Saturday Delivery to End, Certain Operations to Move
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Beginning Feb. 23, all daily mail now cancelled at the U.S. Postal Service's downtown center will be transferred to Cleveland for processing. And beginning Aug. 1, the post office plans to stop delivering mail on Saturdays.
The Postal Service said this morning that it would cease delivering letters on Saturday, although package delivery will continue, the agency announced today.
"It's going to hit mail carriers pretty bad," said Dominic Corso, president of American Postal Workers' Union Local 443.
About 700 mail carriers work in the Youngstown region, including Campbell, Liberty Township, Girard, Lowellville and Struthers, he said. "We could expect to lose one-sixth of them," should the Postal Service end Saturday deliveries.
He said about 20,000 mail carrier jobs across the country could be affected.
However, it's unclear as to whether the Postal Service can stop Saturday delivery without authorization from Congress, Corso said.
"Congress could step in," Corso noted. "From what I understand, there's some opposition to it."
The consolidation of mail processing centers, at least for now, won't affect those employees at the Youngstown center who declined to accept an early retirement package the Postal Service offered last year.
"We had close to 40 retire," said Corso,. Their last day on the job was Jan. 31.
The attrition package convinced enough employees at the Youngstown center to retire early and made it possible to relocate the cancellation operations without any immediate layoffs, Corso noted.
More than 20,000 postal employees elected to take the early retirement package across the country.
About 180 remain employed in the backroom operations in Youngstown. The Youngstown processing center will still be handling incoming mail, Corso noted.
"For the time being, no one will leave the Youngstown plant because of the change," said David Van Allen, spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service Northern District in Cleveland.
The Cleveland postal center is now handling outgoing mail from Youngstown on Saturdays, Van Allen said, but starting on Feb. 23 all Youngstown mail would be shipped to Cleveland for cancellation.
Mail received in Youngstown would be shipped to Cleveland, and for the time being, returned to Youngstown for distribution, Van Allen said.
Last year, postal employees were offered an incentive of up to $15,000 to retire. Criteria such as age and length of service to the Postal Service helped determine the amount of the incentive for each employee, Van Allen said.
Pensions of all those who retired would not be affected, he noted.
Van Allen said that those employees remaining in Youngstown would be assigned other duties, and customers shouldn't expect delays in service.
Relocating the cancellation process is the first phase in transferring the entire backroom operations to Cleveland, Van Allen noted.
As for when the city can expect the relocation of the sorting processing operations there, Van Allen said, "there's no absolute set time. It's going to be incremental and the next step isn't set yet."
Local 443's Corso said that the target is to shut down the entire Youngstown processing operation by mid-2014.
In May, the U.S. Postal Service announced it would close the Youngstown operations by February this year, along with 139 other processing centers across the country, including 13 others in Ohio.
Centers in Portsmouth, Dayton, Athens, Ironton, Cambridge, Chillicothe, and Coshocton will merge with the Columbus center, while Canton, Wooster and Massillon operations will consolidate at the Akron center.
The Akron center is also scheduled to close over the next two years, and all of those processing operations would be transferred to Cleveland.
U.S. Postmaster General and CEO Patrick Donahoe said in May that the volume of mail processed in the United States has decreased substantially, and today does not require a large delivery and procesing network.
"We simply do not have the mail volumes to justify the size and capacity of our current mail processing network," Donahoe said. "To return to long-term profitability and financial stability while keeping mail affordable, we must match our network with the anticipated workload."
The consolidations are targeted to reduce the size of the Postal Service's workforce by 13,000 and achieve cost reductions of $1.2 billion annually.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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