Postal Workers, Union Allies Protest USPS' Staples Privatization Scheme:
Thursday, April 24, 2014
(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
Chanting “Whose post office? The
people's post office!” and “The U.S. Mail
is not for sale!” hundreds of postal workers
and their union allies marched through downtown
Washington on April 24, protesting the U.S.
Postal Service's plan to run postal services
out of Staples stores. The demonstration was
one of more than 56, in every state in the
U.S., on a National Day of Action APWU and
other postal unions called to campaign against
the Staples scheme, a key cog in the postmaster
general's current campaign to cut costs by
firing full-time union workers and giving
postal jobs to part-time minimum-wage non-union
workers at Staples stores.

“Take the part-time workers out and
bring the Postal Workers in,” retorted Dena
Briscoe, president of APWU D.C.-area Local 140.
“We have a rat in the house and it's spelled
S-t-a-p-l-e-s,” Metropolitan Washington
Council President Jos Williams told the crowd
at its destination, the Staples store at 19th
and L Streets NW. Members of the Letter
Carriers, the Mail Handlers/Laborers, AFGE, the
Office and Professional Employees, SEIU, The
Newspaper Guild-CWA, IBEW and the Teachers also
marched. “Our mothers, our fathers, our
grandparents all relied on the post office to
keep us together,” Williams declared. “This
is not just about Postal Service workers. It is
about America and it is about survival of the
middle class,” added Williams, who helped pay
for his college expenses by toiling four years
as a seasonal postal worker. “This is a fight
against the Wall Street privatizers and the
postmaster general who works with them,”
added new, activist APWU President Mark
Dimondstein. The postmaster general instituted
the Staples scheme as a “pilot project”
cost-cutting move, along with his plan to fire
100,000 workers and let another 100,000 go by
attrition. He also is silent on union-suggested
moves to increase USPS revenues, such as
expanding its business to include postal
banking, notary public services, longer weekend
hours, licensing and other services,
Dimondstein said. “We are going to fight this
contracting-out of vital postal services,”
said AFGE President J. David Cox, who led a
large group. “I want the Post Office to be
processing all of the mail.”
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Mark Gruenberg, PAI; photos by Chris
Garlock