CUPW

Thank you Murray Dobbin for a well written piece. The middle and upper middle classes would not exist today if not for the labour movement. Basics like medical coverage, womens rights, child labour laws, etc. would be pipe dreams.
As you pointed out, unions are on the verge of extinction and they only have themselves to blame. I've worked both union and nonunion jobs for 30 years and for the last 20 years the unions have been unresponsive and silent. I'm convinced that they have become nothing more than a bunch of office workers looking out for their own asses while selling out the members on the front lines.
During the economic meltdown in 2008-2009 I got fancy high gloss mailings from my union but never once saw them on the job site while 250 members were randomly laid off. (If the boss didn't like you it didn't matter what your qualifications were).
I sincerely hope that the labour movement won't be allowed to die. But we need to get rid of those currently behind it and get some balls back into it.

A completely disingenuous

A completely disingenuous piece of propaganda!

The Post Office is a dinosaur, an expensive remnant of the nineteenth century. How many of us atually send "letters" anymore, anyway? In this age of e-mail, skype, iPads and smartphones - let alone the fax or home telephone?

And it is no good simply to say "Catherine Swift is wrong." Why is she wrong? Is she fudging the numbers? Lying? Similarly, why was Scott Walker wrong? What little he DID get through may contribute to reducing costs. And this is math, pure and simple. Numbers don't lie.

"...with a 95 per cent mandate from union members..."? OF COURSE they'd vote "yes"! They have a vested interest. Did you ask other stakeholders? The taxpaying public? Did you ask non-union workers? Did you ask all those who would like a job at the Post Office but who have been priced out by the existing high wages/pensions/benefits?

What Murray Dobbin et. al. really want is an even greater forced exaction from the private sector taxpayer. It is the private sector which generates all wealth in the first place, yet this latest exaction is somehow needed in spite of the fact that the antiquated white elephant in question faces no competition.

There is an easier way to solve this coming budgetary tsunami than by "getting rid of public unions". You just make them compete. End their monopoly privileges.

Ever since Gov Scott Walker

Ever since Gov Scott Walker staged his attack on public sector employees, every employer now seems to thing they have the god given right to attack workers wages, benefits and pensions. They don't feel they even have to justify their position, they just want it and we should just give it up.

We've all stood by and watched the right wing dissmantle our country for the past two decades and have done nothing about it. There is no easy stuff to give away any more, nobody is left unaffected.

I suggest it is well past time to for a national strike to rid ourselves of corporate friendly governments, but we just elected a majority Harper governement, the peoples will has spoken...

I was a member of a postal

I was a member of a postal union when Lyin Brian scabbed the place. The PO brought in a few Hong Kong cops to follow us around. They were not interested in collective bargaining, they were out to crush people.IT's no fun having a senior cop read an injunction to me, but they did and we still eventually got a settlement.A lot of the problems are caused by untrained junior supervisors, who do exactly what they are told, or the lose their position. We did a health and safety tour, with Labour Canada on the plant. It took a week, and the result was over 170 safety violations. Asbestos falling from a ceiling, PCB stored illegally in the lower level of the building. Not a pleasant group to work with but everyone wants a job. Similar issues at the other many buildings ran by Canada Post in that city. The workers need all the support of citizens it can muster. "The struggle continues" is and was the rally cry of the unions.

Important Info. Missing

When will someone report exactly what postal workers earn?
And what do these workers do? Sort mail? Deliver it?
There's been lots of gaps in the reporting of this story. Before making it about Harper, et. al, fill in the blanks please.

Don't forget Michael

Don't forget Michael Campbell is spueing the same verbal garbage as Catherine Swift. I heard her on one of Michael's programmes about a month ago and they were bouncing off of each other on how terrible unions are. (Unions hates business) They also commenting that pensions are far to rich for Canada and they should be done away with. What do they want? People not to retire and drop dead at their work site? I would love to see Ken Gorgetti or Jim Sinclair 'wade into' those two and give them a verbal thrashing.

Power of Collective Action

The real irony is that labour groups are simply trying to do what corporate monopolies do: band together to have more influence on public policies.

And the hypocrisy of the corporate oligarchs couldn't be worse. THEY get to work together secretly behind closed doors, but working people don't. THEY get to take more and more stuff from others; working people don't. THEY get to pretend they are the majority; working people are.

