POSTAL ARTICLES:

TERRORISM
&

EDITORIALS

Oh, the party of Lincoln, it sure has changed. Lincoln once said: “If a man tells you he love America, yet hates labor; he is a liar: If a man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor he is a fool. There is no America without labor; and to fleece one is to rob the other.

”It’s bad enough that the workers took the brunt of the attack on September 11th; do we really need to attack their unions too? Let’s not forget what this war is all about, our freedom. Our hidden enemies whether they are foreign or domestic, despise our freedom. Why should you, President Bush, listen to your highly conservative counterparts in the house attack one of the most precious freedoms workers have in this country- the freedom to organize and bargain collectively in the workplace? It’s easy to lament the battles the unions have fought over this nations history. At least when the Rockefellers were hiring thugs to beat the crap out of us, we knew who the enemy was. Now we have our Texas congressmen attacking us with a fountain pen, and the next thing we know these rats are on national television telling us our airports are safe with minimum wage workers.Your spokesperson, Ari Fleicsher stated we must not federalize the security of our airports because, after all, the workers cannot be fired. Let me remind Mr. Fleicsher, who probably has never hit a time clock, that unions are not opposed to firing people. We just ask that the employer have just cause. As a postal union president for over ten years many postal employees get fired in less time (one day) than it would take to fire Mr. Fleisher, who obviously has a job for three more years. When you as our President echoed your spokesperson during your most recent radio address, as an American citizen, there was disappoint- ment. Many Americans, including myself, have refrained from criticizing you. It’s a time for solidarity; it’s time to let you do what you were elected to do, lead this country. But as we talk daily about our security at the airports and in our postal facilities, privatization is nothing more than a buzzword to cut labor costs. At $2.50 per airline ticket to cover the cost of airline security, how much will the worker see? Instead of paying minimal wages, will we get a workforce that can earn a living wage? Will they have health benefits that will allow them to remain gainfully employed and not looking for another job every month? As with most privatization schemes, the money and benefits will never reach the workers.Oh yes, the Union, the mighty, mighty Union. As our numbers decline, as many conservatives are wont to tell us, why are you so afraid of 30,000 more “dues paying members”? You and your republican counterparts don’t object to us paying our house and car payments with union wages or putting our kids through college with wages we have negotiated at the bargaining table. Perhaps it is because we are vocal, perhaps we cry about safety when our workers are exposed to unsafe working conditions, (like Anthrax) while our employer is without a clue as to how to provide a safe working environment for their employees.

The blame is not with the postal service, or the airlines. They don’t know anymore about terrorists and anthrax than our mothers do. The blame should lie with those that are evil enough to kill our citizens in ways that no one should ever imagine. But when the pilot and flight attendants unions’ speak, you are not listening. When the American postal workers union speaks, you and the rats are not listening. Our workplaces are not safe, yet we come to work and do our jobs, just like you have asked us to do. We are at war, and we need to do our part, we ask that you display that “compassionate conservatism” now. The government is in charge of our safety and we ask that you do your jobs too. When you went down to ground zero in New York, you dared not speak about privatizing the firefighters or the police or talking about the ability to hire and fire these union workers. It’s outrageous that you should do so now. Tell your Rat friends Delay and Armey to get down to the nearest post office and breathe the air. Our work goes beyond our jobs and beyond our fallen brothers and sisters, we will continue to fight to raise wages, shorten hours and provide benefits, and ensure a safe workplace. This is what we do, bring justice to the workroom floor, and we are not ashamed of it. You can tell Congressmen Delay and Armey to keep their shiny dimes, maybe next election day, we’ll have the right to fire them (at will), and they will be unemployed.

Claudia Richardson
President, American Postal Workers Union
Austin TX Area Local 299
Email: APWUAUS@aol.com

Let's get a couple things straight, right from the start. It's not heroic or brave for a postal worker to walk into a building known to be contaminated with anthrax. It's stupid.

And it's not just poor judgment for a postal manager to order employees into a building contaminated with lethal bacteria. It's criminal.

Which leads us to the Morgan mail processing and distribution center in Manhattan, NY, where a showdown is brewing between the American Postal Workers Union and the Postal Service.

