WASHINGTON – The opening of U.S. 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,” Mark Dimondstein said, 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. 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.
The union says it’s not asking to shut down the program. It wants the counters to be run by postal employees, not workers hired by Staples. The average postal clerk earns about $25 an hour, according to the union, plus a generous package of health and retirement benefits. The Staples post office counters are run by nonunion workers often making little more than the minimum wage.
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.”
Union leaders have been visiting Staples stores to meet with managers, asking them to share the union’s displeasure with upper management.
Dimondstein asked to meet with the Staples CEO Ronald Sargent, who has declined.
Union officials are considering how they can exert pressure on Staples shareholders.
“If Staples insists on continuing to refuse to staff those stores with postal workers, we’re going to urge people to take their business elsewhere,” Dimondstein said.
So far, the Postal Service has rebuffed the union’s demands.
As far as who will staff the counters, “that’s Staples’ business,” Donahoe said. “They make their own business decisions, and it has nothing to do with us.”
