waiting to hear the bad news.
Postmaster General Patrick Donohue has big plans for downsizing the service. He wants to shutter 15,000 of the nation’s 32,000 post offices, close 252 mail processing plants, slow the delivery of first-class mail and periodicals, eliminate Saturday delivery and cut the workforce of career employees from 580,000 to 300,000.
We’re told this is necessary and inevitable because we’re using the mail less, thanks to the Internet. But the idea that the postal service is irrelevant in the digital age is untrue.
Actually, it’s part of a strategy to privatize the postal system. The postal service outsources $12 billion a year to private companies to do work that, in many cases, postal employees could do.
Now it wants to replace post offices — the nerve center, economic hub and source of identity for many communities — with postal counters in Wal-Marts and supermarkets.
For seniors who walk to the post office or who can’t drive far in bad weather, a nearby post office is a necessity. For millions who can’t afford computers and the Internet, or who live in rural areas where there’s no broadband, the postal system is still an important means of communication.
For people who don’t have bank accounts — and there are far more than you think — postal money orders are a way to pay bills and send money to family in other countries. For small businesses that send and receive a lot of mail, a nearby post office is more than a matter of convenience.
People still read magazines and newspapers. The postal service still delivers them cheaply and promptly. Elections depend on absentee voting, and voting by mail is becoming increasingly popular.
The postal service delivers medicines and other products purchased online at rates much lower than the private carriers charge — and unlike them, the postal service delivers everywhere. It’s called the “universal service obligation,” and it will be the first casualty of a privatized mail system.
The postal service also provides good-paying jobs to hundreds of thousands of people. Now those salaries and benefits are being portrayed as somehow unfair and one of the causes of the postal service’s financial crisis.
Cutting thousands of jobs won’t help the economy. We’ll all lose in the end.
Postal workers are working harder than ever. Their numbers have already been drastically cut, yet there’s still plenty of mail.
They serve the country, just like schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers and the military.
Steve Hutkins, a professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, is founder of savethepostoffice.com.
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