This Sunday, you can rally and tell Congress to strengthen the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for the future and protect six-day mail delivery. The coalition Delivering for America is organizing hundreds of rallies across the country to save Saturday delivery, which Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says he will end Aug. 5. Find a rally near you.
Donahoe’s plan to shrink the USPS and end six-day service is an attack on the future of this great institution, on the customers who need it and on the employees who support it. These ill-advised cuts would hit small-business owners, senior citizens and rural residents the hardest. Says Letter Carriers (NALC) President Fredric Rolando:
We want to make this fight about the cost of losing Saturday mail delivery and how it would affect people in each and every state.
Cutting Saturday mail would delay important household and business transactions, including bills, invoices and personal correspondence, and may force customers to shift to high-cost competing services. Established by the Constitution and using no taxpayer funding for its operations, the Postal Service is a vital public institution that we cannot afford to see dismantled.
Postal unions have tried to work with USPS management to develop costs savings and growth measures. Just this past November, a USPS report shows that worker productivity has increased while both operational expense and the Postal Service’s deficit have dropped significantly.
The root cause of the agency’s fiscal problems is the unique congressional requirement—the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA)—that USPS prefund retirement benefits for decades into the future. Repeal of that requirement would restore financial stability to the USPS.
