Postal management is stepping up its rampage against postal workers.
Like private businesses,
the USPS is using the continuing recession as an opportunity to force
many workers out of their
jobs and overwork the rest -- all in order to increase management's
profits. Though it may be
difficult, postal workers need to stand up against these attacks!
Postal management at the Detroit P & DC on Fort St. is shipping
out most of the 1st class mail
processing for the 481 and 482 areas (from Eight Mile Road south to the
Ohio line) to a new
facility in Pontiac. This will cost at least 200 jobs at Fort St., but
only 19 Fort St. workers are
being permitted to go to Pontiac. The other 180 or so will be told to
relocate far beyond
commuting distance, to such places as Pittsburgh, Des Moines, Sault
Ste. Marie, Grand Rapids,
etc., or face firing. A few have already been sent. In some units, this
forced exodus has reached
people with over 20 years of seniority!
This forced relocation strikes savage blows to postal workers'
families, many of which hold two
or more jobs and will be split up. (Even the ones where both spouses
work for the postal service
are being split up!)
And don't think that the postal service will seriously help
relocated workers pay off their Detroit
mortgages in a collapsed housing market. Far from it! Just last year
the USPS bought a
relocating executive's house for $1.5 million but is only offering
blue-collar workers chump-change help with brokers' fees and closing
costs. Thus not only will many relocated workers
have their families broken up but will face having their finances and
financial futures destroyed.
Even if you can sell your house in Detroit today -- a long shot at best
-- the small amount you
can get will often not pay off the mortgage or give you anything to
start with in Pittsburgh,
where housing prices are higher.
And if you walk away from the mortgage, your credit rating will be ruined, making you unable to buy a house in your new location and possibly even cause you to have trouble renting a decent apartment. The USPS big shots get millions while the workers get disaster!
Senior plant manager Jack Watson said of these moves, "It's
business." Yes, indeed, it is
capitalist business. For capitalist managers, the workers' lives mean
nothing, except a means to
produce profit. They make profits for years on end on the backs of our
labor. And when their
economic system goes into a tailspin, they throw us in the garbage like
a squeezed orange. All
this is inevitable, they say. But we workers have our own economic
interests, our own lives to
defend. So it is also inevitable that we must fight back. Either
management satisfies its economic
interests, and crushes us, or we stand up for the livelihood and
dignity that should be ours.
Management's justification for moving mail to Pontiac, as with
similar moves all over the
country, is efficiency. But in this case, and no doubt elsewhere, this
is a fraud. The move here
will add 40 or so miles traveling to nearly every letter every day.
Even management knows these
moves here and elsewhere may fail, but by then thousands of workers
nationally will have been
put through the wringer.
Why should the workers' lives be destroyed whenever management wants
us to make a move?
We the workers are the ones who have moved the mail throughout the
years, earned the profits
for the USPS year in and year out. As much as any manager, we need to
be made whole when
they want to move our services! If management needs us somewhere
outside commuting
distance, they should pay off mortgages, move spouses together, and in
other ways make the
move survivable. We are human beings just as much as they! In fact, it
is our labor that has
always carried them, not the other way around!
What are the union leaders doing about this situation? Clerks and
mail handlers are being
affected now in large numbers. The clerks' union, the APWU, is relying
on grievances, but this
excessing is largely permitted by the contract. Even if the
long-delayed arbitrator's decision on
the group of grievances filed by the former Boudreaux leadership last
year reverses some of
these moves, it will only be on procedural grounds and management will
be able to carry out the
same moves, provided it consults more with the union officials next
time.
And the new Ullmer leadership is keeping a low profile, issuing very
little literature and relying
on individual grievances even though they stand little chance of
stopping anything major. Both
the Boudreaux and Ullmer leaderships have rejected calls by concerned
workers in union
meetings for mass public actions against the cutbacks and job losses.
The Boudreaux leadership
approached all the area Congressional representatives and other major
local political leaders but
found them unresponsive. (Democratic Rep. John Conyers even came to an
APWU local
meeting last year and promised his support, but when Boudreaux later
told him we really needed
it he wasn't interested in helping.) As for the mail handler's union,
it has also not found a way to
mount an effective answer.
