Building Up the Post Office

This article originally appeared on OtherWords.org

If you’re looking for a way to honor veterans, here’s one: protect the U.S. Postal Service.

I’m a veteran from a family of veterans. After serving in the Marine Corps, I got a good-paying postal job that put me on a solid path to financial security. Now I lead the Detroit Area Local for the American Postal Workers Union. Our 1,500 members include many veterans, some of whom I served with myself.

Across the country, nearly 113,000 veterans now serve as postal workers. With former military members accounting for over 18 percent of our workforce, the Postal Service employs vets at three times their share of the national workforce.

Why? For one thing, military values like hard work, showing up on time, and taking pride in your work set you up perfectly for postal jobs.

For another, USPS gives veterans like myself preferential hiring treatment. Disabled vets, like many I work with in Detroit, get special consideration too. And once they get here, they get generous medical leave and benefits, including wounded warriors leave, among other hard-earned benefits won by our union.

Unfortunately, these secure jobs for veterans are now under attack.

A White House report has called for selling off the public mail service to private, for-profit corporations. And a Trump administration task force has called for slashing postal jobs and services for customers.

In particular, they want to eliminate our collective bargaining rights, which would jeopardize all those benefits we’ve won for veterans and other employees. They also want to cut delivery days, close local post offices, and raise prices, which would hurt customers.

This cost-cutting could also threaten another valuable benefit for service members: deeply discounted shipping rates on packages they get overseas. Currently, shipping to U.S. military bases in other countries costs the same as a domestic shipment, and USPS offers cost-free packing supplies to the folks who send these care packages.

Instead of slashing and burning the USPS, we need to be expanding and strengthening it.

One idea is to let post offices expand into low-cost financial services. Veterans are four times more likely than the national average to use payday lenders for short-term loans, which typically charge exorbitant interest rates.

But if post offices could offer affordable and reliable check cashing, ATM, bill payment, and money transfer services, we could generate all kinds of new revenue — while protecting vets and their communities from predatory lenders.

From discounting care packages to employing disabled veterans, our Postal Service plays an important part in the lives of our service members. USPS does good by Americans who’ve dedicated a portion of their lives to armed service, and by the millions of Americans who rely on them.

I hope you’ll join me in applauding these veterans — and the postal service. Let’s build the USPS up, not tear it down.

Keith Combs is a 30-year postal worker and president of the Detroit District Area Local of the American Postal Workers Union. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Child Care Deserts

This article originally appeared on OtherWords.org:

My husband and I run an oil and vinegar shop in Minneapolis. We love helping customers brighten their meals, but another reason we started our business doesn’t fit neatly into marketing materials: We needed child care, and we couldn’t make it work any other way.

Here in Minnesota, we have the fourth highest costs in the nation for infant care. What’s more, 44 percent of Minnesotans live in a child care desert, where there are simply no spots for anyone.

For two years after we had our son, we did our best to piece together day care and work. We sat on countless waitlists. I even delayed taking a job until my son had aged out of the most expensive infant care category, which costs more than in-state college tuition. 

Even with all our juggling, I was still only taking home $244 a week after child care expenses. It just didn’t seem worth it. I quit my job to stay home, but I knew we’d have to find another solution soon.

For my husband and me, the best choice was to go into business ourselves, arrange our schedules as best we could, and get help with child care from family and friends.

With this help, we got by. But the irony is that it’s very hard for family businesses to provide family-friendly jobs. We can’t offer the support with child care, paid leave, and health care that large corporations can. 

And what about work schedules? Most daycares close at 6pm, but we close at 7pm. It’s even more complicated for shift workers and 24-hour employees in other industries.

We aren’t alone. Small businesses in our area are scrambling to retain employees with kids, or having to scale back hours and serve fewer clients. A lot of women leave the workforce entirely, like I did.

When one of our first employees was pregnant, we offered her more time off after her baby was born. But she wanted to come back after just two weeks because she needed the paycheck.

Luckily, she had a family member who could take care of her child. But whenever that fell through, she missed work. 

According to Child Care Aware, over a six-month period, 45 percent of working parents missed work at least once due to child care breakdowns. Businesses lose over $4 billion annually because of these issues. 

This is unfair — not just for small businesses, but for our society as a whole.

Women are more likely to shoulder caregiving than men, and lack of affordable care limits their economic independence. Low-income families of color are disproportionately impacted by high costs, while rural communities are most likely to be classified as “child care deserts.” 

And, of course, the current system puts small businesses at a major disadvantage to big corporations with the resources to subsidize on-site care.

We do our best to help our employees who, like us, are parents. But the truth is, we’ve come to the limits of what we can do as individual business owners. When others ask me what they can do, I tell them we need to talk with our representatives. 

We need lawmakers to invest in high-quality child care for everyone in our country. We need innovative solutions like the Child Care for Working Families Act that address the crisis from three fronts — maintaining care quality, ensuring quality jobs, and capping costs for families.

If we believe in small business, we need our lawmakers to change this system. Child care isn’t just a family issue — it’s an economic one, too.

Sarah Piepenburg is the co-owner of Vinaigrette in Minneapolis, Minnesota and a member of the Main Street Alliance. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.