Brian Tierney (left) and Kenneth Lerch (right) outside the National Press Club
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“The Postmaster General is really trying to dismantle the United States Postal Service and have it privatized,” said Kenneth Lerch, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 3825 in Montgomery County, Md.
As he joined protesters associated with Occupy DC outside the National Press Club last week, Lerch told TheFightBack, “They want to privatize the Post Office under the guise that [it’s] losing billions of dollars a year, which is just an outright lie.”
Inside the Press Club, Postmaster General Patrick Donahue was interrupted when he attempted to explain why eliminating 200,000 postal jobs was necessary, along with ending Saturday delivery, among other proposed cuts.
Brian Tierney, a local activist and journalist who bought a ticket to the luncheon, said, “We started the mic check as Donahoe was telling his lies.” Standing beside Lerch outside the Press Club directly following the action, Tierney explained why he and several others disrupted Donahoe:
“[T]hey’re trying to say that there are financial problems facing the U.S. Postal Service, but everybody knows that this started with a law that was passed in Congress that requires the Postal Service to pay 75 years in advance to its retiree health benefits, which is a burden that no other institution, no other business or public agency has to pay. It’s just an excuse to basically manufacture a financial crisis in a bid to privatize the U.S. Postal Service, break the unions, institute massive layoffs. They want to layoff over the next ten years almost 200,000 people, and this is a time of record unemployment.”
If not for the 2006 (Bush-era) law, “the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion,” consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted in a recent letter to Senator Joe Lieberman and Congressman Darrell Issa in which he called the situation a “manufactured crisis.”
Privatizing postal routes between denser urban areas, which are the most profitable, could lead to windfall profits for a few companies, while USPS would continue to serve the rest of the country, as the Constitution requires. Lerch feels this is what’s behind the 2006 legislation forcing USPS to pre-pay its health benefits.
“Why would that law be passed to force the Post Office to pay $5.5 billion and pre-fund [health benefits] all the way through the year 2082, in a ten year period. We have to analyze that. And the only conclusion you can come to is to ensure that the Postal Service loses money every year so the privatizers can say, ‘Look, that government agency, it can’t work. It doesn’t work. They’re losing billions of dollars a year. It needs to be privatized.'”
After Walmart, USPS is the country’s second largest employer. Unlike the world’s biggest retailer, however, USPS employees are unionized and receive good wages and benefits. Breaking the postal workers’ union would be a major achievement for the right-wing, which must be pleasantly surprised to see this effort being carried out by President Obama’s administration.
One aspect of the potential job loss’s impact has been largely overlooked, Tierney told TheFightBack: “[USPS is] the largest employer of African American men… The unemployment rate among the black community is disproportionately higher and this attack is disproportionately going to effect black workers.”
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