Mass. postal workers rally to protest cuts, warn of moves to privatize

BOSTON - Postal workers from across Massachusetts rallied on Tuesday to warn the public that their service was being threatened.

“It’s not a business, not a corporation, not designed to make money,” said Ray Bell, president of the Boston Metro American Postal Workers Union. “This is not a labor dispute; this is a public service issue. The American people are owed postal services. The service is breaking its social contract with customers.”

“We want to let the public know that the service is being stolen from under their feet,” said Scott Hoffman, a former president of the Boston local who is serving as a national business agent for American Postal Workers Union. “Under the guise of consolidation, the service is selling the infrastructure that took 200 years to build.”

Postal workers, window clerks and carriers, gathered Tuesday on Dorchester Street in front of the massive Boston Post Office building to alert the public that the deterioration of customer service, delays in deliveries and cancellation of prearranged appointments for passports was part of a concerted effort to discredit the service with the public and later privatize it.

“This erodes confidence in the Postal Service and ripens it for privatization,” Hoffman said. He speculated that other delivery services would reap the benefits, and be allocated lucrative routes, while the Postal Service would be left delivering to destinations such as “a mountaintop cabin in Idaho,” where there was no profit to be made.

“The Postal Service is trying to make a buck at the customers’ expense,” said Keith Richards, president of the Central Massachusetts Area American Postal Workers Union, Local 4553, based in Auburn. Richards has spent 25 years as a postal worker, staffing the office and attending customers at the window.

Steve Doherty, a spokesman for the Postal Service in Boston, strongly disputed the union leaders' characterizations.

"The position being presented here by the leadership of the APWU is absent of anything based in reality," Doherty said. "The facts are that over the past two years, we have worked diligently with our union and management associations to address our shared goals of employee recruitment and retention, workplace safety, and career training and advancement.  We have focused steadily on stabilizing our workforce resulting in employee availability and overtime requirements being at the most favorable levels in many years. We have converted 125,000 pre-career workers to full-time career employees since October 2020, including 50,000 conversions between April 2022 and March 2023.  We have already reversed years of declining service reliability and now 98 percent of the nation’s population receives their mail and packages in less than three days, and we are working hard to correct service-related issues in the other limited areas."

The rallying workers were supported by local politicians, including Boston city councilors, state Sen. Walter Timilty, D-Milton, and state Rep. Rob Consalvo, D-Boston.

Mail delivery quality-of-life issue

Chanting workers called for the resignation of Postmaster General and CEO Louis DeJoy, appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2020.

“The policies being instituted by Mr. DeJoy are destroying our postal system,” Timilty said. “It’s a disgrace; the Postal Service is a shell of itself, services provided to citizens have been absolutely destroyed.”

He called cuts to the Postal Service a “quality-of-life issue” for the entire country.

“DeJoy is trying to manage this like a business,” said Richard Cicchetti, a retired Cape Cod area postal worker and former president of his local.

Changes incorporated in recent years include the removal of processing machines that continued despite cease-and-desist orders from three federal judges, Hoffman said. The service has also discarded a significant number of blue postal boxes. There are currently 140,837 of them, down from 164,099 in 2013.

The rallying workers described long lines at windows due to insufficient staff, canceled passport appointments, closed lobbies during lunchtimes, a reluctance to call in additional staff, delays in delivery and lost items.

“It’s not isolated; it’s happening too frequently,” said Bell. “It’s not fair when a customer shows up for a prescheduled passport appointment to be told that it was cancelled due to lack of staff.”

Third-largest U.S. employer

The service employs some 600,000 workers, making it the third-largest employer in the United States after Amazon and Walmart. In 2019 it handled some 55 billion pieces of mail, down significantly from the 103 billion pieces in 2000, delivering to 106 million addresses across the country.

According to the Brookings Institution, it has been operating at a loss since 2007.

In April, the U.S. Postal Service said it had cut projected losses by more than half, to $70 billion through 2031, due to $48 billion in financial relief in legislation signed by President Biden last year, by reducing work hours and by developing plans for regular postage price hikes. The legislation signed by Biden also calls for future retirees to enroll in a government health insurance plan.

Ed Hall of Falmouth was at the rally in Boston representing his colleagues at the East Falmouth office. He said the working conditions have deteriorated considerably in his office and blamed management for the ill feelings there.

Many of the rallying workers have been in the Postal Service for decades.

Robert Dunn, of Groton, a window clerk said the best part of his job is serving the customers, many of them regulars who know his name. Just like clerk Jim Melich, of Boston, who knows the names of 90% of his customers; knows their names, their children's names, their pets names.

"People come in, they like to talk, have a chat,” Dunn said, adding that sometimes he has to ease his regulars along to ensure the line doesn’t get too long. “It’s a human connection.”

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Postal Service workers rally in Boston against Louis DeJoy leadership