So the hypocrisy goes on, and working people are beaten into the ground, and the minority elites take what they want.

Great coverage from one of Canada's tireless authors. We are privileged to read Mr. Dobbin's clarion voice.

When Harper invokes the

When Harper invokes the "deficit" to justify his attacks on the financial dignity of the people, the best response would be to challenge him on why he continues to allow our money supply to be printed and controlled by private banks. Challenge him on why he allows the government's bonds to be purchased by private banks with newly printed money, rather than bought by our own Bank of Canada, a move that would be truly democratic. If our masters invoke "inflation", challenge them on why they allow the private banks to charge such exorbitant interest, since interest is the principal cause of inflation.

We are under attack and we should fight back with the truth about money and banking.

It is hard to support the postal workers

They do great work and we depend on them but the fact is that postal traffic is declining and the Post Office has to reduce the level of services. Just look at the Tyee if you need a reason why we are buying fewer stamps. Running a very small business, I invoice exclusively by e-mail these days, never by snail-mail.

Postal workers - like teachers - must accept change. Sorry but the reality is that we can't afford to provide lifelong careers in a shrinking market.

It has very little to do with politics and everything to do with change. Just because things are changing, that does not make the people who have to manage it evil.

If you haven't heard yet, the newspaper industry is going through the wringer, too. I blame myself for that one. We get two free thrice-weeklies that add up to hundreds of kilos of paper every year. We can't stop them from coming, but we sure don't need to add to the load. There are only so many trees.

To Kreditanstalt

here we go again. If the Postal Service is such a dinosaur, then why do we get so upset whever it is disrupted, for any reason including inclement weather? The Postal service is just that, a "SERVICE" and as such is provided to supply a need, often in places that it would not be supplied by a private sector company. Can you imagine a private company providing delivery at a reasonable cost to places as remote as Telegraph Creek BC, or Goose Harbour Nfld? It would not happen. Would Sun TV even think about replacing CBC in Nunavit, unless there was a lot of money to be made? Should all the teachers in Canada be privatized? A service should be just that, a service, and should not be subject to the the vagrancies of the competitive market place. Such services can, and should be monopolies, and run by governments either directly or with crown corporations.

That was the first point. Next, it has been proven over and over again that workers wages are never the culprit in exhorbitant deficits. The average worker in British Columbia, even if unionized earns less than
fifty thousand dollars a year. The average executive salaries are from twice that, to hundreds of times that. David Hahn negotiated a salary of over a million dollars per year, plus benefits to run BC Ferries, and we all know what a schmozzle he has made of that. Oil Company and Bank execs routinely earn that much and more. The present recession was certainly not caused by postal workers making too much money.

Unions do not exist just to provide wages to workers. Negotiations are done to provide decent safety and working conditions, job security, and specific rules for how the workers are to be treated. Favouritism and nepotism are limited when everyone has to be treated fairly. Working conditions that are now the norm throughout the world did not come about without an enormous struggle by workers who banded together to fight for their right to be treated fairly. Wages themselves had little to do with that struggle, despite everything that the opponents of unionism try to tell us. Contracts for wages and working conditions are negotiated every two, or three years, or longer, but the workers through the unions are always active on a day to day basis, dealing with issues that most often have very little to do with money.

Finally, if you are so enamoured with cyberspace, then you are quite welcome to trust all of your banking and personal information to the internet hackers. Personally, I will trust my information to my postal delivery person.

Working Class Watchword for The Time...

We are living through another "special time" within Casino Capitalism, a fragile, greed driven ruling class Beast at the best of times, when the entire working class needs to trust the judgement of each other (groups), and support each other acting in their own defence against "the system". This is the simple fact.

The real estate and hedging bubble has finally burst on capitalism, or in some places is still in the process of bursting... over attempts to rebuild the bubble still going on... and as is always the case in such a time, the ruling class has turned especially viciously upon the working class, and expects it to pay for the crimes of Casino Capitalism. (Just like the major capitalist powers expect the Palestinians to pay for the WW2 crimes of European Fascism against the Jews.) To them, it's always the "other guys" fault. The other guy always being the working class, or somebody/some group weaker and poorer.

