Carrying signs that read “Save Our Service,” dozens of postal workers braved the cold to march in front of the main post office in downtown St. Louis Friday. They’re afraid that overnight mail delivery will cease to exist next year when up to 82 mail processing centers are scheduled to close nationwide, including those in Cape Girardeau and Springfield, Mo.
“If you mail something even in the same town or city it’s going to take two, three days. Two to three day mail is going to take four to six days for delivery. We believe that is not right for the American public. We deserve better service,” said Fred Wolfmeyer, the president of the St. Louis chapter of the postal worker union.
According to the U.S. Postal Service, the closures are needed in order to adapt to fewer letters and more packages in the mail. The centers will be consolidated with other facilities as part of a system overhaul projected to save $20 billion by 2017.
“We need to change our networking and processing environment so that we can handle the mail the way America mails it. And that’s handling packages today,” said Valerie Welsch, spokesperson for the Gateway Chapter of the U.S. Postal Service.
Welsch said the 2015 center closures won’t impact St. Louis too much because most of the region’s changes already occurred during an earlier phase of the system overhaul, called the “network rationalization.”
“The only thing we may see affected (in St. Louis) would be the single piece first class mail volume,” Welsch said. “That’s your letter to grandma, greeting cards, the kind of bill payments where you put the stamp on. We may see a change of like a day in delivery of that.”
Nationwide, the postal service estimates that 20 percent of first class mail will be delivered overnight after the next phase of the system overhaul. The remaining 80 percent will take between 2 and 3 days to deliver.
Both Welsch and Wolfmeyer said they want Congress to stop requiring the postal service to pre-fund its retiree health benefits. Newly released revenue reports show that the U.S. Postal Service would have turned a profit last fiscal year if the requirement wasn’t in place. After paying $5.7 billion to pre-fund retirement benefits, the postal service ended fiscal year 2014 with a budget deficit of $5.5 billion.
According to Welsch, no postal workers will lose their jobs because of the distribution center closures, but some may have to move in order to continue working for the U.S. Postal Service.
Follow Camille Phillips on Twitter @cmpcamille.
