The essay below by one of my friends appeared on my Facebook feed yesterday, and it broke my heart.
We read during the election of Louis DeJoy’s efforts to hamstring the post office in order to bolster the irrational claims of The Thermonuclear Bowel Evacuation Formerly Disgracing the Oval Office that mail-in voting would lead to massive fraud. It wouldn’t, and it didn’t. But the actions of this Trump sycophant and donor, a man who has no business as Postmaster General of our nation, are continuing to have repercussions down the line and will continue to do so as long as this waste of human cytoplasm is permitted to continue castrating one of our nation’s most important institutions.
This is a cry from the trenches.
There is a gravestone somewhere with the inscription:
When you go to work tomorrow, I will be going, too, but only long enough to turn in my ID and my laptop.
The GOP Ten-Year Plan To Rape The Postal Service took its first blood on Friday, with hundreds of postal employees and contractors getting the word that their position has been eliminated. As usual, there will be new jobs posted, maybe, at facilities somewhere far from home and at a lesser salary, but a job is a job, and there will be struggles for these positions that will be as entertaining as the old gladiator battles in the Coliseum. And with similar results.
This came about because Louis DeJoy, who ran a shipping company that competed with the USPS, and was a major GOP donor, was appointed Postmaster General during the last administration. The board that oversees the PMG is still a pack of GOP curs, and will not remove him until enough of them are removed to force a vote. By then, it will be too late to save much of the USPS.
In the past year, the IT office that I work in has gone from twelve people to five. The UNIX support group is perhaps 2/3 the size it was at this time last year. The workload has not been reduced at all. Overtime is strongly discouraged. If you think this is a recipe for a catastrophe, I will not contradict you. But it will SAVE MONEY. Just like trashing the sorting machines just before the 2020 election was going to save money. I didn’t notice any savings, because the O/T put in by the employees to take up the slack would have more than eaten it. Oh, wait, they weren’t allowed to charge O/T. So a lot of them did their work off the clock. What a savings!
It will also cripple the USPS even further, so there will be more pressure to simply disband it and give the work to private corporations. Sending a birthday card by FedEx will cost about $15, instead of $0.55. But, hey, small government, right?
And giving us the shaft on a Friday morning of a long weekend was THE morale-booster that we all needed.
Oh, and the USPS employs more veterans than any other government function. So the “We Support Our Troops!” boys have just screwed over the veterans. Again.
I’m a contractor, not a USPS employee. The USPS unit at Peraton is only about 6 months old, having just been acquired from NorthropGrumman. So the scramble for new jobs there will be at least as bad as the one at USPS, because they were still trying to fit us into the organization as it was.
Screw it. I’m six months from turning 66. I may just sign up for the dole, and Medicare, and let the people who are trying to support their families get the jobs. I’m sick of this. I’ve watched the front line get screwed at Kodak, Informix, IBM, and now USPS, and the old men who made the decisions that got us there walk away with fat wallets. This is not how I had thought of retiring, those 40+ years ago, but, as some profound thinker said, it is what it is.
So, tomorrow I drive to San Mateo (55 miles each way, and that I will not miss), turn in all my gear, and drive home to see what happens next. I’d like to thank all the people who voted GOP in 2016 because they were afraid they’d lose their guns, on behalf of the hundreds of us who just lost our jobs.
On behalf of my friend who lost his livelihood and the countless others who have or will, many of whom will not be in a position to retire and say “Screw it,” thank you, Louis DeJoy, for shoving a stake into the heart of our nation’s postal system in the name of ideology and personal profit. May you roast in Hell forever, you simpering, thermonuclear asstrumpet.
The Old Wolf has spoken
PS: Congress, please remove the insane requirement for the USPS to pre-fund its retiree health benefits. Adopting a traditional “pay-as-you-go” method would produce billions of dollars of desperately-needed additional cash flow.
Playing in the World Game 