Postal workers won't go quietly
Unions react furiously to a proposal to lay off 120,000 employees by breaking labor contracts.
Tom Rizzo, spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service in northern New England, said it is still too early to know exactly what kind of impact the layoff of 120,000 Postal Service workers nationwide might have in Maine.
Rizzo said he thinks the cuts would likely affect northern New England proportionately to the rest of the country.
National and local unions reacted furiously Friday to a proposal by the Postal Service to lay off the workers by breaking labor contracts and shifting workers out of federal employee health and retirement plans into cheaper alternatives.
John Riley, former president of the American Postal Workers Union in Portland, called the proposal "the fight to end all fights."
"This is part of a right wing push to manufacture 'crises' that are not real to destroy unions and the middle class," Riley wrote in a mass email he sent Friday to postal employees in Maine. "Unfortunately, it is being enabled by weak Democrats and a President who barely seems to be aware there is a labor movement and working class."
The Postal Service has lost some $20 billion in the last four years amid a 20 percent drop in mail volume.
Labor experts and other unions also sounded the alarm that any move by Congress to break postal contracts would further wound an already ailing labor movement, much as former President Ronald Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers did in 1981.
http://www.pressherald.com/news/postal-workers-wont-go-quietly_2011-08-14.html
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