The ubiquitous blue mailboxes, the slow moving, open-door mail trucks with steering on the right, post offices in each small town — the reliability of the United States Postal Service is a steadying force in storms of uncertainty.
Wrenching that reliability now is particularly destabilizing.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. This column represents her views.
The new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy — a Trump donor whose logistics “efficiencies” in his prior line of work designed hostile labor conditions — has quickly reduced staffing hours and equipment so that the Postal Service is less reliable. That’s a threat to democracy, and it’s a threat to the poor.
Trump doesn’t bother to hide the corruption. This is about voter disenfranchisement. We know well in Oregon that voting by mail works and that, in the middle of a pandemic, it’s a matter of public health.
USPS: Portland postal workers fight top-down changes
Congress convened in an emergency session to vote to fund the USPS, but we’ll be hard pressed to get that through the Senate as they wrangle over specifics of the CARES Act. The stimulus money is badly needed by unhoused people. A regular allotment — such as the $2,000 monthly payments proposed by some members of Congress including, recently, Kamala Harris — is an elegant antidote to extreme poverty. It would be a game-changer.
And while the beleaguered postal system is clearly an electoral weapon — and something we all need to stand up against — it also disproportionately impacts the poor.
As news broke of mailboxes disappearing, one vendor came to Street Roots, anxious about mailing an income verification to maintain his subsidized housing. He had heard that mailboxes were being taken away and that mail was arriving late. He thought he was right on schedule for mailing his documentation, but now he was afraid. What if he couldn’t find a mailbox? What if his verification letter arrived late? His anxiety was brimming over. He couldn’t risk losing his housing.
We see firsthand how much mail means to people on the streets. Street Roots is one of the few locations in town where unhoused people can receive mail and, even when we weren’t selling the newspaper during the early months of the pandemic, we stayed open to distribute the mail.
For people living in poverty, every vulnerability is magnified: an unreliable mail system, library closures that prevent access to computers, Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles closures that prevent access to new identification cards. It’s all just getting harder and harder.
After all, it is all fine and well to convey information and pay bills online, but if you rely on accessing computers at the libraries, that’s no longer possible in this pandemic. Many people in poverty pay in cash, in person — methods that are also not available at this time.
Moves toward cashless-only systems leave behind the poor.
I’ve seen people give up on trying to maintain a mobile phone because they can no longer pay bills with cash. They don’t have credit cards to pay online.
When the state released its requirements for accessing the $500 payments last week, my stomach tightened when I saw the identification requirements. I knew this would leave out many because the further we get into this pandemic, the fewer unhoused people have identifications.
Living in unsecured settings, people outdoors are frequently robbed. Identification cards are also lost or destroyed in the weather. It’s a pattern ground into insecure dwelling. Unhoused people simply have to frequently replace IDs and, given the limitations of access at the DMV and other services, that’s not possible.
And without identification, people have even fewer opportunities to open checking accounts to, say, pay bills online that they can no longer pay in person — or even cash checks.
People who already live with the stress of scarcity are finding their options are now contracting even more severely.
It is the public entities that matter so dearly for the poor — a reliable mail service, a robust library system, a healthy public education system. When those are gutted in the name of privatization, the poor suffer. The push by Trump and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin to privatize the Postal Service is reckless, scary and unnecessary. The reason the Postal Service is not breaking even financially is because it is not tax-supported. That’s a burden that the U.S. military certainly doesn’t have to contend with.
The postal system, written into our Constitution, was revamped into a self-reliant service overseen by a board of governors in 1971. Before that, it relied on taxes, too, and it certainly should be able to now.
What’s more, the Postal Service is built on a public infrastructure that has the potential to contribute a greater number of public services, such as broadband to rural communities — something that could help at a time when people must rely on digital communication.
Some members of Congress have pushed the idea of weaving public banking services into the infrastructure of the postal system. This is not a new idea; in fact, the U.S. postal system provided banking services in the early 20th century, as do postal services in a number of other countries. This could be a terrific boost to the poor, who are too often unbanked and subjected to high fees for the most basic transactions.
Support the organizing of the Communities and Postal Workers United to both sustain and broaden the public services of our public postal system. We have to fight the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine voter turnout as well as the lifeline that the Postal Service provides poor people across the nation.