American Postal Workers Union

AS PRESIDENT of the Philadelphia-area local of the American Postal Workers Union (which represents the sales and service associates with whom the public comes in contact with every day), I totally agree with columnist Stu Bykofsky when he said that Benjamin Franklin would be ashamed at what transpired during his recent encounter with the Post Office. But I don't think he'd be ashamed of the Post Office - he'd be ashamed of how management is running it now. But I do have a few disagreements with Stu's column: Stu stated that an employee didn't know the phone number of their particular station.

City postal workers held a rally yesterday outside the Main Post Office at 30th and Market streets to protest plans by the Postal Service to contract out a new network of 10 Priority Mail processing centers. The rally was part of a nationwide effort called by the American Postal Workers Union.

Philip C. Flemming Jr., Eastern regional coordinator for the American Postal Workers Union, died Wednesday. He was 62 and lived in Springfield, Delaware County. In 1980, Flemming became the first black Eastern regional coordinator for the union and was one of 13 members of the national executive board representing 350,000 postal workers. "He was a former president of the Philadelphia local. Under his leadership the Philadelphia local became an outspoken advocate on community issues and supported programs and organizations dedicated to fighting for social and economic justice," said Gregory C. Bell, president of the Philadelphia Area Local of the APWU.

The U.S. Postal Service has temporarily leased a portion of the Northeast Philadelphia factory abandoned by Whitman's Chocolates when the firm was sold in May 1993. The USPS will use 56,000 square feet of the plant on Roosevelt Boulevard to cope with the annual increase in mailings between September and January. The operation, scheduled to open Sept. 17, will process massive mailings of holiday catalogues in the fall. As the holiday season approaches, the former chocolate factory will accommodate the heavy flow of fruit mailings that come from Florida, California and Washington state.

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Postal Personnel and Modernization will hold hearings on employee complaints at the Philadelphia Post Office, at the urging of organized labor. The Philadelphia hearings are one of a series of oversight investigations into labor-management relations nationwide, said committee staff director Harriett Pritchett. She said Rep. Bill Gray, D-Pa., asked the committee to come here, and indicated he would attend. But Greg Bell, president of the Philadelphia local of the American Postal Workers Union, called the hearings "a major victory for our members.

Nearly 1,500 postal workers picketed the General Post Office at 30th and Market Streets yesterday afternoon, calling for the resignation of Postmaster Charles James and blaming his attendance policies for the death of a worker last month. Escalating an increasingly bitter local dispute between James and the three postal unions over a recent crackdown on absenteeism, the national presidents of all three unions spoke at the rally and called for U.S. Postmaster General Anthony Frank to remove James.

So where is the Christmas mail? Where are the packages? Where are the letters? Where are the Christmas cards? On what is normally one of the biggest mail days of the year, the mail wasn't moving during yesterday's day shift at the U.S. Postal Service's processing plant on Lindbergh Boulevard near Island Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia. "There was no mail in there," said a day-shift postal worker, who asked to remain anonymous. "The trucks are not coming in. We're supposed to be busy, and we're not running the machines.

I predict labor problems, a la air-traffic controllers, by the American Postal Workers Union when its contract expires in July 1987. A report just came out stating that the U.S. Postal Service reported $304.6 million profit for 1986. Sadly, this will be interpreted by the union as a profitable year, hence a "we-want-our-slice-of-the-pie" attitude will prevail. We all know how the one-track mind works. A thorough reading of the report reveals that Postmaster General Preston R. Tisch went on to say the agency actually lost $1 billion on operations in 1986 but made up the difference with interest income of $317 million and $716 million in subsidies from Congress.

Embattled Philadelphia postmaster Charles James, who had employees fired or reprimanded for being sick more than 13 days a year, has left the Postal Service because of ill health, according to the head of the postal workers union. James was replaced, effective last Saturday, after going home ill and complaining of high blood pressure, according to Gregory C. Bell, president of the postal workers union. Bell said he believes James should have been fired. "There is no justice in this world," said Bell, president of the American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO.

Fear blankets the Postal Service's Bulk Mail Center in Northeast Philadelphia after a fired employee returned to the center and allegedly threatened to kill a supervisor. The incident on Thursday night - the same day a fired postal worker gunned down co-workers in Michigan - set employees' nerves on edge and led postal authorities to ask for round-the-clock police protection at the center, 1900 Byberry Road. Wallace Beckett, an acting superintendent, confirmed that an employee had been fired and that police were guarding the grounds, but declined further comment.