To them it is a time for bogeymen and scapegoat creation. (As they squirrel their fortunes away or still "hedge" their bets protectively in gold etc., in the hopes that capitalism will yet rise again like the Phoenix from the ashes of its own self-created destruction path across the planet. As it has successfully been able to do across its 200+ year history to here.) Its scapegoats were once the Jews and Communists of course, now it is still a more amorphous "terrorism" and Al Qaeda bogeyman... though the times are still evolving and closer to home bogeymen will likely yet be created. Like striking workers.

In any case, capitalism has fallen back to its baseline instinct, to explain away the economic and planetary devastation it has created, and it is everyone's fault but their's. Which means a new Solidarity Time for all the working class stratas is again emerging... starting here with Postal Workers. Keeping in mind, that a victory for one group of workers sets in motion the forces and socio-political climate from which all, even the weakest elements of the working class, can wind up making gains, organized or unorganized.

Solidarity is the watchword of the time... in my view.

And this time, we may just hit it lucky, and find the means and wherewithal to finally end capitalism... and create a more truly "democratic" and "co-operative" economic and social order. :-)

I'm delighted that there is a strike

It will remind people of the bad old days when people actually depended on "snail mail", and we were held hostage by these bozos on a regular basis.

If my prayers are answered, the Harper government will notice people's anger, and use the occasion to end Canada Post's monopoly on first class mail.

Then we can let them sink or swim in the free market, and welcome Canada Post employees back to the real world.

In response to Ramona777

Postal employee rates are easily obtained on the web.

Postal Service Mail Carrier - $23.85/hr.
Customer Service Representative - $21.64/hr.
Postal Service Clerk - $23.94/hr.
Maintenance Technician - $26.68/hr.
Millwright - $28.63/hr.
Operations Supervisor - $27.86/hr.

My understanding is that supervisory positions are supported by a different union than CUPW.

I worked for a short time as a postal carrier starting at $22.46/hr.. I earned every cent in my opinion as the job was physically and sometimes mentally challenging with heavy time constraints.

Unfortunately I had to quit as I didn't get enough hours to live on and it was clear that it could take many years before I could get on as a permanent employee.

An opportunity

"While Canada Post is arm's length from the government a successful rollback of contract items (retiree benefits and sick leave are also under attack)..."

This is one of the keys to a more appropriate bargaining structure for everyone. Retiree benefits are something funded by the national government, but costs are entirely under provincial control. This makes it impossible for either the business to estimate costs, or the union to manage a shared allotment of the benefits. It's long past time that retiree benefits were abandoned in favour of more income in the general pension fund, and that individual locals negotiate heatlh insurance with local (read: provincial) health care insurers such as Blue Cross, which is a worker-cooperative-style health insurer. It's not the best, but it provides maximum benefits at low cost, with any profits going to reduce future costs, not shareholder profits.

The advantage to this is that the responsibility for cutting health care benefits for everyone - worker, retiree, student, whoever - then rests entirely with the province, and the worker, the retiree, the student and the union can bring the appropriate pressure to bear on the party responsible. Here in BC, retiree benefits are being cut in defined-benefit pension plans despite having all kinds of money in the account, simply because the provincial governments are de-listing more and more services formerly covered, such as eye exams and physiotherapy.

Unfortunately, retirees and students are suffering the most, and you know who gets the shortest stick there....

This way, not only can Canada Post allocate a resonable sum for benefits for retirees, but the private corporations responsible for administering retiree benefits will now lose a source of exportable profits to their head offices domiciled wherever. I'm not against them, but competition in insurance makes no sense if everyone is using the same set of actuarial tables. The only difference could possibly be.... profit. Anything else is merely a Ponzi scheme.

Sick leave is yet another thing that could be put over to the union's control. Let the corporation allocate a suitable, negotiated sum for sick leave (based on statistical averages for business) to the union's good and welfare fund and let the union's fund take care of those who need more from it. The brotherhood has a closer connection to the actual needs of its workers and knows better how to administrate sick funds based on actual need. The union also has the ability to grow those funds like a pension account by investing in union-owned and operated enterprises, which, for the most part, are remarkably successful. And, contrary to popular belief, there is considerable financial acumen and ability in the ranks of the brotherhood of all workers - and not just for popsicle stands.

contracting out?

"Laying off even thousands of federal employees will actually do little to get rid of the deficit."

And the work still has to be done. As provincial health care employers are finding out, paying private companies to do it results in only minimal savings, as a lot of extra tasks formerly done by the "nearest employee" are now not done, or done at extra (contracted) cost.

