Contributor: John Beaumont

Contrary to what you may have heard, the US Postal Service isn’t broke — but thanks to an unfair mandate from Congress, it’s broken. And we need your help to fix it.

Here are the facts: A Congressional mandate requires the Post Office to pre-fund 75 years of future retiree health benefits over 10 years. About 90% of USPS financial losses since 2007 are due to this mandate, which cost the USPS $11.1 billion last year alone. All to pre-fund retiree health care for workers who may not even be born yet! This is just wrong, and it must change.

John Beaumont

Over the past couple of months, lead stories on every media outlet across this nation have covered the “gloom and doom” angle of six-day postal delivery.  But last Sunday, thousands of Letter Carriers, union members and allies came out to set the story straight on the real crisis that is facing the United States Postal Service.

In San Diego, Los Angeles, Fresno and San Francisco, rally participants let the communities they serve know that if the overzealous plan by Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe to eliminate Saturday mail delivery is allowed to happen, it would be one of the biggest mistakes our government would ever make.

On January 17, 1962, President John F Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988. This granted Federal Employees, for the first time, the right to collective bargaining.

This action led to inspire many states and localities to follow suit, allowing their own workers to organize. This triggered a huge wave of unionization in the public sector that saw firefighters, teachers, janitors, social workers and many others form unions in the 1960s and '70s.

Now all this is under attack. The nation's postal unions, whose employees combine to be the largest Federal union in the nation, are being attacked through proposed legislation in the United States Senate.