Big changes are coming to the USPS — if Congress ever gets off its butt and passes them. In addition to closing rural post offices, there is a proposal to drop Saturday delivery.
Some postal workers are unhappy about that, and other changes, and are staging a hunger strike to draw attention to their concerns.
Six former and current postal workers, part of a group called Communities and Postal Workers United, are calling the strike “six days starving to save six-day delivery.” Their goal is to stop Congress from reducing postal delivery to five days a week.
“We have to be on guard, to raise awareness and pressure the decision-makers as they wrangle back-room deals,” group spokesman Jamie Partridge, a retired letter carrier from Portland, said in a statement.
The same small, grassroots group staged a hunger strike in June to protest legislation proposed to overhaul the service.
The agency lost $16 billion in fiscal year 2012, and needs to cut around $22.5 billion from its annual budget by 2016.
One top proposal, to reduce postal delivery days in order to reduce expenses at the cash-strapped USPS, would also cut letter carrier jobs. According to the protesters, as many as 80,000 postal jobs could be lost.
Congress has been unable to pass postal reform measures and the House and the Senate are in recess until after Christmas.
This week, the group targeted President Obama and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) for endorsing legislation that would cut postal delivery to five days a week.
There is an argument about what has caused the uncontrolled bleeding of red ink. Certainly the rise of email and alternative package delivery services has cut volume substantially. But there was also a change to how the USPS prefunds its benefit payments. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) forced the postal service to set aside billions of dollars to fund retirement and health benefits for employees it hasn’t even hired yet. While prudent, the measure is draining cash from USPS coffers at exactly the wrong time.
There is a bill sponsored by Rep. Stephen Lynch that would allow the USPS to tap that fund and pay off some of its current debt. This would be a temporary solution, but so would enacting most of the reforms the postal service thinks are necessary to get it back in the black.
The long term solution is a smaller, leaner USPS. But is stopping Saturday delivery necessary? Eventually, going to a 5-eday delivery schedule will probably be necessary to save the USPS from going under.
Greetings:
Looking at this primarily from a customer perspective (plus a couple of temporary Christmas employments in my college days) I would add this. The mail I receive is mostly subscriptions, invoices, and advertisements. None of it requires same-day or next day action on my part. The Postal Service should have dropped Saturday delivery years, perhaps decades, ago and should now be looking at dropping Tuesday and Thursday deliveries. The Service has been trying to whittle itself into financial viability for decades with no success. Legitimacy as a business will not come from 1% here or 2% there. Their market has shrunk, is shrinking further, and will continue to shrink in the future. It’s way past time to cut deeply and look for opportunities, perhaps “last mile” deliveries for UPS or Fedex, to rebuild in the future. Time is passing the Service by; forget the deck chairs.
this is just a precursor to trying to make any cuts to curb any kind of costs anywhere in government, or anywhere else. severe cuts will have to happen everywhere to even start getting our fiscal house in order. ain’t going to happen under mr. spenditall 24/7/365. you don’t see the leeches in the w.h making any cuts to their frivolous spending do you? hawaii anyone?
once again, for those trusting souls w/o a clue, this fraud in chief has no intention of helping the economy to recover. learn that and accept it and you will finally understand where we are headed.
Dave you are so correct. The postal workers cannot honestly believe that we would miss Saturday delivery; it’s just another version of the Washington Monument syndrome.
There are over 1/2 million active postal workers, and many more retired, but they can only find 6 who will go on a hunger strike?
Shoot, they can get more people to attend a Sandra Fluke speech.
If they are like many government employees I’ve seen, going without food a few days will do them good.
Why do I get ads in the mail? The postal service subsidizes business advertising. As far as actual mail, such as personal letters and bills, I get less of that than ads. Good question as to why I don’t get all my bills online.
Schools certainly aren’t teaching children how to write a personal letter or thank you.
Privatization would be the ultimate solution to the postal service’s problems. However, the would probably require a constitutional amendment. If I were a liberal I would just say to ignore the constitution because it no longer applies to our situation. But if I were a liberal, I wouldn’t be calling for a decrease in government power!
Now I’ve confused myself!
Seriously, I could live with deliveries cut back to three days a week – and I think most people who live in urban/suburban areas could endure. I could also get along without the paper-copy version of my spam folder, six days a week.
“Saturday delivery” is a boogeyman. What we OUGHT to do is cut the number of delivery carriers in half, and double their routes. Half the route on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and the other half of the route on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Frankly, NOTHING that I get in the mail is all that important. Alternate day deliveries would be fine for me.
Businesses that rely on direct mail marketing ought to have their rates raised; few people want that stuff anyway.
I gave up on the post office years ago; I do online banking and email, and I don’t use a tenth the number of stamps that I used to.
What Ken and Sgt. Mom said. I wouldn’t mind getting billed just three days a week, and I would be delighted to see my mailbox without the bulky “newspapers” consisting of tacky coupons for pizzas, Chinese buffets, and the like.