Average wage in Canada

For those who continue to believe that this strike is wage directed I would like to point out that the average hourly wage in Canada is $24.81, above that of the majority of Canada Postal workers.

Sadly, right-wing propoganda has convinced many Canadians that unions are a drain on our economy but they fail to acknowledge that without unions all private sector worker incomes would be at the mercy of corporate management and workers rights would be non-existent. There must be a balance between corporate profit and the ability of employees to have job security, a living wage, and respect in the workplace. Unions have brought about these minimal requirements not only for union members but for employees as a whole.

Unfortunately, corporate greed and business friendly governments have eroded unions over in the recent past which partly explains why families require two incomes to support a household, why a smaller and smaller number of people earn a larger and larger portion of income and why income levels have been falling further behind the cost of living in this country.

When will the public recognize that those in charge rarely conduct business to favour the average Canadian employee?

kreditanstalt

"he Post Office is a dinosaur, an expensive remnant of the nineteenth century. How many of us atually send "letters" anymore, anyway? In this age of e-mail, skype, iPads and smartphones - let alone the fax or home telephone?"

I'm surprised at you! Surely you know the only things that are sent through insecure, unverifiable channesl such as e-mail etc., are documents that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things?

My parents will never learn to properly use e-mail, never mind store records of it for themselves properly, even though I set up a computer for them years ago. How will dad read his magazine? Mom her pension from a foreign country? Keep records of their bills?

If you want to talk about alternative service delivery methods, esepcially when we're all moving to big cities which should lower the average cost of item delivery, not to mention making neighbourhood mail stations more acceptable, then we've something to talk about. But, a dinosaur? Hardly. Direct marketing, a $300 million business with $6 billion in impact would die overnight as costs doubled or more.

fish-counter

"Sorry but the reality is that we can't afford to provide lifelong careers in a shrinking market."

Your evidence of this is....?

Sooke Is The Dogpatch Mentality...

"Then we can let them sink or swim in the free market, and welcome Canada Post employees back to the real world." Sooke

Only in your version, or more accurately, capitalism's version of the "real world". (Your extreme reactionary views supporting the ruling status quo are very familiar here, Sooke, from you and your kind.)

The reality for "working people " is, if you are not making "at least" $25/hr right now, you are barely living at all... if your ambition is to enjoy life in addition to work, have a home, leisure to enjoy and access to a "reasonable" standard of living.

These "free marketers" of Casino Capitalism keep saying they can make it on their own, but in reality take all the government hand-outs, tax breaks, research grants and other freebies made available to them by the Conservative Capitalist State. Then you all whine interminably if anyone in the working class gets anything other than minimum wage... which minimum wage laws the supporters of the so-called "free market" are even against.

Sooke's views are everywhere of course, in the prevailing capitalist free "media market". It's part of the attack against the working class going on. To which there is only one "real" response... Kick ass and shut the fuggers down. Defend yourselves and organize against the "free market system". We need a "people's market" in its place, that will meet the needs of working folks over those of the ruling elites and their stooges.

a perfect example

The opinion of Kreditanstaldt above is a perfect example of corporate thinking of today. The big greedy managers simply hate people and the cost of labour. It is never cheap enough and they are always trying to undermine everyone in order to cut their wages and benefits. Squeezing more blood. That is why so many jobs have gone overseas where exploiting the poor is more profitable. Getting rid of unions helps exploit labour so much easier.

The post office may have cited a reduction of 17% per household use of letter mail, it also said that there is an increase in parcels (internet shopping) and bulk mailouts. There is still a big need for a post office and to say that it is a dinosaur is just factually wrong. The private sector by way of courier companies are already competing with the post office and seem to be thriving quite well. Rural delivery has been done by private contracts for years, and the pay is really bad. I believe it would be a big mistake to throw away our Canadian postal service and wholeheartedly support those workers.

I was wondering what their

I was wondering what their wages are too, but if it's in the $22-28/hr range as noted above, that's not a lot these days. Especially if you live in a city as expensive as Vancouver!

Thanks for the rates Karen

The one who is most underpaid is the operations supervisor. Otherwise, those pay scales ain't that bad.

Zalm: the evidence is everywhere

How can we pay teachers when there are no kids to teach? How can the Post Office expand when the volume is down? Stop being obtuse. You must live on a different planet from the rest of us.

