"♫ ♪ I WANT IT MYYYYYY WAYYYY....♪ ♪♫"

The following is a perspective by postal commentator Gene Del Polito for Direct magazine. The views expressed are solely the author's.

You know, there are days when you've just got wonder: What's up with the APWU? Here is an organization that is supposed to represent the long-term best interests of a key sector of the Postal Service's employees in a manner that best insures continued employment. Yet, nary a week goes by without seeing something in the electronic or print media that reflects a union that is hell-bent on ensuring its members' extinction.

To the best of my knowledge, the APWU has never said, that as a matter of policy, it believes the Postal Service should be operated in as cost-efficient a method as possible to best serve the needs of the American people and fulfill the Postal Service's function as an important part of our nation's economic infrastructure. What you do hear is a seemingly endless litany of what it opposes.

The APWu has declared that it opposes adding value to doing business by mail through worksharing. It opposes efforts by the Postal Service to realignment its network in better accord with available resources and changing needs. It opposes postal reform. It opposes, it opposes, it opposes.

It not only opposes, it disparages. It disparages postal managers. It disparages the customers that pay their salaries as "vermin." And, if I had to judge by the comments you can routinely read on postal employee message boards, they have little respect for their work or for the people with whom they work.

So, what does the APWU support? Well, it supports insulating itself and those it ostensibly represents from the realities of a changing world. It wants to keep the Postal Service and the world in which it exists in the same pristine condition it found it in 1970.

For instance, it insists on ensuring the retention of wage and retirement benefit COLAs. Nice if you can get it, but most within the private sector enjoy no such assurance. They want to prohibit workforce downsizing or the displacing of workers in the face of business declines or change. Nice too, but there's no one in the private sector who enjoys that either. They want employer paid retirement--defined-benefit annuities as well as paid retirement health insurance. Here again, more and more people in the private sector are finding such entitlements extraordinarily rare.

What you hear from the APWU is NO...NO...NO! The last time I heard that kind of communication it came from a niece who was two-years old. It's a behavior I'm sure she'll grow to change. Too bad I can't say the same of the APWU.