Work-Bites Action Alert: Protest the Privatization of the U.S. Postal Service
Bye-bye, USPS? Join the APWU and other supporters at 535 7th Avenue on Thursday morning to protest the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service.
By Joe Maniscalco
New Yorkers who don’t like the idea of the U.S. Postal Service being sold off and privatized—not unlike similar efforts underway to privatize Traditional Medicare and every other public good—are being urged to come out and support unionized postal workers tomorrow morning in Manhattan near Times Square.
Members of the American Postal Workers Union [APWU] will picket outside the Wells Fargo Bank at the corner of 7th Avenue and 39th Street at 11 a.m. on Thursday, July 24. Why Wells Fargo Bank?
The Trump White House is all in on privatizing the U.S. Postal Service, begun back in 1775 by the way, and so is Wells Fargo. The worldwide financial giant’s “Equity Research” team earlier this year sent out a veritable blueprint on how to scrap the U.S. Postal Service and sell it off. "True privatization would be tricky but possible,” they said, “and all paths lead to better parcel pricing.”
By Wells Fargo’s own estimates, as the APWU pointed out this week, privatizing the USPS would mean price hikes of “30 to 140 percent across its product lines.” Wells Fargo also foresees a bunch of local Post Offices being shuttered and the real estate sold so that “value can be harvested.”
“The Wells Fargo memo spells out what is being whispered in Washington,” APWU President Mark Dimondstein said in a statement ahead of Thursday morning’s action in New York City. “Wall Street stands to make huge profits if all or parts of the USPS are sold off, but those who live on Main Street would have less service and higher costs. Those who live in rural areas would be especially hard hit. It also would be devastating to many small businesses, the trillion-dollar ecommerce industry and threaten the ability to vote by mail.”
In March, Trump’s ex-BFF Elon Musk reportedly jeered both the United State Postal Service and Amtrak at a Morgan Stanley technology conference declaring, “we should prioritize anything that can be privatized.”
Trump, of course, derided the U.S Postal Service as a “joke” during his first trip to the White House and helped pave the way for New Breed Logistics founder and Republican Party megadonor Louis DeJoy to become postmaster general. As head of the USPS, DeJoy spent his tenure, as NY Metro Area Postal Union President Jonathan Smith said in 2020, “purposely trying to undermine the system.”
Last week, former FedEx board member David P. Steiner was tapped to succeed DeJoy as the 76th postmaster general of the United States.
Dimondstein, however, insists the U.S. Postal Service is not for sale.
“The USPS is a national treasure,” he said this week. “This month marks the 250th anniversary of this vital service. It belongs to the people. The people need to understand what’s at stake and send the message; ‘The U.S. Mail is not for sale.’”