Friday, March 30, 2012

August 13, 1984, Postal Workers and the Cost of Living

Many of the letters I’ve written to the editor have concerned the stand the paper has taken with the Postal Service. We moved to Virginia Beach in December of 1978 when we bought the bakery. 
In September of 1981 we sold the bakery and I began working for the Post Office.  In 1982 I had my first article, “Hope for the Holidays” published in The Virginian Pilot.  The following year I had several more articles published with the paper including two in their experimental Sunday Magazine, Virginia.
  
I thought the paper and I had a pretty good relationship. And then it happened.


    My feeling was that no one should tell a working man that he is making to much money or that he shouldn’t try to make more money.  According to their editorial, postal workers were making about $28,000 at the time.  Should we have been making only $25,000 or could we have expected to make $30,000.  I mean, what was their problem? 

Should a baseball player make $30 million a year?  Hell no!  But baseball players are in a class of their own and the $28,000 we were making seemed to be well within the ballpark figure for a middle class worker at the time.   As postal workers we should have been able to get whatever the Postal Service agreed to pay us, which for every  contract between the union and the Postal Service had been decided by an outside arbitrator.   It was between us, them and the arbitrator, not the paper.

Now papers have a right to their opinions and they have a right to be wrong but I felt like I had a right to tell them they were wrong. 





Now, one of the things I want to happen when I write a letter to a newspaper is for someone to respond.  That is the whole
purpose in the first place—to start some kind of dialogue. 

What I was looking for was maybe an argument from the paper or maybe a UPS or FedEx worker saying I made enough money.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the response I got from a mother in Portsmouth who didn’t want to argue economics or fair pay or inflation.  All she was concerned about was that she didn’t get any pay for the job she did and what right did I have to complain. I wanted to point out that most postal workers are also parents but I didn't. That might have drawn a response even further removed from the original premise of the newspaper that postal workers get paid too much. 

 She was arguing a social problem and maybe she had a point but I was arguing a labor problem and as any arbitrator will tell you, "them's apples and oranges."


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