APWU Responds to New York Times Column

When a business columnist for the venerable New York Times wrote an article outlining the Postal Service’s financial difficulties and concluded that the USPS should be privatized, APWU President William Burrus fired back.

In a letter to the editor, the union president disputed the suggestion that the cause of the Postal Service’s current financial crisis is the diversion of mail to the Internet and e-mail. He pointed out that the crisis is the fault of the 2006 postal “reform” law, which requires the USPS to pre-fund retiree healthcare costs.

“Mail volume reached its height in 2006, well after Americans began using e-mail and the Internet on a mass scale,” Burrus said, noting that the slump in mail volume since then is almost entirely due to a recession-driven decline in business mail.

“Without the pre-funding requirement,” Burrus wrote, “the Postal Service would have had a $1.2 billion surplus for its 2008 and 2009 fiscal years.”

The columnist’s call to dismantle the Postal Service “relies on discredited theories that were considered and rejected during the postal reform debate earlier this decade, at the height of the outsourcing frenzy,” Burrus concluded.

“The Postal Service must remain a public service if we are to honor our nation’s commitment to serve every American community at uniform rates.”