What’s Behind Postal Crisis? Privatization. | Labor Notes

Consider that tens of millions of Americans used to bank their money in the Postal Savings System until it was abolished in 1966 because of pressure by the banking industry.

Despite a drumbeat of media myth-making to the contrary, the Postal Service is still very busy. Letter carriers deliver 170 billion pieces of mail each year. The Postal Service is at the center of this country’s $1.3 trillion mailing industry. Rural communities, the elderly, and many Americans who do not live online still rely on mail delivery and pickup.

But since 1970, when Congress transformed the Post Office Department into a hybrid public corporation, the USPS has been compromised by a series of compliant postmaster generals guided by a board of governors friendly to corporate privatizers.

Take, for example, William J. Henderson, postmaster general from 1998 to 2001. Three months after stepping down, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post describing the “innovative” $7.2 billion contract he signed with FedEx to carry and sort some first-class, priority, and express mail for the USPS. Henderson opined that “such alliances with private business don’t go nearly far enough. What the Postal Service needs now is nothing short of privatization.”