More than 100 community members and postal workers flooded the Radnor Middle School auditorium Tuesday evening to attend a public meeting detailing the consolidation plans they say will adversely affect 750 jobs. The meeting discussed the Southeastern Pennsylvania Processing and Distribution Center in Devon, one of the 252 facilities across the United States facing closure under the U.S. Postal Service's plans to cut costs. Approximately 50 members of the local chapter of the American Postal Workers Union and their supporters rallied at St. David's Square Shopping Center two hours before the meeting, where they held poster signs reading "Save Southeastern" and chanted, "Don't cut services, deliver services.

AS PRESIDENT of the Philadelphia-area local of the American Postal Workers Union (which represents the sales and service associates with whom the public comes in contact with every day), I totally agree with columnist Stu Bykofsky when he said that Benjamin Franklin would be ashamed at what transpired during his recent encounter with the Post Office. But I don't think he'd be ashamed of the Post Office - he'd be ashamed of how management is running it now. But I do have a few disagreements with Stu's column: Stu stated that an employee didn't know the phone number of their particular station.

Last night, U.S. Rep. Bob Brady said he was convinced that his pal Jim Gallagher was cleaning up the Southwest Philadelphia mail-processing center after a nearly three-hour "walk-and-talk" tour the two took yesterday afternoon. In fact, Brady said, Gallagher, a onetime Philadelphia letter-carrier who rose to become the new regional postal director, was sleeping at the plant so he could visit all three shifts. Brady, D-Pa., who on Dec. 5 called for a Government Accounting Office probe of the processing center, withdrew that request Monday to give Gallagher, a friend since childhood, "a little time before anybody was breathing down his neck.

So where is the Christmas mail? Where are the packages? Where are the letters? Where are the Christmas cards? On what is normally one of the biggest mail days of the year, the mail wasn't moving during yesterday's day shift at the U.S. Postal Service's processing plant on Lindbergh Boulevard near Island Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia. "There was no mail in there," said a day-shift postal worker, who asked to remain anonymous. "The trucks are not coming in. We're supposed to be busy, and we're not running the machines.

The mail is starting to move again, say postal workers and customers. No longer are hundreds of overflowing bins of unprocessed mail blocking passageways inside the U.S. Postal Service's processing plant on Lindbergh Boulevard near Island Avenue, postal workers told the Daily News yesterday. In the past week, several local post offices have had an increase in mail volume, possibly from the plant and/or holiday mail, according to postal workers. "We used to know when they were hiding the mail, because it was only a trickle," said a postal worker.

The U.S. Postal Service apparently is taking complaints of postal workers and customers seriously, after five days of Daily News stories about lost and missing mail and chaos at the processing plant in Southwest Philadelphia. On Friday, Jim Gallagher was appointed the new Philadelphia regional manager, replacing Frank Neri, considered by many postal workers and the American Postal Workers Union to be the architect of the chaos at the plant since it opened in 2006. Today, Gallagher is to meet with Gwen Ivey, president of APWU Local 89, which filed a complaint on Oct. 24 about senior managers allegedly ordering clerks to undercount the mail by millions of pieces each week and about chronic understaffing at the plant on Lindbergh Boulevard near Island Avenue.

The U.S. Postal Service has shaken up its Philadelphia-area management after a week of stories in the Daily News about late and missing mail deliveries. Frank Neri, the Postal Service district manager for the Philadelphia metropolitan district, was replaced yesterday by Jim Gallagher, a veteran USPS manager, spokesman Paul Smith confirmed yesterday. Gallagher "was postmaster here in Philly for six years," Smith said. "He's been in Philly virtually his whole career with extensive operational experience in both mail processing and operations.

When blood tests indicated that one of its mail handlers was producing antibodies consistent with anthrax infection, the U.S. Postal Service's South Jersey headquarters went into a bureaucratic tailspin. In the nine days after the Oct. 30 announcement of the suspected skin infection, the Bellmawr mail-processing facility would be shut down, reopened for 2 1/2 days, shut down again the next day, reopened for three days, and then closed and opened for a final time on the order of a federal judge who reversed his own day-old ruling.

A federal judge said last night that the South Jersey mail processing center in Bellmawr can reopen, so long as it is monitored for the presence of anthrax. After postal management and unions agreed on terms, Judge Jerome B. Simandle of U.S. District Court in Camden lifted the restraining order he had issued 24 hours earlier, and the facility was open and operating by 8 p.m. "The linchpin from our point is getting the monitoring," said Jonathan Walters, a lawyer for the American Postal Workers Union, which sought the closing.

The South Jersey mail-processing center in Bellmawr was shut down last night by order of a federal judge, the third time the center has been closed in a week. Lawyers for the local American Postal Workers Union sought the closure after it was discovered Tuesday evening that a mix-up caused the wrong mail-sorting machine to be decontaminated, leaving the machine identified as tainted by anthrax in operation. "The contaminated machine was used for the next three days, sorting literally thousands of pieces of mail," said Jonathan Walters, an attorney for the union.