I contributed to one and grabbed a byline on another in a small package for Metro on talk of closing Philadelphia post offices in response to lagging volume.
With mail volume down, jobs dwindling and the highest deficit in agency history, technology has brought the United States Postal Service into its darkest days.
Read the rest here.
Below some quotations that didn’t make it into the piece.
Gwen Ivey, the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Pa. Area Local American Postal Workers Union.
- “The postal office is really short employees,” Ivey said. “Go into the average neighborhood postal office and you’ll see a single clerk and a line out the door.”
- “Management is riding the wave of a sour economy to get support behind making cuts that don’t need to be made,” she said. “There is far greater waste on the administrative level than in most offices.”
- “You have to think of the community that uses the post office, and that’s not necessarily someone who uses a computer.”
- Ivey also made mention of the lost revenue from P.O. boxes that will lost when offices are shuttered.
- The APWU promises to be in force at the Labor Day parade on Delaware Avenue on Monday.
Dane Dave of West Oak Lane
- “There is absolutely waste with this government spending. A lot of what we do get in the mail — magazines, bills and junk mail — can be replaced online or we really don’t need at all.”
Theresa Nieto, of New Jersey
- “I think about old people and low income people who might not have a computer or be able to afford one or Internet access. We still depend on post offices.”
Dean Ruble of New Jersey
- “There are two post offices within a mile of each other, and I’ve always wondered why. Post offices are still needed for someone like an elderly person who isn’t going to go online, but [with decreased volume] there probably needs to be [fewer offices] out there.”
