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H A N D L E R
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UPDATE NATIONAL
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I O POSTAL N MAIL
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NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS: 1101 Connecticut Avenue,
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L HANDLERS
A F A N L I U N.W. • Suite 500
• Washington, D.C. 20036 (202) 833-9095
THE POSTAL SERVICE IS NOT GOING BROKE
John F. Hegarty John F. Hegarty National National President President
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n March 5, 2014, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) submitted the following editorial opinion piece to the Wall Street Journal. The Senator was kind enough to make his editorial available to the NPMHU for publication. Sen. Sanders was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is a steadfast supporter of the Postal Service, Postal employees and all Union workers.
There’s No Need to End Saturday Mail Delivery By Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) The U.S. Postal Service is one of our most popular and important government agencies. It provides universal service six days a week to every corner of America, no matter how small or how remote. It supports millions of jobs in virtually every other sector of our economy. It provides decent-paying union jobs to some 500,000 Americans, and it is the largest employer of veterans. Whether you are a low-income elderly woman living at the end of a dirt road in Vermont or a wealthy CEO living on Park Avenue, you get your mail six days a week. And you pay for this service at a cost far less than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Yet the Postal Service is under constant and vicious attack. Why? The answer is simple. There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service. They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services, and couldn’t care less how privatization or a degradation of services affects ordinary Americans. For years, antigovernment forces have been telling us that there is a financial crisis at the Postal Service and that it is going broke. That is a lie. The crisis is manufactured. At the insistence of the Bush administration, Congress in 2006 passed legislation that required the Postal
Service to prefund, over a 10-year period, 75 years of future retiree health benefits. This onerous and unprecedented burden—$5.5 billion a year—is responsible for all of the financial losses posted by the Postal Service since October 2012. Without prefunding, the Postal Service would have made a $623 million profit last year. Excluding the prefunding mandate, the Postal Service estimates it will make more than $1 billion in profits this year. This is not surprising, since the Postal Service made a combined profit of $9 billion from 2003-2006, before the prefunding mandate took effect. The mandate allows the antigovernment crowd to proclaim that the Postal Service “is going bankrupt.” Their solution to this manufactured crisis is to slash hundreds of thousands of jobs, close thousands of post offices, eliminate hundreds of mail processing plants, end Saturday mail, and substantially slow down the delivery of mail.
UNION
Mark A. Gardner Mark A. Gardner Secretary-Treasurer Secretary-Treasurer
DeFazio (D., Ore.) in the House and by me in the Senate. The House bill has 174 co-sponsors. The Senate bill has 27 co-sponsors. First, prefunding must end. The future retiree health fund now has some $50 billion in it. That is enough. This step alone will restore the Postal Service to profitability. Second, the Postal Service should have the flexibility to provide new consumer products and services—a flexibility that was also banned by Congress in 2006. It is now against the law for workers in post offices to no-
“For years, antigovernment forces have been telling us that there is a financial crisis at the Postal Service and that it is going broke. That is a lie. The crisis is manufactured.”
In the House, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) passed a bill through his committee that would do all of these things. The bill would drive more customers to seek other options and will lead to a death spiral—lower-quality service, fewer customers, more cuts, less revenue and eventually the destruction of the Postal Service
In the Senate, Sens. Tom Carper (D., Del.) and Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) also passed a postal reform bill through the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. While not as destructive as the House proposal, the Carper-Coburn bill could lead to the loss of about 100,000 jobs, allow the Postal Service to eliminate six-day mail delivery, substantially slow down the delivery of mail, and lead to the loss of more mail processing plants and post offices within the next few years. There are much better ideas that would strengthen, not destroy the Postal Service, and they are in the Postal Service Protection Act introduced by Rep. Peter
tarize or make copies of documents; to cash checks; to deliver wine or beer; to engage in e-commerce activities (like scanning physical mail into a PDF and sending it through e-mail, selling non-postal products on the Internet or offering a non-commercial version of Gmail). A recent report from the Postal Service Inspector General suggests that almost $9 billion a year could be generated by providing financial services. At a time when more than 80 million lower-income Americans have no bank accounts or are forced to rely on rip-off checkcashing storefronts and payday lenders, these kinds of financial services would be of huge social benefit. It is time for Congress to save the Postal Service, not dismantle it. Mr. Sanders is an independent senator from Vermont.
RICHARD SIU RETIRES
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Don Gonzales Appointed Western Regional Director (Oakland)
he NPMHU National Office has announced that Richard Siu, Western Regional Director, Oakland will be retiring on May 1, 2014. We congratulate Richard on his well-deserved retirement. Richard began working as a Mail Handler in San Francisco in 1979. He became a shop steward in 1985, and later assumed the role of chief steward. He took on numerous responsibilities in his Local Union, including service on both the Safety and Health Committee and the Local Joint Steering Committee for the Quality of Working Life process (QWL). Richard was appointed to the Western Region CAD in 1993, where he continues to serve as Regional Director in the Denver Field Office. We wish to thank Richard for his long tenure in serving the members of the Western Region, and we wish him all the best as he starts this new chapter in his life. To fill the vacancy created by Richard’s retirement, President Hegarty has appointed Don Gonzales, the current President of Local 321, as the Regional Director, Western Region, Oakland. Brother Gonzales started as a Mail ★Handler at the Denver BMC in July 1980, and became a Union mem-
ber immediately. Don has served as a Union representative for 25 consecutive years. He became a shop steward in 1990, served as Chief Steward starting in 1991, and then served as the AVP of the Denver BMC from 1993 to 1996. He was the editor of the Local Union’s “State of the Union Newsletter” from 1993 to 2011, and also served as a trainer for Local 321 during that time frame. In 1996 he assumed the role of Recording Secretary, and then from 2002 to 2011 he was the Vice President of Local 321. Since 2011, Don Richard Siu has been the Local President. Don has experience in both RI-399 and regional arbitrations, OWCP, helping employees negotiate retirements, disability retirements, OWCP claims, and - HR-related matters. Don has attended training classes for steward, advanced steward, arbitration, OWCP, CIM, RI-399, disci-
Don Gonzales, Director — Western Region, (Oakland)
pline, and FMLA, and he has also led training classes on many of these subjects. Don will be starting at the Denver Field Office effective March 22, 2014. Please join us in congratulating Brother Gonzales on his appointment, and ★ in wishing Brother Siu all the best in his retirement.
D E A D L I N E S L OOM IN G
Please Post!!Post!! Please 21327_NHUpdate.indd 1
March 2014
3/12/14 11:44 AM