Preserving the People's Post Office

PRESERVING THE PEOPLE’S POST OFFICE Christopher W. Shaw Foreword by1 Ralph Nader PRESERVING THE PEOPLE’S POST OFFICE PRESERVING THE PEOPLE’S POST OFFICE By Christopher W. Shaw Foreword by Ralph Nader Essential Books, Washington, D.C. Acknowledgements Thank you Sam Bollier, Jonathan Brown, Marcia Carroll, Rob Cirincione, George Farah, Meghan Ferris, Stephanie Hilborn, Tim O’Carroll, Laura Rothrock, Todd Scriber, Katy Shaw, Marlene Thorpe, Lisa Wei, Robert Weissman, Barry Williams, and Mark Wittink for your helpful contributions. I am grateful to Raissa Howera for sharing her talent, to Jake Lewis for sharing his knowledge, to Ralph Nader for lending his commitment, conviction, and experience, and to John Richard for generously and patiently making available his expertise and insight. Published by: Essential Books P.O. Box 19405 Washington, DC 20036 Price: $25.00 Library of Congress Control Number: 2006932118 ISBN 978-1-893520-03-5 Printed in the United States of America Copyright © 2006 Essential Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by an information storage and retrieval system, without the writ- ten permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. To American postal workers and to my parents Table of Contents Prologue ix Foreword xi Introduction 1 The Post Office Department 7 Corporate Supremacists & the Postal Service 19 Where’s the Universal Service? 31 More Than a Book of Stamps 45 Delivering More 59 Corporate Mailers Demand More 69 Residential Patrons Get Less 87 The Universal Delivery Service 105 Handcuffing the Postal Service 121 Delivering Everyday Fair Wages 135 Post Office Potential 149 The Post Office Consumer Action Group 159 Postal Savings 171 Postal Restructurings 187 Global Postal “Brands”? 203 Endnotes 207 Prologue This is not a “small” book. It has an enormous reach for the American future and immediate relevance to the present moment. Here’s why. A pernicious attack is being waged against democratic institutions we have long taken for granted as a permanent feature of American life. Some we have begun to learn about – such as automated systems of telemarketing that spread campaign lies to millions of Americans on the eve of national elections, as well as automated systems of fraudulent vote-counting that cripple the election process itself. But if much work must now be initiated to regain and protect anew the legitimacy of popular participation in the most basic com- ponents of the democratic heritage, we also need to pay attention to the burgeoning attack on other and less visible forms of civic achieve- ments built in the l8th and l9th centuries. One speaks now of civil spaces so ancient in origin and homespun in outward and inward reality that we cannot imagine them ever losing their substance. As Christopher Shaw here demonstrates (with a wonderful blend of warmth and anxiety) we are also threatened with the “privatization” of the U.S. Mail! His book is a veritable populist alarm bell in the night entitled Preserving the People’s Post Office. Yes, the limp sloga- neering that serves to rationalize “globalization” as a justifiable attack on the dignity of tens of millions of ordinary working Americans even reaches into the the postal service! This reality that shapes Shaw’s book underscores the direct relationship existing between the quality of civil society, the wages working Americans earn and the services that connect all of us to a vibrant community life. So-called “out- sourcing” is a controllable cancer that threatens the very substance of American democracy. These connections are properly emphasized in a germane and moving introduction by Ralph Nader. The subject is not “small.” It is, rather, deadly serious business. — Lawrence C. Goodwyn, Professor Emeritus of History, Duke University ix x Foreword When I was growing up in New England during the 1940’s, the symbol for reliability, punctuality, and efficien- cy was the United States Post Office. People could almost tell the time of day by the postman’s rounds (twice a day delivery) and the frequent pickups at corner collection boxes throughout the neighborhoods. For 3 cents you could send a letter in the morning and it would be delivered in your town or city that afternoon. For one penny you could send a postcard to the most remote areas of these United States. Congress’ relations with the Post Office Department were intrinsically political; from the subsidy that Congress provided, to the appointment of thousands of postmasters. Being political, with all its warts, also made the Post Office reasonably accountable – especially when compared with the recast Postal Service born in 1971. was reminded of these words I wrote over twenty years ago Iwhile visiting a county historical museum in New England that showed containers the old Post Office used to deliver eggs from the local farms. The Post Office that sought to deliver fresh eggs was an innovative enterprise seeking new ways to bet- ter serve the public. If the spirit