The Teacher-on call list in Nanaimo was closed last time I heard. I am sure the Post Office has a hiring list too. If you want to pretend it is still 1970, go ahead. For the rest of us, it is 2011.

I am proud of my union!

I am closing in on my 12th year of being a Postie. Currently I am a letter carrier in Burnaby, but I have held many positions in CPC, including driving the Step-Vans, and right up to 5 ton. I have also worked on the plant floor. In my opinion, as humble as it may be, is that the hardest job at Canada Post is being a letter carrier.

I am hearing the majority of media reports as stating that money is the issue. Please believe me when I tell you that it is not. $24.00 dollars per hour may sound like a lot, but when you look at it annually, we are shoulder to shoulder with the rest of average Canada. One of the major issues concerns health and safety. CPC is already online with a machine that will come damn close to sequencing our routes by address. Letter Carriers do sort their on mail, so to have a machine to do it for you sounds great right?? Wrong! CPC is going to a two bundle method of delivering mail. Dividing out letter mail, with oversize items. CPC says because the USPS has been doing it for years, that it is successful and a good thing. If you live around Metro-Town, or in the Westend, then you know about how many different flyers you get every day. So now we have more than 2 bundles. By the way, all that paper is extremely heavy. Now throw in some keys, your scanner for bar coded mail items, and a bottle of water. Feel like a pack mule yet? We suffer from many aliments. We live with knee pain, back issues, sore shoulders, planter faciatis. Of and before I forget, lets add in all sorts of weather. Monsoon season? Tough. People depend on us. This new system Canada Post is ramming down our throats, means more time on the street, and because the machine sorts my mail for me, I have now lost the control on HOW or WHAT order to deliver my route. Making it easier to alleviate my physical load. I may ok money for what I do, but I am far more concerned in being able to use my body for the next 40 years. Inside workers also suffer. Lack of rotations, doing same job all the time. Standing in place on rubber mats that lay on concrete. Repetitive motions leading to long term injury. There are joint CPC-Union health and safety committees, and all of these concerns are well documented. So for CPC to pretend that these issues are not-negotiable is insulting.

So I am proud to be a Union Member, and I am especially proud to be a member of CUPW. It ain't perfect, and I may not agree with all of our policies.

Ask some of the elderly, or the lower income earners in your communities if they want to see Canada Post abolished. Sometimes seeing us is the highlight of their day, or the only way the can receive communication. Not everyone has a computer.

End polite rant here.

Lauri: thanks for the reality check

Thank you for your hard work in providing a vital service and I hope the union manages to win useful concessions but I think the strike mechanism is the wrong way to go to win public support.

My biggest beef with the postal service is the amount of junk mail you have to deliver. Most of it goes into the fire. Sorry about that.

Right Sentiments, Wrong Example

Protection of Labour cannot long extend to maintaining functions which are no longer economically feasible. How much support should be given to railway firemen or buggy upholsterers? Life moves on and occupations move with it.
At the same time, it would appear to me to be the better part of reason during a transition period to let attrition handle the matter and that the delivery schedule be gradually reduced. What harm would be done to the public if mail were delivered only every other day? Or later, once a week. Perpetuating a service which is moribund due to the availability of better alternatives by continuing to hire folks but pay them less seems to me to be bad business.

Bang On!

Thank you Murray Dobbin for gathering the facts and seeing the bigger picture - that this is about democracy and the power of unions to uphold the right to collective bargaining in order to ensure high standards in the workplace when it comes to wages, benefits, employment security and health and safety, and for recognizing that this benefits all Canadians - workers, unionized and non-unionized, business owners, and our communities.

This is the kind of balanced and objective journalism we can count on from The Tyee, and in this way you are in a class of your own. Other mainstream media publications make a mockery of themselves by their biased and unfair reporting, particularly when it comes to the Canada Post/CUPW story.

Thank you for the support!

Fish-counter

No kids to teach? Every district I know has an on-call list for sick calls - my sister's on one. They may not be accepting any more new hires, but that's because so many schools have just laid off a whole bunch of teachers - Vancouver has laid off permanently more than 100. And I'd be very surprised if there was a classroom in the province that had the recommended number of kids in it, except for the one-roomers in Kispiox or something. My sister relieved for a week in a class with 31 Grade 4s in it. Perhaps you can tell me how that equals "no kids to teach"?

