Letter Carriers as Busy as Santa’s Elves in Efforts to Save the Postal Service

NALC Activist

Another busy week in getting NALC’s message out calls for another end-of-week recap.

• The Economist–President Rolando, or as The Economist refers to him, “the chief courier,” sent a letter in response to Andreas Kluth’s article, The World in 2012, which inaccurately described American’s attitudes about the Postal Service and its financial crisis. President Rolando pointed out Kluth’s overlooking of the 2006 congressional mandate to pre-fund future retiree health benefits as the biggest drain on the USPS, and he set the record straight on several other missed points.
• The New York Times—The Times’ compilation of letters to the editor shows how broad the public’s support is becoming for sensible solutions for saving the Postal Service. Even the one letter in opposition to relieving the Postal Service of its absurd congressional mandates to pre-fund future retiree health benefits revealed its author’s true agenda: to do away with the Postal Service forever. With luck, nobody is looking to folks such as that for advice about saving one of America’s most valued institutions.
• The Washington Post–for the first time ever, The Washington Post published a letter from President Rolando that pointed out failures in George Will’s Nov. 27 op-ed column as well as the Posts’s own Dec. 6 story, Postal proposal would slow mail delivery.
• The House sends a deeply flawed payroll tax holiday extension bill to the Senate–As expected, the House of Representatives passed a payroll tax holiday extension and sent it on to the Senate. Unfortunately, House Republicans offset part of the bill’s costs with a hit to federal and postal employees’ benefits and pay. Call your senators’ offices immediately and urge them to oppose paying for an extension of the payroll tax holiday by freezing federal worker pay and slashing our benefits.
• Five-month closure moratorium–USPS and the Senate agreed this past week to a five-month moratorium on mass closures of post offices and mail-processing facilities. “This is a positive step, provided the parties use the time to put together a positive plan for the future, including ways to grow the business as well as efficiencies that make sense,” President Rolando said. “That requires maintaining the networks, which are vital to the ability of the Postal Service to adapt to an evolving society and meet the needs of the public and America’s businesses, as we’ve been doing for 200 years.”

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