The mail processing facility is contaminated with anthrax. Postal officials admitted as much on Thursday, October 25, when they announced the deadly bacteria was found on four pieces of mail sorting equipment in the building. But instead of shutting down the facility until it could be decontaminated, postal officials have cordoned off the four contaminated mail machines and told workers to keep processing mail in the rest of the building.

Under pressure from angry postal workers there, and in other parts of the country, APWU president-elect William Burrus has announced that postal workers won't work in contaminated buildings. And President William Smith of the New York Metro Postal Workers Union has instructed union attorneys to file a lawsuit in federal court Monday to shut down the Morgan mail facility.

There hasn't been a job walkout in the Postal Service since 1978, when some workers at Bulk Mail Centers on the east and west coast struck when postal contracts expired. Those strikes were quickly crushed and a number of workers were fired.

But this is a different situation. No reasonable person would expect postal workers to sort mail in a building contaminated with anthrax.

The Postal Service and the government are already under heavy criticism in the media and from the public for their leisurely response to the threat of anthrax in postal facilities, especially after two postal workers on the east coast died from inhalation anthrax at the Brentwood facility near Washington, DC.

When a letter laced with anthrax showed up in Senator Tom Daschle's mail, congressional buildings emptied faster than a house when a skunk walks in. Frightened congressmen and their staff didn't return to work until crews testing for anthrax gave the all-clear.

The Supreme Court building was closed recently when anthrax was found on a filter in a building where the court's mail is sorted. All of its 400 workers were sent home and the building is now being tested on the mere suspicion that the court is contaminated.

Is the government saying that the lives of postal workers are worth less than the lives of a congressman or a judge or their staff?

APWU President-elect William Burrus now faces his first test of leadership. Up until now, he's supported the government's and the Postal Service's handling of the anthrax crisis in the nation's postal facilities.

But unless he can convince Postmaster General Potter to act reasonably, he must now break ranks with the Postal Service. And he'll have to decide how far he's willing to go to protect not only the safety and health, but also the lives of postal workers in the Manhattan postal facility.

As he ponders that decision, he could consider what Moe Biller might have done had he been healthy enough to carry out his duties as President today.

Anyone who knows Biller can imagine him calling Postmaster General Potter and telling him something like this:

"Listen, you *bleep*, you've got a death trap in Manhattan and if you haven't got the balls to shut it down, I do.

"I'm leaving on the next shuttle to New York. I'm taking a cab to Morgan and calling Smith to have a bullhorn ready for me when I arrive. When I get there, I expect you're gonna have the building shut down. I'm then gonna make a nice little speech praising you for your concern for postal workers. But if you haven't shut that *bleeping* place down, I will."

Would Potter dare to discipline postal workers for refusing to enter a contaminated building. If he did, he wouldn't be Postmaster General for long.

The public is already upset with the double standard of protection being offered during the anthrax attacks. One for the privileged, another for postal workers. They expect us to sort and deliver the mail. They don't expect us to die for it.

Burrus, who ran for president on the Leadership Team, now faces his first test of leadership. And what's at stake is more than his reputation. What's on the line is the safety and health, indeed the very lives of postal workers in Manhattan.

Dan Sullivan <apwuflash@aol.com>
Southwest Michigan Area Local
Editor

Middle-aged but hanging tough to a middle linebacker's frame that took him as far as semipro ball with the Philadelphia Bulldogs before the draft got him in 1968, Mr. Smith, a bearded brimstone Baptist, Sunday deacon and ex-Carolina farmhand, suspects he has a sort of jihad on his hands.

His enemy? Make that enemies. First, the United States Postal Service: Mr. Smith, 57, is suing his perennial foe, alleging that it is undermining the safety of its city employees. Also the United States government, and now those wishy- washy physicians at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "They've changed their tune 50 times," he complains of their much- revised anthrax policy. Rain, snow, heat, gloom: Mr. Smith's constituency of 10,000 workers is sworn to slog through them all, but nobody ever mentioned anything about weathering anthrax.

Ask him if he thinks the postmaster general, John E. Potter, has any kind of handle on making the mails safe for messengers and recipients and his scowl becomes a smirk. "He's one confused man. He doesn't know an apple from an orange."

