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Postal Workers Union Forces Post Office to Close Lots of Branches
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On September 25, 2014 @ 5:25 pm In The Point | 4 Comments
Or rather what this really means is that the Post Office will be forced to close a lot more branches setting off more political lobbying and protests.
At least 9,000 U.S. Postal Service jobs will become union positions over the next three months due to an arbitration ruling this month that said post offices must use bargaining-unit employees at sites with reduced operating hours.
Arbitrator Stephen B. Goldberg said in his decision that the postal service violated an agreement with the American Postal Workers Union by using part-time employees instead of union clerks at many of the lower-traffic facilities where the financially struggling agency reduced hours in 2012 to save money.
The ruling requires the postal service to use union clerks at the facilities that have cut back to four hours or six hours per day, but it allows the agency to continue using non-union employees at sites that have been reduced to two hours per day.
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out what happens next. A lot of those four and six hour facilities suddenly become two hour facilities. Others will just shut down.
So this doesn’t really add that many union jobs so much as it eliminates non-union jobs. That’s what union leaders consider win and it helps explain why the rest belt got that way.
The reduction in hours at low-traffic post offices came as a compromise after labor groups and members of Congress pushed back against earlier plans to close the facilities entirely.
This is why the postal service is a complete mess. Its budgets make no sense. It’s saddled with ridiculously generous payouts to postal workers who can retire early and do because the working atmosphere in the service is invariably miserable.
Closing locations is impossible because every location has politicians who will fight for it to stay open.
That means more efforts to outsource to stores and even less service as skeleton branches remain open for two hours as a useful compromise.
The unions killed the Post Office. Now they’re just finishing the job.
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