Bid Posting May 9-18, 2025Branch NewsMay 10, 2025
Fellow Members- I’m going to skip the talk of picnics, meetings, retirements, et al and cut right to business this time. Here we are at a critical stage in our employment with the US Postal Service. There are two resolutions in the House and Senate (H.Res.70 and S.Res.147) out there to prevent privatization from happening and then there was the news this week that Donald Trump has pushed forward yet another megadonor with a severe conflict of interest as his choice to replace his former megadonor pal that initiated most of our service killing changes. Also, being put onto the floors of Congress very soon for a vote, there will be a bill from the Oversight Committee to absolutely trash our retirement system so that there can be tax cuts for the wealthy. Let’s start here, H.Res.70 and S.Res.147 are resolutions before the chambers of Congress to stop the USPS from being able to be privatized, which should be a no-brainer to pass, seeing that the Postal Service is a Constitutional right afforded to every address in the United States as per, well, the Constitution (hence the name Constitutional right). Unfortunately, there is no shortage of no-brained individuals in charge of certain things these days and we need to rewrite things for them to remind them of people’s rights. Contact your Senators and Congressmen to tell them to pass those resolutions. Next up, the House Oversight and Reform Committee have offered a reconciliation package which now goes to the House and Senate to vote on which will raid and radically alter our retirement. Firstly, they want to have everyone contributing 4.4% to their annuity instead of the anywhere from .8 to 3% that you currently pay. Next up, new hires would actually pay 9.4% unless they accept jobs as “at will” employees which would mean giving up their rights and protections. Also, included in this resolution designed to fund tax cuts for the rich is a plan to do away with the “bridge” to social security which is given to people retiring between 57 and 62 currently; that is a HUGE problem for many employees if they do away with this benefit. For many people, this would tack 5 more years of work on their careers. That’s five years that people have worked years of their lives to have to spend with their families or doing things that they wanted to do…but heck the wealthy need that slush fund, and we can never have enough missiles. Finally, as the last slap in your face, they want to use your high 5 years of salary to calculate your pension instead of the average of your high three that they currently use. This was floated during the last Trump administration and here it has reared its ugly head again. In case you are not a math major, adding two more lower years of salaries to the calculation will negatively impact your payments by thousands a year. That’s right folks, they want you to work longer, pay in more, and receive less, sounds like a great idea…to them. The Local 308 website has a post from President Gibson with the QR code so that you can write to your representatives in Washington to shoot this nonsense down. As soon as I receive the hard copy of that post, it will also wind up on the bulletin board. I already shared the links in our Lehigh Valley Facebook group. It’s time to unite and to take action. The other bit of news this week is that Donald Trump “suggested” to the Board of Governors that they need to name David Steiner as the next Post Master General. Mr. Steiner currently sits on the board over at the USPS’ competitor, FedEx. Does that seem like a conflict of interest to anyone else? I know that when I was hired, we took an oath that we could not and would not work for a competitor of the PO, otherwise we would lose our jobs. In fact, earlier this year, an employee here in this building was removed for just such a thing. Somehow though it would be okay for the highest office to be held by a stockholder of a competitor. It’s not unprecedented, Mr. Trump named his top donor and XPO shareholder / CEO Louis DeJoy as PMG previously. We all saw how great that was when he replaced career USPS employee and former Lehigh Valley Plant Manager Megan Brennan as PMG. Now, PO lifer Doug Tulino will be replaced by another Trump hand-picked (err bought-in) chum. We had one transportation “guru” come in and screw up the logistics, now we can bring a processing and distribution genius in for dicing up those services. National President Paul Hogrogian says that the Union is ready to negotiate with Mr. Steiner and work with him; I’m a bit more pessimistic. I’m traveling to Washington this week to attend the legislative conference and meet with some of our representatives, including Congressman Mackenzie. You can bet that there will be a lot of discussion about all of the above-mentioned topics. We all must get active, though, and we all must have our voices heard. Make the people that represent us know what their constituents think and what matters to us. It doesn’t take long to scan those codes and send those letters off to your representatives. We pre-funded retiree benefits for all of those years, and we finally got out from under that albatross and now a whole new set of nonsense is brought forth to fight against. The three worst presidents for Postal Workers, and federal workers in general, and our retirements have been #3 Donald Trump 45, #2 Ronald Reagan, and at #1 the first three months of Trump 2.0 (47). These latest pieces of garbage legislation are an attack on the middle-class jobs that we hold, an assault on workers’ rights, an affront on our retirements, and thinly veiled attempts at union busting. Hopefully, the price of gas will go down soon and last long because we may be driving to work for more years than expected, but hey at least nobody is eating the dogs or eating the cats. The Union Meeting on June 17th should be interesting. Check out the flyer and sign up in the Union office. Stay United, Stay Strong- Sean Lehigh Valley-Scranton 2022 Picnic
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Branch President Sean Craig Your Union RepresentativesLocal Memorandum of UnderstandingUpdated 2023
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