Obama: To save postal service jobs, end Saturday delivery
Forgive a touch of hyperbole. I can make a case for this literally.
The Post Office lacks the following attributes that would allow it to adjust like normal retail service businesses do. The Post Office can not close locations, or reduce services, nor layoff excess employees when volume comes down without permission from regulators. Given these restrictions, how many more private businesses would have failed in the Great Recession? I suspect many.
I am certain of the situation at my work. The small biz will lose one day of cash flow per week with the end of Saturday delivery. We lose an important option in getting goods to the customer. Saturday delivery via USPS. Now Fedex will get that revenue.
In Obamas proposal, he is letting the customers (who are largely taxpayers) make the sacrifices and changes-Pay more and get less. They get hit twice-Price increases and extending big time financial aid to the USPO in a time of low revenues.
It’s fair to point out the union employees are the most protected stake holder in this proposal. Easy ammunition for 2012 there for the GOP winner to feed the anti union rhetoric. Too easy.
It’s time to stop pretending we can have this both ways. Both ways being the thinly veiled myth that the USPO is run like an independent business, and that it is not really government run. It’s time to let the USPO make the cuts it needs as part of it’s own proposals. Or it’s time to fully fold it into the Federal Government and treat it and its management accordingly. This weird mix of retail services and thick regulations to operate it must come to an end.
I’m not saying which way to go. I’m saying in many ways we have the worst of each.
A link and excerpt of the article that started this Page.
money.cnn.com
The White House also, for the first time, came out strongly against any efforts to allow the postal agency to void union contracts to lay off 120,000 postal workers, as proposed by the Postal Service in its own cost-cutting plans. Instead, the White House would have the Postal Service use some of the $7 billion from its over-funded pension to offer incentives and buyouts for employees near retirement.