Steve Hutkins is a Gallatin Professor who focuses on place studies and travel literature. His courses this semester include The Travel Habit: On the Road in the Thirties, and The Art of Travel. But over the past few months, Hutkins has made quite the impact outside of NYU. The USPS is closing thousands of post offices across the United States, and Hutkins is fighting to keep them open. In April, he started the blog Save the Post Office, and has since been in full blown post office mania. Hutkins got print coverage in The Washington Post, and was also interviewed by Gothamist. His blog gets thousands of hits a day, and he is continuing his fight to, well, save the post office. We spoke with Hutkins to find out more.
I read that you began the blog after you heard your own local post office was getting ready to close. Has it been shut down? Have you been in contact with your local branch? Do they appreciate what you’re doing?
My post office has not closed, and it’s not on any of the closing lists the Postal Service is working on, so we’re okay for now. But the Postal Service has already said there’s another list of 4,000 post offices that may close coming out soon (in addition to the 4,300 they’re currently studying), and the Postmaster General says half of the country’s 32,000 post offices will probably close over the next six years. So no post office is really safe — the Postal Service wants to replace them with postal counters in big box stores and supermarkets. And yes, my postmaster knows about my efforts and I’m sure he appreciates them, just as I appreciate everything he does for our community.
Since starting the blog, have you been communicating with higher-ups at the post office?
I do not communicate directly with the folks at USPS headquarters in DC. I just share my thoughts with them through the blog, and I can guess what they’re thinking.
The Postal Service says it’s shutting down various post offices due to financial concerns, but you often contest that in your articles. Could you explain the economics behind these decisions, and your objections to them?
The Postal Service constantly says it’s the Internet that’s causing its financial problems, but in my articles, I try to show how the Internet effect is gradual and slow-moving — it started to be noticeable in about 2000, when first-class mail volumes peaked — whereas the sharp drop in mail volumes and revenues started in 2007, when the recession began. The Postal Service and the media (which basically repeats what the USPS says) always connect these recent declines to the Internet in order to argue that steep declines will inevitably continue in the future. This justifies the drastic, emergency measures they say are necessary — closing thousands of post offices, taking the no-layoff clause out of union contracts, and drastically reducing the size of the workforce. This strategy is an example of what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine.” It’s about exaggerating a crisis — or, as Ralph Nader said recently about the Postal Service, “manufacturing crisis” — in order to do things that members of the corporate elite have wanted to do for a long time, like weaken unions and privatize the postal system so that corporations can get a bigger piece of the mail-industry pie, which is huge.
What is your ideal solution to the post office problem?
The main source of the financial problem facing the Postal Service right now is a 2006 Congressional requirement that the USPS pay off 75 years of retiree health benefits in 10 years (enacted when the Postal Service enjoyed peak revenues). That costs the Postal Service $5 billion a year, and it’s the cause of the huge deficit that the Postal Service has incurred over the past four years (about $20 billion). If it hadn’t been forced to make those exorbitant and unnecessary payments, the Postal Service would be running in the black right now. If Congress would fix this immediate problem, the short-term “crisis” would be solved and the Postal Service could look to long-term ways to deal with the Internet effect. That might involve expanding the products and services it offers (the way post offices do in Europe), and it should also mean less outsourcing. Right now, the Postal Service “contracts out” $15 billion a year to private corporations for work that in many cases postal workers could be doing. It doesn’t make sense to outsource all that business and then say there’s not enough work for postal employees. The Postal Service wants to reduce its workforce from 670,000 to 425,000. Why put a couple of hundred thousand people on the unemployment line or push people onto their retirement pensions before they’re ready? The Postal Service has helped a million families rise into the middle class. Why kick so many of them out of it? How’s that going to help the economy?
In the Washington Post, you stated that your students haven’t yet been subject to your “postal mania.” Has that changed in the new school year?
No, they have been spared. The post office is not what I’m teaching right now.
You gave a talk to the faculty yesterday on your post office project. What did you speak about?
The faculty, on the other hand, has not been spared, and they were subjected to my mania for over an hour this week. I gave them an overview of how the blog developed and the kind of issues I’ve been writing about — the forces behind the push to privatize the post office, the tragedy of seeing beautiful historic post offices being closed and sold to the highest bidder, the value of the post office to a small town, the surprising ways a simple blog can be an effective tool of social activism.
