Four workers have died at the Palmetto Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Georgia in the past two years. The most recent is Demarcus Little, a 45 year-old father of two.
Postal workers have been dying across the country. Management is being let off the hook. USPS was recently fined only $26,481 for the death of Nick Acker, who was crushed to death in a mail sort machine in Allen Park, Michigan.
The deaths are part of a broader assault on the postal workforce. Utilizing a manufactured deficit, USPS Postmaster General David Steiner has proposed ending six-day mail delivery, closing “unprofitable” local post offices and ending the Universal Service Obligation. They have already suspended payments into workers’ pension system. The proposals would mean the effective abolition of USPS as a public service and placing it under control of private corporations.
The union bureaucracy has told workers there is nothing to worry about. They have already endorsed the pre-existing “Delivering for America” restructuring, signed below-inflation contracts and backed binding arbitration to strips workers of the right to vote on their own agreements. It will not fight the coming attacks on jobs and services. That must be organized from below.
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee has been conducting an independent investigation into conditions across the postal network. This meeting will report on what we have found, discuss the threat to USPS as a public institution, and take up how workers can build the organization needed to fight back.
Join us this Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern. Register here, send in your testimony and join the committee.