Postal workers, retirees, and community allies turned out Sunday, July 26, to celebrate the 240th anniversary of the U.S. Postal Service.
In Portland, they marched through the Main Post Office downtown, chanted, ate birthday cake, and listened to postal defenders— including Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general in 1775.
“The postal service is under assault,” proclaimed Franklin (aka Ben Poe). “Over 100,000 good union jobs have been lost in the past 10 years as post offices and mail processing plants have been cut and closed. Mail is being delayed. Six day delivery and at-the-door delivery are on the chopping block.”
Franklin said the postal service is not broke, and that the agenda of the 1% and their friends in Congress is to cripple the institution to soften it up for union busting and privatization.
“The USPS is a $67 billion annual business with over $100 billion surplus in its pension and retiree health benefit funds, over 30,000 post offices and 200,000 vehicles,” he said. “We’re facing a huge transfer of public wealth to Wall Street investors.”
The Postal Service was established by the Second Continental Congress in 1775, making it one year older than the United States.
“For more than two centuries it has been the government agency that interacts the most with the American people,” said David Yao, vice president of the Greater Seattle Area Local of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), at a Postal Heritage Day rally at Seahurst Park in Burien, Washington.
“U.S. post offices are anchors of our communities all across the country, and postal workers are the public servants Americans encounter on a daily basis,” Yao said. “Our public postal service must be protected as a public service, a public asset, and a national treasure.”
Recent small victories in the struggle to save the postal service have included a one year moratorium on mail plant closures and a National Labor Relations Board charge against the USPS to stop outsourcing postal retail jobs to Staples Office Supply stores.
Postal unions—APWU, the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, the National Association of Letter Carriers and the National Association of Rural Letter Carriers—have called on President Obama to declare July 26 Postal Heritage Day.