What you're talking about "the post office expanding" for I don't know. Nothing at all in the article makes any reference ot that. It's all about roll-backs, lower starting wages, management oversight and safety committees. It's the easiest thing in the world to get rid of employees when you have too many - layoff notices take place effective within 2 weeks, and then they're someone else's problem. No company or government department I know keeps employees one week longer than absolutely necessary unless they think they might need them again in the near future, and might have a hard time finding and training a replacement. People are let go at the hospitals I work at all the time as needs change. I've seen positions not filled by attrition and the balance of the work covered off by contractors and lower-paid workers as managers try to stay ahead of the employement curve. And some of them have some very sophisticated tools for doing so.

When you're ready to argue facts instead of insults, c'mon back. Til then, this has been a waste of time.

Effeciency?

As I understand it, if I mail a letter from my town on Vancouver Island to the guy next door, it is re-routed to either Victoria or Vancouver.
The idea being that those centres have expensive machinery that can sort the mail and "save" man hours.

That is typical management thinking!

So now my letter travels for 2-3 days and I am lucky to get it delivered next door within the week!

@Barryeng...just one

@Barryeng...just one thing...

Why should I, as a B.C. taxpayer living hundreds of miles away, be forced at gunpoint to pay for (inefficient) postal service to Telegraph Creek or Goose Harbour?

Information, please

I agree with Ramona777. Let's have some real data on how much postal workers make, how much they want to make, etc. etc. Enough with the rhetoric.

somebody asked what postal

somebody asked what postal workers do?
MSE's are truck drivers from step vans up to semi trailers. They also deliver parcels, Priority Post and haul the bags of sorted mail picked up from stations after the carries have sorted it each day.
Inside workers manually sort over size mail and parcels, each working from a case showing addresses in their area. They forward mail to other cities towns and countries plus of course Rural Routes.

Maintenance workers maintain the equipment including the electronic equipment
Letter carriers do the final sort from their station, then carry it door to door. They carry a bag or bag with weight to 35 pounds and on their route pick up small bags with the mail they have sorted earlier, in a number of relay boxes, that was dropped there by the MSE Drivers.

The supervisors belong to APOC and like to claim they are not a union. They call it an association. without it, many of those supervisors couldn't hold down the job. It's a lot more complicated than some folks thing. I support the union as they do collective bargaining with an employer who wants to get rid of most of them. Time and motion studies have existed for years which affect all outside workers.

Pensions

Michael Campbell and Catherine Swift are corporate lackeys, who deal in truthiness and nothing else. For example, have you ever heard either of these twits discuss the $35B taken from the federal employee pension plan by the federal government? Have you ever heard either of them discuss the detriment to Canada of shipping raw crude and logs out of Canada. No way, only corporate tax cuts will work in their small minds. Have either ever pondered why unions were created in the first? I guess not, since it was to protect workers from corporate mouthpieces like them.

Safety and integrity

To all of you who are bitching about postal workers and how much money they make or don't make - let me remind you of couple of things airheads....
1. You can't send everything over the internet.
2. Not everyone in this world use computers - thus they send letters
3. What do you do if your family send you a letter from another country that you never receive?
4. What happens you send something to someone that is important and you have a choice to pay $100 by UPS or pay $25 by Canada Post? Which option you choose?

The integrity and the security of the mail system is at stake here. Got it? It must stay in public hands! And for that I support every postal worker and I strongly hope that they will prevail. For the sake of order, democracy and sanity.

The reality - less mail volume

The reality is that mail volume is dropping. I saw a story a few months back about how lettermail volume is down some 15% and Canada Post is restructuring (i.e. shrinking to adapt). It was inevitable considering what the growth of the Internet and online services is doing to newspapers, television and retailing. We just have not been hearing numbers before.

My wife is with the feds and she said lots of eyebrows were raised when the Harper government said it would trim the federal public service by a third through ATTRITION.

If you think the postal strike is a battle, I predict you ain't seen nothing yet!!

Kreditanstalt

So is the school system.........
But I suppose you are one of those who "thinks" schools and postal systems should turn a profit. Then, using your "logic", the same could be said of the military. Demand that organization to turn a profit, to "justify" it's existence.

As for you "paying" for mail service to the "Telegraph Creeks" of this country, well then, why should I pay when you get sick? Why should I pay when you use a road or sidewalk?

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