U. S. mail at Staples to end; union elated

After union- backed boycotts and an adverse labor board ruling, the United States Postal Service has agreed to end an arrangement that allowed Staples Inc. store employees to provide mail services.

Post office spokesman Darlene Casey told Bloomberg News that the Postal Service would end its relationship with Staples in order to comply with a National Labor Relations Board judge’s ruling.

The cancellation is a coup for the Postal Service’s largest union, which mounted a threeyear, multipronged campaign against the arrangement, fighting Staples’ failed attempt to merge with Office Depot Inc. and leafleting outside stores urging customers to boycott the company, according to Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union.

“Had we not drawn the line in the sand and launched these protests,” Dimondstein said, all Staples stores “would have had full- blown post offices, not staffed by postal employees but rather Staples employees, and the post office also would have used that model to spread to other major retailers.”

Dimondstein said he received a commitment in writing from the post office that sales of postal services at Staples will cease within the next two months.

Staples spokesman Carrie McElwee confirmed that more than 500 of its stores would be dropped from the program. She said Staples customers will still will be able to ship goods through the company’s relationship with UPS.

Announced in November 2013, the post office collaboration with Staples began as a pilot program to place mini post offices in 82 stores, staffed by Staples’ nonunion employees providing services including Priority Mail. While the post office promoted the arrangement as a way to provide convenience for customers, it was denounced as privatization by American Postal Workers Union leaders such as Dimondstein, who had just ousted the union’s incumbent president by promising to more aggressively resist concessions to management.

In July 2014, days after the American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution urging its members and the public not to do their back- toschool shopping at Staples, the Postal Service announced it was shutting down the mini post offices. Instead, it would include Staples stores in its decade- old Approved Shipper Program, which authorizes certain sites around the country to provide some post office services such as mailing packages, alongside those of other shippers. That wasn’t enough to satisfy the American Postal Workers Union or union allies like the teachers federation and the AFL- CIO, which continued to back the boycott.

In his 2015 farewell address, outgoing Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said those efforts were unfortunately making it “tougher for us to find retail partners,” and that trying to restrict postal services to post offices wasn’t good for customers or for the agency’s business model. “It’s an example of the narrow, nearsighted view winning over the broader, long- term strategy,” he told a National Press Club audience. “Attitudes have to change, and I hope they will.”

But the agency’s Office of Inspector General took note of the union’s complaints. In May, the inspector general announced that it had conducted an audit of Approved Shipper Program locations, including Staples and the three other main participants in the program, Office Depot, PostNet and The UPS Store.

The audit found that the post office lost revenue because participants incorrectly accepted boxes with insufficient postage, that clerks at the private retailers often didn’t complete certified mail forms correctly, and that “shippers are still not complying with mail security requirements.”

The Postal Service’s handling of the Staples situation also drew rebukes from National Labor Relations Board officials. In June, the board ruled 3- 0 that the post office had violated federal labor law by refusing to provide its union with information it had requested about the mini post office pilot. Five months later, a labor board administrative law judge ruled that the post office had failed to meet its obligation to bargain with the union over the ongoing Staples arrangement, and issued a recommended order that would require the post office, if the union requested it, to rescind its arrangement with Staples.

Among the evidence he cited was an internal post office report from 2012, which hadn’t been shared with the union at the time, stating that the aims of its partnerships included moving the “majority of volume to retail partners … lowering cost to serve.”

Asked why the union kept boycotting Staples but not major approved shippers Office Depot and The UPS Store, Dimondstein said he didn’t support having postal services sold in those locations either.

“You only have so much capacity at one moment,” he said. “It’s not going to end there.”