Thank you Paul, Carl, Paige, Ted and Jeremy… You’ve Set The Stage!

by Brian Griffin | Feb 7, 2022 | Uncategorized

Wow, it worked! And a big shout out and thank you to Sisters and Brothers that made it happen: Paul Frankenfeld (AFM Local 1), Carl Vineyard (USW Local 14734), Paige Stephens (UFCW Local 75), Ted Thompson (NALC Branch 43), and Jeremy Tyler (Workers United Local 12). Thank you for being the very finest version of us – the best that we can be! To you five, thank you!

Frankly, I wasn’t sure it would work, and I’m sure it will likely still have fits and starts, but the Delegate Meeting Wednesday evening was about, by, and for Delegates. Instead of a valiant effort by the Executive Secretary-Treasurer alone to make the meeting worthwhile, over half of Wednesday’s meeting was dedicated to voices of Sisters and Brothers in the struggle, sharing their view of that struggle with one another. We heard about victories, we heard of losses, and we heard stories of battles yet undecided. We heard about The Labor Movement we all love and share, and it was, by my estimation, the most informative and uplifting delegate meeting I’ve attended in my near-five years with the CLC.

It has long been my vision that we would be better…we would be stronger…we would be in greater solidarity if we were more connected. We all live busy lives, and we are all stretched to our maximum putting it all in and on the line for the Labor movement each and every day. It’s an indisputable fact! Having said that, it can be a difficult, frustrating, and often lonely slog, fighting the good fight every minute of every day… and when you lay your head down at night, sometimes you aren’t entirely sure if it was a good day or not…if you made headway or not…if you won more than you lost. I know… The work is hard and often the love for the movement can seem unrequited.

However, fear not! Wednesday evening, we got a glimpse into the movement all around us. Those good and noble persons named above stepped out and stepped up to share some moments with us from their corner of the movement. Bits and pieces of the battles they have lost, and won, and are yet to be determined… They, for those few moments, were speaking not just with all of us, but for all of us. And I could not have been prouder of them, and you, and the movement.

We speak often of Unity and Solidarity – and we should! We easily toss it about and place it in our closing on the written page – all good. But we must be more intentional…more purposeful in living it. And where better to make that happen than during the one time each month when we come together as Sisters and Brothers, joined in common cause, to tell the stories of our struggles, victories, hopes, dreams, disappointments and more?

“After all, it’s called a “Delegate” meeting, not an “Executive Secretary-Treasurer” Meeting!” So, it is my intention to do my work and dedicate myself 110% to the stewardship and advancement of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Council, and to each of you… but going forward, this is about you — not me. The stage is set. I am asking you to take it. So, until next month, I will see out there!

In unity and Solidarity Forever!
Brian

(Brian Griffin, Executive Secretary-Treasure, Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Council)

Our Sisters and Brothers at the USPS Remember the Creed. Its the Bureaucrats that Don’t!

by Brian Griffin | Feb 7, 2022 | Uncategorized

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” These words have long been associated with the American Postal Worker. Though not an official creed or motto of the United States Postal Service, the Postal Service acknowledges it as an informal motto.

In the very earliest of day, before the United States was its own nation, long before the internet or telephones and multitudes of methods for instantaneous communication over vast distances, the connective of the American colonies was the mail which was transported by horseback riders on the rough-hewn roads between cities and towns. The safe, efficient delivery of the mail was critical to the colonies’ survival, which is why three months after the battles of Lexington and Concord, the Continental Congress turned to Benjamin Franklin to establish a national post service as the first Postmaster General.

The postal service was a mess when Philadelphia’s 47-year-old Benjamin Franklin took the helm. At that time, it was run under the crown as a moneymaking venture for Britain. For years, it ran a deficit, and Franklin realized the best way to turn a profit was to improve services instead of gutting them. Ironic isn’t it that the future Founding Father — a statesman, scientist, and shrewd businessman — believed in efficiency and innovation. Historians by and large believe he would have been alarmed at the more recent attempts to slash operations of one of the nation’s founding institutions.

So, let’s fast forward to January 18 this year, when a federal crisis-response service launched and anyone with a fixed address in the United States or its territories could go to CovidTests.gov and order four tests sent for free to their home. The initiative may have come weeks too late to help contain the omicron surge, but at last, free rapid testing by mail is finally available in the U.S.

As it turns out, that inviting website is really just a splash page for the United States Postal Service (USPS), one of our nation’s first public institutions, founded for the sake of public good, and yet, in recent times, one that has been systematically dismantled. And now, in the third year of this pandemic, the Covid-19 response is being foisted upon critical public institutions that have been underfunded or tampered with for decades.

It’s counterintuitive that some of our most essential institutions that might have remained stable during a crisis have been stripped to where they can barely function, and yet still leaned on as if whole and robust. Even before the prior administration admittedly was starving the agency to make it harder to vote by mail, USPS has been besieged by challenges. To no small extent, the problem is that the office is made to operate differently from any other public institutions.

Trying to provide world-class service like the USPS by making its money off the sale of postage and services instead of relying on taxpayer funds, as do all other public services we enjoy, is insane.

One can point to 2006, when Congress passed a law requiring the post office to prefund health care benefits for retiring employees, as that moment, and the financial burden that created, for the financial situation the USPS is in now.

With the advent of a new administration in 2021, attention on the USPS crisis slowed, but the office continues to struggle under the strain of the remnants of so many destructive policies, compounded by this pandemic. Just a few months ago, the postal service announced it was slowing down its mail delivery for some letters and packages; staffing shortages that have roiled other industries have overburdened postal employees, who work as many as 80 hours a week, have caused additional delays.

It might be less frustrating if it weren’t all so predictable. Rural Americans have reported delays and losses, significantly impacting their livelihoods. Essential government communications such as stimulus checks and advanced child tax credits, delayed and lost, and all because an essential public utility all of us and the government rely on to fulfill basic functions has been willfully neglected.

Let me conclude by asking this: If I had a letter, and I gave it to you, then demanded that you take it to the most remote corner of the planet, find a specific location, no matter how difficult the terrain, or harsh the weather, and safely deliver that letter to a specific individual, all for $.58, would you be able to do it? Yet that is what we ask the USPS to do millions of time each and every day.

So, as we all sit in our nice warm homes on this brutally cold winter morning, let’s remember the Sisters and Brothers who are out there now…doing it…getting it done…even while their good work is kneecapped and handcuffed. The USPS is a mission-critical system, a necessary government service, and the good, noble, dedicated women and men who carry out that service each and every day, are doing their level best, under willfully burdensome and unnecessarily onerous circumstances. Remember that if your package is a little late, or your mail doesn’t arrive as you wish. It isn’t becasue of the hard-working women and men of the USPS. Stand strong with our Sisters and Brothers and support the USPS!