Someone asked me to post my comment as a diary. So here it is:
US Postal Workers Are Fighting Massive Service Cuts
Thousands of US Postal Service jobs are at stake under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s modernization plan, which would close 200 mail processing plants and funnel all mail to 60 mega-plants. Postal workers are organizing to stop the plan.
Robotic Mega-Plants
Postal workers are the nation’s biggest union workforce — 585,000 strong, split across four unions. They’re half women, 30 percent black, and 16 percent veterans.
Thousands of their jobs are at stake under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s ten-year “Delivering for America” modernization plan, which would close two hundred mail processing plants and funnel all mail to sixty mega-plants called regional processing and distribution centers (RPDCs), each with a football field–sized parcel sorting machine — a series of conveyor belts, scanners, and chutes that can sort five thousand packages an hour.
Wyoming has only two mail plants, and both are slated to be downgraded, so all the mail (and many of the jobs) will travel out of state to the nearest RPDC. It used to be that local mail could get there overnight
Now it will take at least two days, but more likely three or four
Disastrous Changes
In Richmond, Virginia, colon cancer screening tests for 870 veterans sat so long in the plant that they expired. A museum reported it was missing $300,000 in membership renewal checks.
In Atlanta, trucks waited three or four hours for their turn at jammed loading docks; the line got so long it backed up onto the highway. In Houston, an anonymous worker tipped off the press that the new sorting machine wouldn’t fit in the new building.
This is the outline of the remainder of the article, which I hope you will read:
A Public Treasure
Hubs and Spokes
Anti-Rural Discrimination
Piecemeal Privatization
A Better Way
This article was republished by Jacobin from Labor Notes. The diary is not an endorsement of either publication.
