Forgive my all-caps madness, but we are unbelievably pumped to announce that for the first time, the junk mail industry has been foiled in its attempt to deny Americans the choice to stop junk mail.
Yes, my friends, the San Francisco Do Not Mail Resolution passed–by a 9-2, veto-proof majority.
Now pardon me while I dance around my office. I was just at the hearing, where I had to keep myself somewhat composed.
<dancedancedance>
OK, I’m back. Having worked on the national Do Not Mail campaign since it launched last March, I’ve seen a lot happen with the campaign. Here are the highlights of this particular chapter of the campaign:
- The tireless support and energy of San Francisco Do Not Mail supporters; (Members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors were shocked by the amount of emails and calls they received over the last few weeks!)
- The leadership of the resolution’s sponsor Ross Mirkarimi and the steadfastness of the other 8 SF Supervisors who voted for the resolution in the face of intense pressure from the junk mail industry and the U.S. Postal Service; (Send a thank you message to Supervisor Mirkarimi!)
- The potential for all the places Do Not Mail–you, me, ForestEthics, and champions of common sense everywhere– can go from here!
So now you tell me: Where do we go from here?
wow in this time of economic crisis you people can still think of ways to take jobs away from those that are still lucky enough to have jobs. Now with the do not mail campaign this will cut mail volume of the post office by up to 50% from an already failing business. Looks like usps, who is the second largest employer in the nation, will have to start laying off employees for the first time in history. Thanks for not helping the economy and putting more fellow americans on the streets. I’m sure there are a lot of people that think the post office will not resort to lay offs but I’m telling everyone now that it will happen and all thanks to the do not mail campaign. Junk mail harms no one. If you don’t like it then recycle it. But in these times of financial crisis we should all be working together instead of trying to take more jobs away.
Why is it that fear cripples so many people?
Instead of thinking of the negative side of everything why not get creative and see how you can benefit from the new industries and technologies available?
Here’s some perspective – in developing countries children die every day by the tens of thousands because of dirty drinking water. THEY LITERALLY ARE DRINKING MUD FILLED WITH PARASITES.
Stop crying a river about a few thousand jobs when millions around the world suffer and die without every knowing the comforts you’re trying to hold onto.
What irritates me is that people go off on a power struggle about jobs and money. Why is that in america money is the only thing? I as a consumer could care less if the usps dies or got very small and stamps were $1 or more. So what – I don’t send hardly any mail anymore now that things are more and more electronic. So I have to use an occasional $1 stamp for that occasional non-electrontic thing. So what, it’s only $1. Well at least I don’t have to send it UPS for $4. The USPS subsidizes the cost of stamps with junk mail. They created their own mess. So it is not working out for them. The time spent on the phone opting out, and just dealing with it, or do I just pay $1 or more for stamps? I’d just pay for more for stamps and be done with it.
Tina,
I understand why you are upset. Job loss is on everyone’s minds right now. However, I would just like to point out to you, respectfully, that junk mail does in fact harm everyone in an indirect way. The amount of trees cut down for junk mail every year (100 million!) and the amount of carbon emissions made by processing those trees into mail and delivery of the mail greatly impacts the health of natural systems on which humans rely on in very intricate ways. If we continue to exploit the very thing which enables us to have our comfortable lifestyles in the United States, we will eventually have to deal with the consequences of our actions, which are expected to be dire. My point is this: without an environment that is healthy enough to support the 6.8 billion people on earth, everything else becomes small potatoes. We will not have the luxury of jobs and a stable food source and a stable income if our society breaks under the strain of an earth that cannot support our economic activities.
I agree with you that workers losing their jobs puts a lot of American families through unfair hardship. But I’m just trying to point out that the people at Forest Ethics are not trying to make people lose jobs, they are trying to help curb climate change by reducing superfluous manufacturing. Climate change will affect everyone…you, me, poor, rich, people with jobs, and people without jobs the world over. Looking out for the environment IS looking out for fellow Americans and world citizens.
Perhaps a really good way to focus your frustration would be to encourage the government to recruit the unemployed and train them to work in green jobs. In that way, workers are employed and contributing to the advancement and progress of our nation, and it would help America to rise to a leadership position in the search for sustainable business methods. I think there is a huge need for people who are as passionate as you are on that front. Thanks for your time!
watch stamps go up to $1.00 something ! congrats ,now the p.o. will be out of business too!! lets all be out of work!! get it? didn’t expext the p.o. would lose business?? watch for what you wish!! from a p.o. worker..i quit this club!where do you work? can i kick you out of your job?
right on! seems like P.O. workers are the only ones that understand the effect this will have. everyone thinks the government will just bail us out and no one will have to be laid off but the truth is the government will not help us because we are not funded by them. thousands of post office workers will lose their jobs all because some people don’t know how to recycle unwanted mail. even if there’s no junk mail it’s not going to stop trees from being cut down for paper.
Honestly, postal workers who believe that their contribution to the environmental scourge that is junk mail equals an honorable profession need to read a book about climate change and pollution. When cities pass smoking bans on restaurants people just like you cry out about lost jobs in North Carolina and restaurant/bars that will go out of business. The jobs in North Carolina that supported getting kids addicted to a killer habit should be eliminated, and the restaurants found that a whole new set of customers that previously avoided their establishment now patronize it and their businesses boomed.
There appears to be no group of workers in the world with a greater sense of entitlement than postal workers. I love my mail man, but I still think there should be fewer of them, and I am confident that the mailers will find other less damaging ways to market to their customers. As for protecting the pensions of the postal workers that is not a problem. Congress already knows that the USPS is losing nearly a billion dollars a month and will never be able to make good on its $50B unfunded pension obligation. It knows that the US taxpayer will have to cover it, and by the time USPS finally implodes or is privatized the bill will be several times greater than the Detroit bail-out.