How many hits has your blog been getting lately? Has all the press (Gothamist, Washington Post, etc.) helped?
The blog averages about three thousand hits a day. The Washington Post article helped, but most of the traffic comes via postal news websites that aggregate articles about postal world. They’re like trade publications, and most of the people who read my blog are postal workers. The general public doesn’t seem very interested in the fate of the Postal Service — unless you live in a community where the post office may close. Sometimes people in these communities find the website, and there’s information and advice on the site about what to do if your post office is slated for closure.
What was your personal favorite/most important post? What was the most popular post?
I don’t have a favorite, but the most popular pages on the website are the lists and maps I’ve created showing the post offices that may close and that have already closed. The Postal Service hasn’t been very helpful in providing good lists (and certainly not maps), so the website is the best source around for that sort of thing. The “Shock Doctrine” piece got a lot of hits too (over 20,000 reads), and there’s a page on the site that aggregates the daily news about post office closings — apparently a lot of people check in with that on a daily basis. There’s also a postmaster who writes for the site, and his pieces are always very popular — he has a very thoughtful grasp of what’s going on, and much more historical understanding and personal experience than me.
I read you were considering a leave of absence from NYU. Are you still planning on that?
Actually, I’m on a partial leave right now, and it’s a good thing. Everyday something important happens in postal world, and the leave is giving me an opportunity to write about events as they happen. For example, the Postal Regulatory Commission (the agency that oversees the Postal Service) is doing a investigation (called an “Advisory Opinion”) about whether the Postal Service’s plan to close thousands of post offices complies with current laws and regulations. Everyday there’s new evidence and testimony to review, and the “verdict” will be coming soon. In the meantime, town meetings with postal officials are going on all around the country, post offices keep closing, and new studies and reports about the postal system are coming out all faster than I can read them. Plenty to keep me busy.
What would you say to those that consider the post office an “anachronism of the past,” as a commenter on Gothamist suggested?
The Postal Service is trying to make the brick-and-mortar post office an anachronism by moving postal retail into Wal-Mart, Staples, CVS, Sam’s Club, and supermarket chains. That’s basically a mode of privatization, and I don’t think the American people realize yet that their post offices are being taken away from them. As for the “post office” in the larger sense — the Postal Service itself — that’s hardly an anachronism. It’s a $70 billion a year business, and while it may be running in the red because of the recession and the health care pre-funding problem, the Postal Service isn’t going anywhere. Even with increased use of the Internet, the mail business is going to be a vital industry for years to come, and that’s why the privatizers want to get their hands on more of the USPS business. They are basically trying to steal the post office — and the postal system — from the American people. So what would I say? Wake up, America, you’re getting robbed.
(image via)
UPS and FedEx-DHL aren’t having these problems because they’re private companies. They were able to deal with the changes in technology and still have good businesses and better-paid, unionized employees. This guy is ignoring that for some obvious romanticism and this is a waste of time.
Steve Hutkins is doing an outstanding and much needed job of providing information regarding the corporate takeover of the Postal Service. The American people are being robbed of their Post Office and it is not being reported in the corporate owned media because the corporate owned media are highly invested in privatizing the Post Office.
Time Warner (CNN, People Magazine, etc.) sends the most mail volume through the Postal Service Time Warner’s media coverage (or lack of coverage) of the Post Office is naturally biased for their positions, one of which is to “deaverage” the costs of the Postal Service so that the postage rates favor large volume mailers like themselves. The large newspapers, like Gannett, McClatchy, etc., are also in on shaping the Post Office to their benefit.
One glaring example of the lack of corporate owned media coverage of the Post Office is the current plans to close and/or consolidate mail processing plants. The Postal Service admits that if they are allowed to proceed with consolidating mail processing operations, the first class mail that is currently delivered the next day will instead take two to three days. The Postal Service does not intend to reduce the cost of a first class stamp to match the reduction in service. The delay in service problems will be even greater for those in rural areas. This is a dramatic, inappropriate, and unnecessary reduction of service to the American people that should be on the front page of newspapers and the headlines of television news. Corporate owned media coverage reflects the interests of their owners. Much thanks to Steve Hutkins for providing information that reflects the interests of the American public.