wsws.org: The post office’s Greater Newark New Jersey Processing and Distribution Center (PDC) in Kearny, New Jersey is slated to close early next year, threatening hundreds of jobs. Its operations will be consolidated in the Jersey City Network Distribution Center (NDC), which will become the Regional Processing & Distribution Center (RPDC) for the region.
In 2022, this facility employed as many as 800 mail handlers, mail processing clerks, equipment operators, and other workers and supervisors. Of these, the roughly 250 PSEs (Postal Support Employees) non-career or temporary employees were given letters telling them that they will be terminated with no recourse.
Career employees are being offered “noncompetitive consideration” for lateral or downgraded positions at other facilities within 50 miles of the closed facility. Those who do not find an equivalent position to the one which they now hold will have to accept downgraded positions to keep a job, with their current pay grade guaranteed for only two years. Those who don’t take an available position will be terminated.
The situation at Kearny is just a taste of what much of the USPS work force will face in the near future. It is part of the misnamed “Delivering for America” program, a vast restructuring effort which will close thousands of local post offices and shed tens of thousands of jobs.
A key component of the plan is the restructuring of the USPS network along Amazon lines, centered around a smaller number of huge distribution centers. According to a recent article on the Save the Post Office website, the initial wave of consolidations is supposed to be accomplished by June of 2024, and will involve the creation of 13 Sorting and Distribution Centers (SDCs) at various locations across the country. Thirty-seven existing post offices will be converted to “spoke” facilities, sending their routes to the SDC hubs. SDCs, in turn, will feed into larger Local Processing Centers and Regional Processing and Distribution Centers.