Management's unprecedented attacks have met little resistance from
the union leaders and this
has helped demoralize the rank and file. But recently one form of
resistance has emerged. Many
workers in both crafts and unions have made copies of and mailed a
letter of protest written by a
rank-and-file clerk and addressed to President Obama, Senators Levin
and Stabenow and
Congressman Danny K. Davis of Chicago. This protest letter emerged from
the workers
themselves and not from the union leaderships (though one worker
remarked that the leaderships
should have started it). These are the politicians who have made all
kinds of promises of support
to workers during their election campaigns. It is good to send them a
message, but Workers'
Voice believes that a much stronger message is needed. These
politicians were passive when
Boudreaux approached them. This letter is a good start but it is
unlikely that it will get anything
but more promises in return. We need to put our feet on the street, we
need to march in public,
let working people of the area see us standing up, make the media cover
us and put our own
words on TV. The only way to make a capitalist politician do anything
for the workers is to put
his or her feet to the fire! We need mass action, of postal workers of
all crafts united!
Certain attacks may succeed, but the more the rank and file organizes, the more it will be able to withstand future attacks that are bound to happen when contract talks open this year and management tries to drive us further down. Postal workers face, with other workers across the country, a long struggle against bearing the burden of the great recession. Postal workers of all crafts must unite, and we must not fear to appeal to other workers facing hard times. We need mass action of workers united if we are to achieve our demands. []
An earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, devastating large parts of
the capital Port-au-Prince and
other areas. There are perhaps 200,000 dead, and millions more homeless
and destitute.
There has been a wave of sympathy around the world for the Haitian
people. People are sending
money; relief organizations are stepping up their work; and some
governments have sent
substantial aid.
But in the crucial first days after the earthquake, the US
government focused on sending troops
into Port-au-Prince. Although there were already 9,000 UN troops and
police in Haiti, the
Obama administration concentrated on "law and order" rather than
bringing in supplies to for the
destitute people. Planes with food, water, medical aid, and relief
personnel were held back, while
military supplies were given priority. Priority has also been given to
establishing a shameful
naval blockade of Haiti to keep desperate Haitians from fleeing to the
US. Meanwhile it's taken a
week before the US government started considering airdrops of food and
water and alternate
supply routes into Haiti besides the Port-au-Prince airport.
The result? The Associated Press reported that, in the horrible
first week after the earthquake, the
aid that arrived was "disorganized, disjointed and insufficient" (Jan.
20) Doctors without
Borders and other aid groups complained that plane loads of their
supplies were diverted from
Haiti. And, with US and UN troops concentrating on "order", and with
the US taking overall
command of everything, those supplies that did make it to the airport
were often left
undistributed. Moreover, some aid groups complain that troops, in the
name of ensuring their
safety, held them back from their work. This is costing an increasing
and untold number of lives,
as many injured people went without treatment, and many people without
food and water.
And the amount of aid is still vastly inadequate, and the supply of
it uncoordinated. The Obama
administration presented the troop buildup as simply a humanitarian
gesture, and finally a Navy
hospital ship arrived over a week later. But other countries brought in
aid and even field
hospitals from the first day after the quake, while the US government,
just as in New Orleans
after Hurricane Katrina, put troops over aid. The Haitian masses are
showing tremendous
courage, resilience, and restraint while trying to survive without
supplies, and yet, just as after
Katrina, the news media seek to justify the military buildup by
creating an exaggerated image of
violence among the people.
But however slow in helping the survivors, the Obama administration
and world agencies have
jumped at the opportunity of the earthquake to restructure the Haitian
economy. The US
government, the World Bank, American conservatives, Democrats like Bill
Clinton, and others
are seeking to accelerate the free-market reforms of the last two
decades in Haiti. These reforms
drove Haiti deeper into poverty and deregulation and powerlessness;
they are responsible for a
lot of the shoddy construction of the last couple of decades; and the
privatization that took place
under these reforms left the government unprepared to deal with
emergencies. Nevertheless, the
IMF, smelling blood, rushed after the earthquake to insist on a $100
million loan tied to more
"reforms", wage reductions, and austerity. Facing condemnation for its
heartlessness, the IMF
was forced to back down on the conditions for the loan, but the
long-term plans for Haiti are still
being worked out by the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, and the US
government.
That's what imperialist relief puts emphasis on: troops and economic
domination. We should
demand a proper relief effect in Haiti: the Haitians need food, water,
medicine, and medical
facilities, not bayonets. They need help to deal with homelessness and
reconstruction.
Moreover, there are going to be a lot more natural disasters around
the world in the future. How
many more times are we going to see people left to fend for themselves,
while the Pentagon
rushes to bring in troops and the capitalists make use of the occasion
as another business
opportunity? It's time to insist that there be proper preparations for
relief operations that actually
help people. And there has to be comprehensive economic planning to
provide for people's
livelihoods in the aftermath of the disasters. This planning cannot be
left to the capitalist world
agencies and the governments beholden to the corporations. Instead
there must be an end to the
heartless and brutal rule of neo-liberal free-marketism. The working
class must get organized in
its own right, if there is to be a change in the nature of disaster
planning. []
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