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On Sunday evening, NALC President Fredric Rolando held a tele-townhall call with the NALC membership about the dangers of the House of Representatives taking up the job-killing postal bill, H.R. 2309. If the bill becomes law, it would dismantle the USPS and destroy 200,000 jobs – perhaps including yours. Sometime in the next three weeks, the speaker of the house must decide whether to bring H.R. 2309 to a vote and Congress must decide whether to support it or not.
NALC's most urgent goal is to prevent this devastating bill from ever becoming law. To do that, letter carriers across the country need to convince their family members, friends and neighbors to weigh in with members of Congress against H.R. 2309. Businesses and communities across America would be devastated by this bill and members of Congress need to hear this message from their constituents.
Members of Congress Need to Know:
- H.R. 2309 would needlessly eliminate Saturday delivery, the USPS’ largest competitive advantage, to save a fraction of their annual operating budget. This senseless cut would damage millions of small businesses and result in major volume losses that have not been accounted for.
- H.R. 2309 will eliminate 90 percent of all door-to-door home and business delivery--a cut that is widely unpopular among the 35 million Americans who currently receive it. This change alone would hurt advertising mailers, small business mailings, eBay and Amazon.com deliveries, just to name a few -- not to mention the inconvenience to the business or resident who will now have to leave their residences or places of business to retrieve their mail from a cluster box location.
- H.R. 2309 would downsize the USPS’ invaluable networks by closing thousands of post offices and mail processing plants in a haphazard manner that would result in massive delays in mail processing and simply destroy the current USPS service standards that customers have come to rely on.
- Worst of all, H.R. 2309 does nothing to reduce the crushing annual payments to fund the future retiree health benefit that no other agency or business have to make, despite the fact that the retiree health fund already has nearly $45 billion in it -- enough to cover health care costs for retirees for decades to come. As a matter of fact, the bill actually INCREASES the congressionally mandated payments to the fund, which will all but guarantee a collapse of the Postal Service in the future.
H.R. 2309 is not a bill to save the Postal Service; it is a bill to destroy it. We need to make sure every member of Congress receives this message loud and clear to ensure that H.R. 2309 never makes it to the floor.
Beginning Monday morning, July 9th, the NALC will activate a special toll-free number to help NALC members contact their members of Congress. We need to generate as many calls as possible into every congressional office until this bill is stopped. Please keep in mind that this toll free number will not be active until Monday morning when Congress has returned to Washington.
Please do your part to protect the future of the Postal Service by calling your representative in Congress and urging you co-workers, families and friends to do the same. The future of your job could depend on it.