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the city's post- disaster guardian angel, has let Mr. Smith down, too. "He's on the side of the Postal Service!" he hollers. It is apparent that if you're not with President Smith, you're against him. Sounds familiar.

He doesn't mean to yell, yet wishes his interviewer would: in the heat of "the big battlefield" with the Postal Service, he hasn't had time to get new batteries for his hearing aid. (Both eardrums were punctured in Vietnam.) He hasn't had time to get to his doctor to have his sugar diabetes checked, or to take an anthrax test, either. He can't be in two places at once, and suing the government in federal court this week to shut down the contaminated Morgan Station, where four sorting machines tested positive for anthrax last week, takes precedence.

Nor has he had time to open the mail in his studiedly impersonal office at 350 West 31st Street — bare walls, zero memorabilia, a banquet-sized desk completely covered by neatly stacked paperwork. Hence the postal pileup on a circular table where two union workers wearing see-through blue gloves are attempting to reduce the clutter. Some is pressing business, some not.

There's even "junk mail" (his description) addressed to his predecessor, Josie McMillan, ousted by Mr. Smith in 1999 after a challenge that began in 1997 and went to court in 1998. Mr. Smith sold the last of his family property in Scotland Neck, N.C., to come up with the $13,000 required to finance his campaign. After running on an anti- fat-cat, anti-establishment platform, the first thing he did was cut the presidential salary from $142,000 to $95,000.

"The president of the union is nothing but a servant," asserts Mr. Smith, a postal worker since 1976. (He was in maintenance, never a mail carrier.) "I made $47,000 when I was on the work floor, and if I can't live off $95,000, then I need to starve."

MORNINGS he hauls himself out of bed in pitch blackness in Linden, N.J., where he lives with his wife, Barbara, catches the 4:36, clocks in by 5:15, runs a quick broom across the employees' lounge if he spies any crumbs (he's a neatnik), then puts on protective gloves and a surgical mask before getting a jump on his correspondence. That last bit is a recent addition to his routine.

"I don't take chances," he deadpans. "The Postal Service might send some anthrax to me, the way they hate my guts."

Even before the machines at Morgan tested positive for anthrax spores, Mr. Smith demanded that the station be shut down. He has advised Morgan's 5,500 workers not to report until their building is certified anthrax-free and scoffed at the Postal Service's offer to supply 7,000 employees with antibiotics without first testing them for anthrax exposure. So far, there have been no reports of a Morgan employee testing positive. He claims the economics of keeping open a station that moves 12 million pieces of mail daily is taking precedence over human lives.

"I realize that Morgan employees are not Supreme Court justices or senators or Congress, but they are God's children; they have the same right to life as the a-ris-to-crats," he says, each syllable a mini-indictment. "No one piece of mail is worth a human life."

Mr. Smith grew up poor in rural North Carolina, where his grandparents owned the family farm and his father hired out as a sharecropper. There was always more work than money. He hoed the fields at age 6, and by 12 tended the livestock, hogs and cattle; he remembers winning blue ribbons at the local 4-H fairs with his cows. His mother was a disciplinarian who thumped more than just her Bible. "Spare the rod, spoil the child; she believed that," he says.

After high school, he followed his older brothers to New Jersey, stoked the furnaces in a refinery, played football whenever and wherever. He was closing in on a pro tryout when the Army sent him to Vietnam. Injured three times, he came home after nine months with scars and a medical discharge. He joined the postal system in Jersey City at the behest of the Veterans Administration; he recalls it as a "take the job or lose your benefits proposition."

He took it.

Doctors reported that many people are asking for flu vaccine in the mistaken belief that if they develop flu-like symptoms after they have been vaccinated, they will know they have anthrax. The early symptoms of anthrax resemble the flu.

In reality, experts said, taking a flu shot will not help diagnose anthrax, because numerous viruses cause flu-like symptoms.

"We want to separate the idea that getting vaccinated [for flu] increases or decreases your fears about getting anthrax," said Keiji Fukuda, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "When people get vaccinated against influenza they have decreased their chances of getting the flu, but they can get infected by cold viruses."

