Posted on 01/19/2014 7:28:46 AM PST by re_tail20
The opening of Postal Service retail centers in dozens of Staples stores around the country is being met with threats of protests and boycotts by the agency's unions.
The new outlets are staffed by Staples employees, not postal workers, and labor officials say that move replaces good-paying union jobs with low-wage, nonunion workers.
"It's a direct assault on our jobs and on public postal services," said Mark Dimondstein, president of the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union.
The dispute comes as the financially struggling Postal Service continues to form partnerships with private companies, and looks to cut costs and boost revenues. The deal with Staples began as a pilot program in November at 84 stores in California, Georgia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as a way make it easier for customers to buy stamps, send packages or use Priority and certified mail.
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said the program has nothing to do with privatization and everything to do with customer service and driving up demand for the agency's products.
"The privatization discussion is a ruse," Donahoe said in an interview. "We have no interest in privatizing the Postal Service. We are looking to grow our business to provide customer convenience to postal products."
Staples spokeswoman Carrie McElwee referred questions about union concerns to the Postal Service. She said the company "continually tests new products and services to better meet the needs of our customers."
Union leaders fear that if the Staples program is successful, the Postal Service will want to expand it to more than 1,500 of the company's other stores. That could siphon work and customers away from nearby brick-and-mortar post offices, taking jobs from postal workers and even leading traditional post offices to close.
Union leaders have been visiting Staples stores to meet with managers,...
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
I can see them unionizing Staples and watching the whole enterprise go down the tubes in 18 months.
That’s a very competitive segment of retail.
“I think he was being sarcastic vette, that’s how I took it anyways.”
Well if so, I apologize. But it needed a Sark tag. I get pi$$ed off every time I go into the post office. It’s like they all know that they are “a protected class,” and they go out of their way to let you know it! Having the USPS go out of business, that is have it absorbed by private enterprise, would be a very good thing. We would still have to give them their “retirement” but at least the bleeding would be stopping and we would not have to put up with their insufferable attitude. The USPS Is like Detroit. At one time, they had almost a million “employees,” now they are down to less than half of that number and they really need to can another 200,000.
Since I hate Staples, I’m having a problem seeing the downside of your scenerio.
Maybe I’d get a decent office supply store nearby.
A deal with Walmart will be huge. The post office should do that. There is a lot of potential.
The window clerks are a small percentage of the postal workforce. Except for mail delivery, most of the grunt work of the USPS occurs behind the scenes between dusk and dawn and I can assure you from first hand experience that many of those people work very hard and conscientiously.
The window clerks are a small percentage of the postal workforce. Except for mail delivery, most of the grunt work of the USPS occurs behind the scenes between dusk and dawn and I can assure you from first hand experience that many of those people work very hard and conscientiously.
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The postal grunts, particularly the perdiems are the most abused, poorly used, overworked workforce in the States.
It’s not a good job to try to grow old in. Those parcels and sacks of mail do not sprout wings and move themselves and there’s always a deadline. Whether USPS, UPS or FedEx, people who do that work have my respect.
“I can assure you from first hand experience that many of those people work very hard and conscientiously.”
Yeah, like the one “young Holder’s person” who picked up one of our business utility bills at the USPS Mail Center in Richmond, CA where she worked, cashed one check she had made up for $3,200, and was apprehended at another bank trying to get another $2,000, you me that kind for “conscientious” worker? Thank heaven for an alert bank employee.
You’ve seemed to have bad luck with your USPS interactions because a Rasmussen poll a few years ago showed that the public generally thinks highly of the USPS. Obviously few of those poll respondents have had the problems you have suffered. But I can imagine that there’s a few badly run postal areas like yours must not reach the general levels of customer satisfaction that led to the favorable response to Rasmussen’s query.
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