USPS - Mail center employees rally against job losses

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More than 50 postal workers from the Charlottesville region rallied alongside U.S. 29 on Sunday to protest the possible closure of the Albemarle County Airport Road mail processing center.

“Every day I come to work and work hard,” said Tom Thorpe, a Charlottesville resident and postal worker since 1988. “I’m close to retirement. But I might have to move.”

Several postal workers said they are worried about losing their jobs or being forced to relocate to Richmond. They are also concerned that the quality of mail delivery would sharply decline in the Charlottesville area.

Many of the postal workers carried picket signs that read “SOS” — an acronym for “Save Our Service” — and such slogans as “Keep the Service in C’Ville” and “Don’t Close Down Our Post Office.” The Charlottesville Area Local 1657 of the American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO, organized Sunday’s protest in front of the main post office on U.S. 29.

A U.S. Postal Service study recommended in October that the Charlottes-ville-area mail processing facility should be closed and its operations consolidated at a new facility outside Richmond to save costs and boost efficiency.

“The study results support consolidating some mail processing operations that are currently being performed at the Charlottesville [plant] by taking advantage of available processing capacity at the Richmond [plant] in order to increase efficiency and improve productivity,” postal officials said in an Oct. 30 statement.

The move would result in a annual savings of $10.4 million and would have “minimal impact” on services, such as mail delivery times, retail services and hours of operation in the Charlottesville region, according to postal service documents.

The Albemarle mail processing facility has 181 jobs. The proposed consolidation of the facility with the Richmond-area facility — located in Sandston — would result in a net decrease of 68 jobs.

A public hearing on the possible changes is scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center at Charlottesville High School.

The postal service has been struggling with an “acute financial crisis,” according to documents that will presented at Wednes-day’s meeting. Partly contributing to the postal service’s financial woes are of the growth in electronic communication, the ongoing economic recession and a decline in first-class mail volume, the documents show.

The postal service saw a 29 percent drop in first-class single volume mail between fiscal 1998 and 2008.

In the third quarter of fiscal 2009, the service lost $2.4 billion. Preliminary figures showed in late October that the service may finish the fiscal year as much as $7 billion in the red.

According to the postal service documents, the proposed consolidation reduces costs, improves efficiency and “puts the right people in the right place with the right resources.”