of public service which moti- vated that Post Office was still alive today, when postal officials look north to our neighbor Canada and observe that its citizens mail letters to their parliamentary representatives for free, they would seriously explore offering such a service in this country. If that Post Office had witnessed recent communications advances it would have pushed hard to be in the vanguard of efforts to make them more widely accessible. xi FOREWORD But ever since President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission to reorganize the Post Office on “a business basis” in 1967, the postal system has become increasingly frozen into a defensive posture, tied down in a manner akin to Gulliver in his travels by demands from such groups as major corporate mailers, competitive rivals, and partisan politicos. There has been no place for bold new ventures of the past, such as Rural Free Delivery, Parcel Post, Postal Savings, Air Mail, or even the ambitious, yet fruitless, Missile Mail experiment of the 1950s. If the Post Office Department had been responding to the profit-making demands of the market or to the political influence of large corporations none of these advances would have even been attempted. Parcel Post, lest we forget, was introduced in the face of corporate competitors’ opposition due to the fact that they were providing entirely unsatisfactory, oftentimes price- gouging, service to large parts of the nation. President Ronald Reagan called government “the problem.” Was government the problem when the Post Office made open communications between the Continental Congress and George Washington’s army possible during the Revolutionary War? Was government the problem when the Post Office provided invaluable aid to the establishment of a vibrant national and local press by delivering periodicals throughout the land? How about when the Post Office Department constructed a national infrastructure for aviation? Is government the problem when letters and packages from home reach servicemen in dis- tant parts of the world today? Or when citizen organizations are enabled or often made possible by a non-profit postage rate? When universal service – uniform service at uniform rates throughout the country – allows friends and families to exchange letters, cards, and packages? When semi-postals raise tens of millions of dollars for breast cancer research? When the National Association of Letter Carriers’ National Food Drive collects over 70 million pounds of food to help alleviate the nation’s shameful hunger crisis? Through the postal system, as Christopher Shaw describes in this book, the national government has long played a beneficial role in our lives. For that and other ideological reasons, corporatists with no regard for the value of universal postal service are waging a campaign to destroy the world’s finest postal system. Absence of an understanding of the Postal Service as a public service has allowed corporatists to obscure our postal system’s defining mission: “to bind the nation together.” There are promoters of a corporate postal system who would ultimate- xii FOREWORD ly like to steal the Postal Service from the American people by eliminating its public service function and privatizing (i.e. cor- poratizing) it. Operation of the postal system on “a business basis” has helped make their case for them. In Preserving the People’s Post Office Christopher Shaw demonstrates how a patronizing attitude toward the individual postal patron – “Aunt Minnie” – that accompanies a corporate mindset has caused service reductions for the general public, as the relentless pressure of corporate demands for receiving pref- erential services burdens the citizenry more and more. Instead of focusing on new ways for our government to serve its citizens through the Postal Service, service reductions – such as closing post offices, removing collection boxes, and ending door delivery – have shifted emphasis to business practices focusing on how much the traffic will bear, further diminishing the spirit of public service. A recent push for postal “reform” legislation demonstrates the degree to which the public has been marginalized. Postal Service management, major mailers, corporate ideologues, business competitors, postmaster associations and the beleaguered postal unions have all been included in this legislative process, but there has been a noticeable absence – the consumer, who has been excluded from having a seat at the table. The bills which have gone through Congress reflect this absence. Instead of being discarded, as they largely should have been, the recom- mendations of the recent corporate dominated President’s Commission on the Postal Service, which were not public service oriented, are apparent in the legislation. Postal unions and postmaster associations represent member- ships committed to serving patrons, and these organizations do show a willingness to reach out to consumers.

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