Union leaders partner with the bankers to fix the post office.

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Our readers outside the country should be familiar by now with our objection to the Team Concept.  This is a dominant policy of the strategists of organized Labor in the US and is at the root of the collaborative policies of the Labor hierarchy.  The Team Concept says that employers and workers have the same interests so it is important that we help them make profits.  What this means on the ground is that workers in one company help their employers in their struggle against their rivals for market share.

The way to help them compete is to reduce their costs.  Wages are lowered, benefits reduced, Union rules and other impediments to profit taking are eliminated.  We have to ensure our boss victory.  Naturally, our bosses' rivals are telling his or her workers that they need to help him fight back. Their wages have to be cut, benefits reduced etc. etc.  In the public sector where I worked this was called "Competitive Bidding".  We were told that it was not an issue of losing what we have or working harder but of "working smarter". In our case, we were competing with the private sector bosses who were after publicly funded projects.  We had to show we were "better" than the workers in the private sector. I need to say no more as it is obvious it becomes almost impossible to build a powerful, united workers' movement when we are all joining with our individual bosses to put the other folks out of work. The same applies when we are competing with workers in other regions of our state or country or the world.

It leads to a race to the bottom for the worker class and that's what we have experienced over the past period as this ideology has been used by the heads of organized Labor to justify the concessions they have forced on a reluctant membership. It also applies to the political arena in the support organized Labor gives to the Democrats, that other Wall Street Party.

At the root of it all is the view that capitalism or the so-called free market is the only form of social organization.  The bosses in their media always link jobs to their policies in order to perpetuate the idea that the private sector is the only creator of jobs which is nonsense. "If you raise wages" they say, "it will lead to layoffs and job cuts." Will it?  It doesn't have to.  It could if demand isn't there and it could if the workers don't mobilize against the bosses' plans to reduce the price and or conditions of Labor power.  We can raise wages and force the boss to "eat it" meaning their profits will decline. They will do without that vacation this year or cut their consumption.

This world view, that the market is all powerful prevents the present heads of organized Labor from mobilizing the potential power of the 12 million Union members in an offensive of our own to drive back the aggressive assault on living standards and society in general.

As we mentioned in a previous blog, the bosses are concerned that the US postal service is not making money.  They want to close some 4000 post offices.  Many of these are in rural communities and are more than just post offices. In some areas they are meeting places and places where people can get news and connect with the broader community.  I have heard that mailpersons have even delivered medication to rural residents who have no means of transportation, no access to the internet and stuff like that.

The position we have to take is obvious: we don't care whether it makes profit---it's a public service.  The funds for this service are a portion of the wealth we create through our Labor and invested back in to the community. For the capitalist though, it is money out.  It is not capital in the sense that it is being used to increase iteself and allow for the stuff to be accumulated; it is not "working capital"
 in the way they use the term. There are genuine changes that have taken place with the rise of the internet, email and private companies like UPS and Fed Ex.  But when we address these issues we have to start from a position of what we need and how best we can provide it.  The same with education or health care or transportation for example.

The problem is that though the USPS is a public service, the capitalist class introduces such an entity and tolerates it because it is needed to best serve business, profit taking, or more accurately, the extraction of surplus value in society (See here for an explanation of Surplus Value).

These guys have our best interests at heart--don't they?

The leadership of The National Association of Letter Carriers AFL-CIO, that represents 280,000 US postmen is responding to the capitalists' concerns about the lack of money making opportunities in the USPS by seeking free market gurus that can come up with market solutions.   The Union has hired Ron Bloom who was Obama's "car Tzar" that oversaw the taxpayer bailout of the auto industry after their economic crisis hit.  Bloom is a Harvard Business School graduate who has worked for various Union when he is not working for the banking business.  He has been a long time associate of Lazard Freres, the bankers that have been involved in the restructerings of numerous industries and business in order to make them profitable. The Union has also hired Lazard.  The plan is to "restructure" the post office in order to make it profitable and please the private sector. The members' dues will pay a hefty price for such good business advice.  It's just as big a waste of members' dues money as the millions the Union officials give to the Democrats every election cycle.

The goal of the arrangement is to "prevent the collapse of the institution and remake its business model for modern America" write the Wall Street Journal. We only have to look at what has happened to US workers in Steel, the airline industry and at Goodyear where Bloom has been involved in negotiating concessions for us to see what's in store for the postal worker.  After the Goodyear deal in 2003, Jonathan  Rich, a senior Goodyear executive, said, “We got what we needed” to become competitive.
again.

So turning the US postal service in to the new age American business model is what the the Union leadership refers to as "going on the offensive". The postal service bosses are trying to get Congress to change the law so it can override contractual agreements limiting layoffs so that more than 200,000 jobs can be cut to save money.The cuts are "critical to return the postal service to profitability" says a USPS bureaucrat---there's that damn word again.

Bloom wants to see if the USPS can get involved in other business concerns that make money, "There is value to this network that goes so far beyond just delivering the mail" he says. All this may be true. And times change so obviously how we work and where we focus our energy and how work is organized changes.  But those changes and their implementation can best be determined by those that receive and those that provide the services involved. The Unions can launch an nationwide campaign to form community committees of postal workers and members of the communities they serve to discuss and develop ways to help the system serve society as it changes. Profit doesn't enter in to it. if we need money there is the trillions spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, the trillions the corporations and banks are hoarding and the trillions the hedge fund managers, speculators and other wasters have stashed away. And we don't need to ask Congress to change laws, we can force them through mass direct action in the streets and through the building of an independent working people's political party

The first position of the Union should be no closures at all.  A postal service doesn't have to make money it is a public service. There should be an immediate campaign for a 30 hour five day workweek to increase leisure time and as well as employment. The NALC should also launch a major campaign to unionize all workers in the communications industry including those involved in internet communications and call centers and it can use the money it is going to waste on Bloom and Lazard  as a start.  Linking up with the OWS movement is also important.

The present strategy of appealing to bankers and Wall Street executives like Bloom is what has gotten us in to this mess.  It's time to abandon what hasn't worked.