Bend postal workers protest planned service cuts

Bend workers at the U.S. Postal Service held a protest Friday afternoon of service cutbacks, including closure of the local mail processing center.

The USPS is cutting about 80 mail processing location across the country, including here in Bend. That means about 20 or so people could lose their job by April of next year. And while the organization said there won’t be layoffs — that workers are transfered to other jobs — they say it’s not the right direction for them or the nation’s mail service..

“People have to think about selling houses, uprooting their whole families,” said Linda O’Donnell, a postal worker for 10 years.

But change is on the way, and not the kind of change O’Donnell is looking forward to. This will change the way your mail could be handled.

“(The mail) being trucked over a mountain pass, especially in this kind of weather, and then being trucked back — it’s going to cause delays,” O’Donnell said. “So let’s sit down at the table and come up with better solutions to the crisis that’s at hand.”

A budget crisis that has led the postal service to cut 220,000 positions nationwide over the past decade, as a sharp drop in first-class mail accompanies a move to online communication.

“Any business that had that kind of change to the services that their customers use would have to make adjustments, so that’s what we’ve been doing,” said USPS spokesman Peter Hass.

One of the main reasons they deem the adjustment necessary is because of the way we communicate and share information with others.

“Things have changed, in terms of communication, they’ve changed in terms of bill payment,” Hass said. “All of those things affect the postal service, and we, in terms of the postal service itself, we’re looking for comprehensive legislative reform that’s for one solution.”

Not everyone agrees.

“The Internet has been around since the 1960s, so to use the Internet as an excuse for first-class mail decline is not a valid reason,” O’Donnell said.

The cuts are expected to go into effect in April, and critics with the American Postal Workers Union say they could be felt by everyone.

“It’s not just about jobs,” O’Donnell said. “Jobs is one part of it, but it’s about the community and what is going to be happening to the American people of this community.”

These local postal workers who are protesting and letting their voices be heard, part of a series of protests in affected areas around the country on Friday.

In Oregon, they’ve already had Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden sign a letter to halt the consolidation and closures of the post office facilities.