..Already, the nine cases have yielded valuable lessons. Treatment involving a combination of three antibiotics appears to help contain the infection, doctors said, and a CAT scan of the chest has been the test most likely to help clinch the diagnosis.

Above all, doctors familiar with the cases emphasized that physicians who suspect that a person might have inhalational anthrax should do blood cultures and start intravenous treatment with the appropriate antibiotics immediately.

"Once you suspect anthrax, you have no time to think," said Carlos Omenaca, a Miami specialist who treated Ernesto Blanco in Florida, the second case. "You first treat and then think."

Four of nine people with the disease have died. Some, such as Joseph P. Curseen of Maryland and Kathy T. Nguyen of New York, died within a few days of becoming ill, while Blanco, at 73 the oldest patient, was sick for a week before seeking treatment, yet is the only one who has gone home from the hospital.

(Dr. Susan) Matcha's two patients -- Leroy Richmond of Stafford County and a second worker, both from the District's Brentwood postal facility -- remain in serious but stable condition at Inova Fairfax Hospital. Neither has suffered the catastrophic, downhill course described in medical articles about the disease. Both are able to eat, to breathe on their own and to talk with their families, said Susan Whyte Simon, a Kaiser spokeswoman.

Early symptoms in recent cases have not always matched the "flu-like" picture of fever, muscle aches, headache, cough and chest discomfort. The State Department mail handler being treated at Winchester Medical Center came to the emergency room with a fever, nausea and muscle aches but no cough or breathing difficulty, said Terry Sinclair, the hospital's medical director. He was initially sent home on a regimen of ciprofloxacin pills. When an alert laboratory technician spotted anthrax bacteria on a microscope slide of the man's blood, the patient was admitted to the hospital and given intravenous antibiotics.

One of Matcha's cases, the second worker from the District's Brentwood postal facility, had a fever and a terrible four-day headache. Fearing meningitis, Kaiser staff sent him to Inova Fairfax Hospital for a spinal tap. That test yielded a normal finding -- but X-rays revealed telltale enlarged lymph nodes in his chest, as well as pneumonia.

Blanco, the Florida patient, initially appeared to have an ordinary case of bacterial pneumonia. However, he worked at American Media Inc. with Robert Stevens, the first person to die in the ongoing anthrax outbreak.

"I said to myself, 'I don't think he has it, but if he does and I stop the antibiotics [for anthrax], he'll die. So I'm going to continue,' " recalled Omenaca, an infectious disease specialist at Miami's Cedars Medical Center.

Richmond, Matcha's first anthrax case, looked surprisingly well when she first examined him, the physician recalled. But within a few hours, samples of his blood being cultured in the hospital's laboratory tested positive for the cigar-shaped anthrax bacteria.

Matcha increased Richmond's dose of ciprofloxacin and added two other antibiotics, rifampin and clindamycin. Then she waited nervously for his condition to deteriorate, as the textbooks predicted it would.

"They talk about how you have this flu-like syndrome for three or four days, get a little better, then crash," she said. "We weren't really sure where we were in this cycle. [But] he sort of stayed the same."

Richmond's fever came down quickly. But fluid began to accumulate between the lungs and chest wall -- a complication medically known as pleural effusion.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Oct. 21, Matcha was called about a second postal worker, the man with the headache. Told that he worked at the Brentwood facility, she said: "Okay, let's get some blood cultures." The cultures soon were positive for the bacteria.

"I don't know what made me think anthrax, to be perfectly honest," Matcha said. "Maybe it was just that I had been seeing the other patient."

Omenaca, Blanco's doctor, didn't consider anthrax when he first examined Blanco in early October, on the patient's second day in the hospital. The mailroom clerk had been sick at home for a week with fever, a headache, a dry cough and mild confusion. A chest X-ray showed pneumonia but no enlarged lymph nodes. Omenaca started the man on two intravenous antibiotics.

Two days later, Blanco's doctors learned that he worked with Stevens. Omenaca promptly substituted ciprofloxacin for one of Blanco's antibiotics. But even when a swab of Blanco's nose tested positive for anthrax spores, Omenaca said he doubted that anthrax was the cause of his illness.

"I thought, 'This is a coincidental thing. He has pneumonia, and he's colonized with anthrax,' " Omenaca recalled.

