UPS Claims It Came to Compromise with USPS

Last Friday, the Direct Marketing Association sent a message to members asking them to write to UPS to persuade the company to stop blocking passage of the postal reform bill. By late in the day, David Bolger, a UPS spokesperson, said that UPS would not oppose postal reform bill S. 662 as it stood, but claimed that the office of the key senator who is a champion for the cause rejected it.

Members of the mailing community had worked hard to make sure the postal reform legislation passed before Congress adjourned yesterday, writes DM News. Congress will likely return for a lame duck session in mid-November, so the passage of the reform bill could occur then, according to the article.

But Gene Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce says he is skeptical that a lame-duck session of Congress would take up the bill. “If it didn’t happen [Thursday] night, it’s probably not going to happen,” he says, according to Direct Magazine.

The DMA supports a cap on postal rate increases that would keep them at or below the rate of inflation. UPS was blocking final agreement of the bill by holding out for a provision that could have resulted in an increase of up to 40 percent in single-piece Parcel Post rates, the message from the DMA said.

Bolger, however, says that the USPS and UPS had met at the urging of Senator Collins to work on a compromise. After six hours, the two entities had come to an agreement. But when the compromise was sent to Senator Collins’s office, “they did not consider it or accept it,” Bolger says.

“The UPS is being portrayed as the entity that killed postal reform. That is not true. We have made it very clear on where we stand on that issue. We’ve always dealt in good faith. All along we were supportive with the caveat of the single-piece Parcel Post issue,” Bolger is quoted as saying in Multichannel Merchant.