The United States Postal Service is a Microcosm of America as a Whole

As anyone who frequents this column knows, I’m all but fixated on bringing corruption within the postal service to an end. It’s not simply because I’m haunted by the feeling of leaving a job undone, but because I’ve long since recognized that as a microcosm of the nation as a whole, as the postal service goes, so goes America.

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So as I sit here on this election night watching Americans cut their own throats, it’s like deja-vu. It reminds me of what I watched happening to postal workers as a union rep over twenty years ago. Back then, just as now, when I tried to warned the people of what I saw so clearly, it was like spitting in the win. The people were content to live their lives from day to day not wanting to get involved, and totally apathetic to what was happening to the people around them.

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It would have been so easy to correct the situation at the time, because that was before corruption had been institutionalized within the agency, and there were still people around who understood that the role of a United States government agency was to be in the very forefront of the fight to protect the rights of American workers.

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At that time all they had to do was point their finger at a manager who was guilty of criminal corruption and provide documentation of the offense, and no matter who it was, they’d be held accountable. I know that for a fact, because I was personally responsible for ending the careers of several people very high in the chain of command.

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But the people were seduced by power, and much more interested in their own personal interest than they were the conditions in which many of their coworkers were forced to endure. You see, at the time the postal service was engaged in a classic example of divide and conquer. They under adjusted the workload for part of the employees, and overloaded others. Then they’d point to the “performance” of those with a lesser workload to justify the harassment of those who were overloaded.

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That strategy served two useful purposes. First, it served to divide the workers. Secondly, it both conditioned and desensitized all the workers to the gross harassment and underpayment of their coworkers. After all, “That’s not harassment – all they’re doing is trying to make those lazy employees as good as I am. If they’d just do their jobs as efficiently as I do, they’d be paid.”

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So when I approached them to discuss the importance of sticking together and to serve as witnesses against the harassment and the underpayment of their abused coworkers, it was like trying to get someone to step up in defense of Nancy Pelosi at a Tea Party convention. They’d actually get angry at me for trying to defend “those deadbeats.”

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Then as the years passed many of the veteran warriors of the labor movement retired from the union, along with those professionals in management who understood the importance of public service, and who also understood that postal employees were the agency’s most valuable asset in helping to meet that goal. But now, in far too many cases, just like in our overall political environment, these professionals have been replaced with self-serving cronies who are undereducated, don’t know nor care anything about the history or tradition of the positions they hold, and can always be depended upon to put their personal interest before that of the agency, and the people who depend on them for representation.

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A prime example of that is, as many of you know, we’ve been calling for the removal of both Postmaster General John E. Potter and Inspector General David C. Williams since March for running what we compared to a “latter-day plantation.” Well, Postmaster General Potter recently announced his retirement (under what conditions I don’t know). But read the responses of the respective presidents of the American Postal Workers Union, and the National Association of Letter Carriers below:

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“An honorable partner?”

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Here’s what Arbitrator Sherrie Rose Talmadge had to say in her December 2, 2009 decision regarding  the time fraud of employees under the watch of this “honorable partner”:
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“Management’s violations were so egregious over a period of many years that punitive damages were awarded to deter the service from further clock ring violations.”

So as a direct result of their apathy and refusal to become involved, postal employees have allowed employee abuse to become institutionalized, and many of the people that they’ve elected to represent them have been conditioned to accept it as business as usual. Thus, now when government documents are falsified to modify the employees’ time and steal their wages, instead of viewing it as a federal crime with a penalty of fives years in federal prison as prescribed in 18 U.S.C. § 1001, many of their representatives view it with a yawn, and handle it as a routine grievance. This allows the agency to treat any violation of that law as a mere business expense, as it continues to rob the employees of millions of dollars a day.

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One attorney charged the agency run by this “honorable partner” who’s “a strong advocate for the USPS and its employees” of being in violation of the RICO Act (The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), the law passed by congress to go after the Mafia. And he was absolutely right. Forcing employees to share their wages with the postal service under duress is nothing short of extortion (blackmail, use of intimidation or force in order to obtain something – money, information, etc.). The only difference is, instead of robbing the employees in the parking lot with a gun, they’re robbing them in the office with a pen. Yet, when the employees scream for help, instead of getting the police, they get a union official who refers to the mugger as “an honorable partner.”:

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Now I’m hearing from many of the very same employees who didn’t want to get involved when they could have nipped this in the bud. Now they’re begging for outside assistance, because they’ve elected people to represent them who won’t bother to return their phone calls, refuse to give them copies of documents used against them by management (“I can’t give you a copy of the documents. THEY’RE UNION PROPERTY.”), and either don’t have the sense, or the inclination, to use the union’s numbers and political clout to demand that federal crimes be prosecuted as CRIMES, not simply grievances.

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As a result, corruption has become rampantly pervasive throughout the agency. It’s been factored into the postal service’s bottom line for so long now that it has become an essential part of the agency’s very survival. So at this point, it’s gone way beyond where the employees can possibly bring it under control without outside intervention.

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So as I sit here watching the election returns coming in tonight, I sit in horror, and the uneasy fear that all of America is doomed to suffer the same fate – and real soon.

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Eric L. Wattree

wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com