After a yearlong mass protest campaign, San Francisco Postmaster Raj Sanghera announced that the Bayview, Visitacion Valley and Civic Center post offices had been taken off the closure list. McLaren Station on busy San Bruno Avenue was also spared.
This is a victory for postal workers and community members from all over the country who have been working hard to resist the planned destruction and privatization of the public U.S. Postal Service.
It’s especially a victory for the communities that organized to pack the public hearings in 2011 to protest the closing of the Bayview, Visitacion Valley and Civic Center facilities. They gave the Postal Service managers an earful.
This was followed up by mass leafleting in the Mission, Bayview, Tenderloin, Bayshore, Excelsior, Viz Valley and Fillmore neighborhoods by the Save the People’s Post Office Coalition. It includes the Senior Action Network, the San Francisco Labor Council, the Living Wage Coalition, Occupy, Poor Magazine and Church Women United. Thousands saw our banners and signs and took the flyers.
Then, on June 27, this local coalition organized a rally at the Federal Building, a march of 200 people through the oppressed Tenderloin district, an occupation and a people’s speakout inside the Civic Center Post Office, where many homeless and low-income people pick up their mail.
The Bayview, Visitacion Valley and McLaren stations are all in working-class neighborhoods in the southeastern part of San Francisco and home to many African-American, Asian, Latino/a and white families who depend on their neighborhood post offices. Victory celebrations are being planned.
Here are some of the key actions over the last year in the growing national movement to save the Postal Service:
The USPS decision to cancel the planned closing of four post offices in San Francisco demonstrates that our movement is having an effect. But we must be vigilant: The big push to implement the Donahoe slash-and-burn program will come after the presidential election and in 2013. Our movement needs to grow, and grow fast, to stop the juggernaut. It’s up to us to mobilize our members and communities to push the privatizers back on their heels.
For information, see cpwunited.com, savethepostoffice.com and clupjs.com
The author, a retired mail carrier, is a member of the Save the People’s Post Office coalition in San Francisco.
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