Omenaca and Blanco's other doctors consulted with federal health experts by telephone, sometimes as often as every two hours. Because Blanco had been on antibiotics for two days by the time anthrax was suspected, his blood cultures didn't show the bacteria. Doctors had to perform multiple tests -- on blood, lung fluid and a biopsy of the lung lining -- before they finally nailed down his diagnosis.

"It was very stressful," Omenaca said. "If this was anthrax, it meant that somebody had put anthrax in that building. . . . Without the CDC, there's no way we could have made the diagnosis."

Blanco's crash came on his sixth day at the hospital. He went into shock from the effects of the toxins produced by the bacteria. His blood pressure plunged, and he was admitted to the intensive care unit. Fluid accumulated around his lungs and had to be drained through a chest tube. Gradually, over a three-week period, he recovered.

"I still don't know why he survived," Omenaca said.

Omenaca said that, since treating Blanco, he has pored over old medical books trying to discover why the case differed from the classic picture of inhalational anthrax. In a 1901 text, he read that the disease sometimes shows up as pneumonia without large lymph nodes in the chest, just as Blanco's did.

"I really look forward to having more insight on the other [recent] cases . . . to see what we can learn from those," he said. "And I hope that we are not able to do a large study."

U.S. Postmaster General John Potter said Tuesday that the Postal Service is doing everything possible to help employees.

"For 18 days, we have been working to enhance the safety of our employees and their workplaces," Potter said.

Some local postal workers said they wonder if that is true.

Jim Piggott reported that the memo...was sent out earlier this month by the plant manager at the main post office on Kings Road.

Piggott reported that the memo was only distributed to management but it addressed how the anthrax threat is being handled by the Jacksonville facility and how employees should react to it.

The first part of the memo said, "We had a report of a clerk on the caller window asking customers if they wanted gloves to pick up the mail. This is not authorized and must be stopped. It was at the general mail facility in Jacksonville."

"We are looking at the safety and well-being of employees and customers alike," post office spokesman Bill Tyler said. "We have issued gloves and masks for their protection. However, to be handing out gloves to the public, does that cross the line?"

Another part of the memo involves the health of postal workers. It said, "If employees want to be tested for anthrax exposure, they must do it at their own expense. If they test positive (which is extremely unlikely), they have to prove they contracted it at work."

Postal officials said that is the policy of the Department of Labor.

"We lifted it right off the OWCP (Web) page. It reads, 'The Office of Workman's Compensation Programs will not pay a medical bill for an exam due to potential exposure,'" Tyler said.

Postal workers who did not want to be identified told Piggott that they are concerned but could not comment further. Postal union officials also declined to comment.

Aired October 24, 2001 - 08:49   (ET) — CNN LIVE AT DAYBREAK — with Paula Zahn

TOPIC: Anthrax Investigation:

Should Post Office be Shut Down for Thorough Inspection?

Postmaster General John Potter: "We have very defined incidents in four locations around the country. I don't believe that there is a need to shut down the Postal Service. You know, life is filled with risks, and, you know, you could die crossing the street, you can die driving a car, and that's not to minimize what is going on here, we did lose two of our own, but it is to suggest that you don't shut the Postal Service down. You know, if you think about it, how would you ever start it up?"

The Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) Policy Regarding Anthrax:

The Office has received a number of inquiries regarding the workers' compensation coverage of Federal civilian employees who may have been exposed to anthrax. Generally, costs associated with preliminary testing to determine whether an employee may have experienced anthrax exposure would not be covered under workers' compensation. Services to screen for or prevent occupational diseases can be provided by the employing agency under the provisions of 5 U.S.C. 7901.

The Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) has no statutory authority to pay for routine screening or preventative services, because the Federal Employees' Compensation Act only provides for medical treatment of an actual injury or occupational disease. However, preventative care can be authorized by OWCP when there is probable exposure to a known contaminant, thereby requiring disease-specific measures against infection.

When a Federal employee tests positive for anthrax exposure, and this exposure likely occurred in the workplace, a claim can be submitted to OWCP. The Office can authorize payment for the treatment rendered to prevent illness.

Source: Office of Workers Compensation Programs Web site at:

http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/OWCP_Policy_Anthrax.htm