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Postal union holds state convention in city

By Laurie Wink, The News-Dispatch

The beach, casino and shopping opportunities won Michigan City the opportunity to host the 2007 state convention of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which is Thursday through Sunday at the Holiday Inn with 80 attendees.

Kathy Sadlowski, vice president of the 22-member Dunes Area Local in Michigan City, is the convention chairwoman and said she is proud that the event is in the city.

“Fort Wayne was up against us but, when they heard what we had to offer, they dropped out,” said Sadlowski, who has spent a year preparing for the event with a core committee of four.

The convention's focus is member education, said Doug Brown, the APWU state president from Muncie. The annual meeting also is a time to take care of general business for the 4,000-member state organization.

The union represents 300,000 postal clerks, maintenance workers and motor vehicle employees nationwide. Like any union, the APWU is concerned with getting better working conditions, higher wages and adequate health benefits for its members.

At the same time, customer service is a top priority, says Kevin McCaffery, a maintenance director from Bloomington, Ind. Brown and McCaffery are concerned about the impact of Postal Service cutbacks on customer service.

“We have a long history of providing economical service to the American public, but we're not immune to thingsgoing on in the rest of the country,” Brown said. “We're in a transition mode, with down-sizing and the elimination of window clerks in smaller offices.”

The budget-driven decisions are made at the upper levels of the U.S. Postal Service, McCaffery noted, but are noticeably affecting local postal workers. During the six years he's been in Bloomington, the clerk staff has dropped by one-third.

“Nobody is losing jobs, but positions are not being filled as attrition happens,” McCaffery said. “Workers are being moved as far as 50 miles to a new work location.”

McCaffery was actively involved in fighting a proposal, announced in December 2005, to close the postal distribution center in Bloomington and shift the work to Indianapolis. Using the postal service's own productivity numbers, his local union proved that the Bloomington plant was more productive than the plant in Indianapolis under consideration. The move didn't happen.

Contrary to the perception that the mail volume would decrease as more people used e-mail, faxes and cell phones, the overall mail volume has increased, McCaffery said. Billions of dollars have been spent to automate much of the mail handling system, but rates continue to increase.

On May 14, the price of a first class stamp will increase to 41 cents. Any complaints about the higher postage prices will be directed to the window clerks, who are on the front line of customer service.

“Window clerks are getting beat to death out there,” McCaffery said, noting that the shortage of clerks is creating long lines and unhappy customers.

Indiana APWU president Brown says that the U.S. Postal Service is still the most productive in the world.

“Where else can you go and drop a letter to your grandmother in California for 41 cents?” he asks. “We're still the cheapest postal service in the world.”

According to the tag line of a press release, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that visits 146 million homes and businesses six days a week, delivering half the world's mail.