Column: Georgia needs the Postal Service

The United States Postal Service is under severe threat. With the pandemic crisis driving down mail volumes by 50% or more this year, the Postal Service is on track to run out of money by September.

While a postal bankruptcy would be devastating for the entire country, our state’s losses would be particularly severe.

More than 18,000 Georgians work directly for the Postal Service, including at the Atlanta-based Mail Recovery Center. More Georgians work as postal workers, in other words, than as fast food cooks, firefighters, electricians, or childcare workers. USPS provides good, family-sustaining jobs with benefits, and is a leading provider of these jobs for African-Americans and veterans in particular.

The Postal Service is also the backbone of a broader mailing industry which employs over 210,000 people here in Georgia, including those at the United Parcel Service world headquarters in Sandy Springs. UPS, Fedex, and other private carriers rely on the vast, universal public postal service network to handle the last leg of a significant share of package deliveries.

During this crisis, postal workers are playing a more vital role than ever, risking their own safety to continue to deliver medicine, food, and other essentials so Georgians can stay home. The Veterans Administration estimates that approximately 80% of all the prescriptions provided to veterans go through the mail. In fact, one of their two servicing centers for these prescriptions is in Dublin.

A functioning Postal Service is also necessary for safe elections during the pandemic. Already, 1 million Georgians have requested mail-in ballots in 2020.

In March, a bipartisan group of lawmakers agreed to a postal relief plan, but the White House blocked it from the final stimulus bill. Instead, the White House has demanded major rate hikes, post office closures, and job cuts in exchange for a loan to the service.

Rate hikes — especially on businesses and other delivery services — would almost certainly be passed on to customers. Institute for Policy Studies research finds that UPS and Fedex already impose delivery surcharges on suburban and rural areas that are home to 70 million people. So if the USPS goes bankrupt, service to Georgia’s remote rural areas would likely become much more expensive, or even discontinued altogether.

We can still prevent this.

The House recently passed the HEROES Act, which included $25 billion in direct aid to our Postal Service. And while Trump has appointed a union-busting political crony (with no postal experience) as the new Postmaster General, members of Congress have started a bipartisan Postal Preservation Caucus to protect the public post office.

Georgia’s members of Congress should join that caucus. And its Republican senators should commit to supporting aid for the postal service when the Senate considers the HEROES Act.

Americans across the political spectrum see the valuable work postal workers do every day in our own neighborhoods, even in “normal” times. It’s the most popular federal agency. Now more than ever, we need to protect it.

The writer is an Inequality Research Analyst for the Institute for Policy Studies, an independent research organization. He lives in Tucker.