So, Ruth, you don’t have to worry about kicking other people out of their jobs, they are already paying plenty of taxes for environmental clean-up that postage stamps do not cover (the USPS doesn’t pay taxes like other businesses do), and we’ll all be paying more taxes to cover the pension obligations to USPS workers in the future because it isn’t ever going to come from the ratepayers.
Tina, your assertion that the USPS is not funded by the US Government is patently wrong. The Postal Act of 2006 transferred $30B of its pension obligation to the federal pension program. It is currently in debt to the Federal Fund Bank well over $10B, headed to insolvency by September of this year as it tacks on another $600M-$800M a month in losses. At this rate our children will be paying for the interest costs of the USPS bail out for generations, and they won’t even know what a postal letter used to look like except for old time TV shows.
how do compare delivering mail to smoking? I didn’t know that mail could kill. I guess we can’t expect any kind of sense coming from a person that doesn’t really know the insides and outs of the postal system. I hope your job is in much jeopardy as ours is. Its great to see that there’s still people out there that actually want fellow Americans to lose their jobs just so the economy can sink into an even deeper hole.
Call Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Oprah and any other business owner and ask them if they ever worry about being kicked out of their job.
Learn to fend for yourself – it’s the new type of JOB.
The economy is where it is at because of #1 greed – why not start a company and take back some of that wealth and do some good – like hire people.
Lastly new technologies are replacing old institutions and tasks. Take for instance the washing machine. You can look at the negative and say “many maids were put out of work” or you can look at the positive and say “many more jobs were created because of the manufacturing, research, etc. to make better machines”
What about the amount of time it give back to parents who couldn’t afford a maid? How long would it take you to wash your laundry if you had to do it all by hand – let’s not even mention hanging it out to dry.
Ruth & Tina, if your jobs hinge on the continued processing and delivery of unwanted and unrequested junk mail to millions of people, I sympathize with you, but I do not support you. I do not doubt that some percentage of postal workers’ jobs would be affected by a reduction in junk mail. However, the kind of attitude you proffer is nonsensical. It implies that we should still be supporting the proverbial “buggy whip” industry even though no one needs or wants buggy whips any more. More generally, that anyone who works for a company or an industry that downsized due to changing technology, or economic or social conditions, should not have lost their job. Should we force real estate agencies to rehire or retain all the real estate agents they had in 2006 even though the real estate market has dropped to levels not seen in decades? Should we make it illegal to pay bills online so that the Post Office can continue delivering handwritten checks?
How will either of you, personally, succeed? By being the best postal worker you can be. And if for some reason that’s not good enough, then you’ll need to find a different job. It’s not a pleasant thought, I agree, but it is reality.
The writing for snail mail has been on the wall for years, just like the auto industry.
I watched a news report where an auto worker said “ten years ago they were considering closing the plant where I work, if they do it now I don’t know what I’ll do.”
The person has had ten years to prepare – the Internet has been around in a big way since 1994 and there has been news stories about the decline in the sending of standard mail and yet people are shocked that jobs may be on the line?
Pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase!
Get your heads out of the sand or from infront of the soap-operas and realize that things have changed – do something to MAKE YOURSELF RELEVANT instead of redundant.
You know what’s going to come out of this passing? Absolutely nothing. You’ll be getting junk mail after you’re dead.
People got to stop complaining about the price of stamps. $1 to send a physical object coast to coast? That is Cheap! Look at UPS and Fedex – they want at least $4 to send something ground.
Once thing that irritates me the most is carrier walk route bulk mail. It says ECRWSS on it. Resident. Current occupent. Esspecially those fast food menus. It is unstoppable. Even if it hints at the company that printed it, often they will not stop it from coming to my house. If any such do not mail laws come in, I can only hope and prey that it includes the carrier walk route parasites. Looking up to canada, companies can do unaddressed mail, but people can place a sign on their mailbox to optout, and the carrier will not drop the junk in. They solved the problem a long time ago. This is one of those “only in america” things – the usps doesn’t deliver unaddressed mail, so the carrier walk route mail is addressed. But the addresses come from the usps’s database of “yes this house exists” database, with absolutly no way to optout or flag an address for do not mail. So these parasite carrier walk route mailers abuse the hell out of the database – and get free rein on our mailboxes and our privacy. Please stop the insanity…
If I were to choose from the current system vs. the usps very downsizing and the price of stamps going to to $1 or more? I’d take $1 or more stamps any day. Who would miss junk mail, unless your are insane.
This kind of argument really exposes the deep-reaching flaws in our economic system. It’s one thing when something useful is being produced, but to keep these systems running just to give people jobs is ridiculous. Junk mail, the auto industry, ranching, even warfare gets these kind of tear-jerking argument.
Each one of these jobs is taking up a very large chunk of the waking hours of a human being – 9-5, Monday to Friday, 50 weeks a year for a few decades. Is junk mail really worth this? People packing envelopes, rotting in front of computers, or risking their lives logging. The waste of human potential here is equaled only, perhaps, by the massive destruction of nature it entails. If all that’s happening at the end of the day is that you’re tossing this to the curb, then what is this all for?
The real question here is why it’s so hard to get by, even for a family with two working parents in some of the richest countries in the world.
No more junk mail!!!I’m tired of having to pay to take it away. The people that deliver this don’t give a hoot — junk mail is the easiest—they don’t have to read names or addresses. They just shove it in your mailbox. Why should we make their jobs easier? They don’t care if you get the correct mail or not!
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