Washington, DC
In 1990, to the detriment of the members of the American Postal Workers Union, the United States Postal Service (USPS) announced the privatization of its _remote bar coding_ technology and began subcontracting the work to non-union plants in various parts around the United States.
Four years ago, a neutral arbitrator ordered the USPS to first offer this remote-encoding work to APWU members before proceeding with its contracting-out scheme. At that time, the USPS complied and entered into a landmark agreement with the APWU, formally bringing the work back into the APWU bargaining unit. This represented the greatest aggregate of bargaining-unit work ever _contracted-in_ in the union_s history.
It has now developed that, with the apparent knowledge and operational support of the USPS, that Envisions Inc. and other runaway operations have started low-wage operations in two Mexican border cities for the specific intention of providing U.S. mailers with the same remote bar coding services that they can receive from USPS.
These operations south of the border undercut the wages, benefits and working conditions earned by American postal workers through the collective bargaining agreement negotiated in good faith by the APWU and the USPS. These tactics by USPS and these attempts to privatize postal services are not only economically damaging to APWU members, they represent a serious threat to the jobs of thousands of other workers in the USPS and in related sectors of the U.S. economy.
The far-reaching impact of this union-busting scheme by the USPS constitutes a blatant mockery of the APWU collective bargaining agreement and of U.S. laws governing the handling of the U.S. mail as well. It also opens up the issue of abuses and possible criminal use of this special mail technology, which was developed with funds from the U.S. postal rate payers.
The AFL-CIO recommends that the USPS Board of Governors and the Postmaster General of the United States end this ill- conceived experiment. The oldest and most venerable institution of the United States, the Postal Service, should do its work at home.
The average citizen of the United States does not want his or her postal stamp to be used to underwrite the exportation of American jobs or the exploitation of workers in other countries.