"The Robber Barons are stealing the post office from the American people"

The plan by the independent agency that runs the U.S. Postal Service to kill 120,000 jobs and eliminate universal mail service for thousands of rural communities is not a simple cut-costs equation; it's a massive attack on benefits and union rights for millions of public workers.

Zandar:

... the US Post Office wanting to lay of 120,000 workers is a huge story, possibly the biggest story of the year so far as jobs and the labor movement are concerned. Jobs and unemployment, being the number one issue with voters time and time again, are critical in order to get our total economy back on its feet, and you can't do that well if the Post Office wants to get rid of a hundred thousand plus jobs over four years. The true tale of employment carnage is much, much worse.

The financially strapped U.S. Postal Service is proposing to cut its workforce by 20 percent and to withdraw from the federal health and retirement plans because it believes it could provide benefits at a lower cost.

The layoffs would be achieved in part by breaking labor agreements, a proposal that drew swift fire from postal unions. The plan would require congressional approval but, if successful, could be precedent-setting, with possible ripple effects throughout government. It would also deliver a major blow to the nation’s labor movement.

In a notice informing employees of its proposals — with the headline “Financial crisis calls for significant actions” — the Postal Service said, “We will be insolvent next month due to significant declines in mail volume and retiree health benefit pre-funding costs imposed by Congress.”

Let that sink in. The Post Office wants to not only break its contract with labor unions to put 120,000 people out of work, it wants to kick nearly all of its employees out of the federal employees health care plan and pension plan and replace them with something less. Republicans like Darrel Issa want to know more about the plan and apparently have no problem with setting a precedent that will allow government to simply eliminate union contracts whenever it feels like it.

The fact of the matter is the USPS has already gotten rid of 200,000 plus jobs over the last ten years. Under the new proposals anyone with less than six years of service would be subject to losing their job, period. Postal unions are already vowing to fight these proposals, but you'd better believe the battle to weaken government unions and to demonize government employees at the state level was in preparation to gut the Post Office and eliminate all government employee unions as well.

I'll be keeping an eye on this one. The Constitution mandates a national post office. Imagine what Republicans would do to it if they got full control in 2012.

TPM has more detail of what's really going on:

One point that came up repeatedly in our discussion last night about the crisis in the postal service is that the USPS is apparently subject to a regulation that requires it to pre-pay pension and health care obligations 75 years in advance, something that is required of no other government agency. And a substantial amount of their budget shortfall is tied to that regulation.

TPM Reader SM notes these points ...

As a union organizer for SEIU, I have a distinctly labor perspective on the USPS crisis; and, I think that there are two HUGE pieces of information that are often left out of the "The USPS is an aging dinosaur" narrative often perpetuated by the mainstream media.

Firstly, the USPS is subject to a regulation forcing them to pre-pay retiree health benefits for 75 years in the future. This means that they are paying for health benefits for postal carriers who haven't yet been born. The cost of this regulation (a regulation not required of any other government or private entity) was about 5.5 billion dollars in FY 2011 and was even higher in previous years.

Secondly, the Postal Service has overfunded their pension system by about $75 billion dollars in recent years. Thus, there is money in a separate account that could more than handle the current shortfall in postal revenue ($0 of which comes from tax dollars).

Meanwhile TPM Reader DW notes the structural difficulties faced by the postal service since the USPS is mandated by law to service various localities and facets of the postal market that can't be done at a profit ...

I am a recent retiree of the USPS and have some thoughts on the Postal Service. The news blurb you read has to be viewed in the context of upcoming union contract negotiations. USPS management always makes it seem like the sky is falling right before they negotiate the contracts. That is not to say there are no problems at the post office. The truth is there is no profit to be made delivering mail when all the easily made profits are siphoned off by other package carriers. FedEx and UPS take the cream off the top, leaving the unprofitable business to the postal service which is legally obligated to deliver to every address six days a week. If anyone thinks FedEx or UPS wants to deliver packages to every house every day, they are mistaken. They do not want to waste their time driving to unprofitable rural areas or stopping at every house in a neighborhood. If the USPS disappears, I feel sorry for anyone living any distance from a large city who expects mail at an affordable rate. A lot of people don't realize that the postal service currently delivers some packages for FedEx and UPS that would be unprofitable otherwise.

There has been a slow "privatization" of the postal service over the last few decades. I've always assumed it was based on a back handed way to slowly get rid of union postal workers until there are so few of them they are no longer a political force. I could give many, but one example of what I mean by "privatization" is the discount large mailers receive for presorting their mail. The postal service gives a discount of what it would cost the USPS to process that mail using union postal labor. The businesses hire a mailing firm (or do it in house) to presort their mail with labor that is paid close to minimum wage, pocketing the difference between what the postal worker makes and what the minimum wage worker makes. It's just an example of another decent paying job being given to a lower wage non-union worker so that large businesses can pad their bottom lines at the expense of labor. An additional bonus for business and Republicans is that union postal workers eventually lose their jobs and their clout with Congress.

When an article like the one you referenced appears I am always amazed at the comment sections. The American public is always ready to jump in and say the most uninformed things about situations about which they know nothing. It always makes me realize that maybe I don't have a complete picture or understand everything about the businesses, customs, situations, etc. that I read about and maybe I should do more research before I jump in and comment.

As a final thought, I look at the neighborhoods in my town and see 4 or 5 different trucks delivering mail and packages to each neighborhood every day. The thought of all these different trucks driving around burning fuel to go to the same houses seems ridiculously wasteful and energy inefficient to me. The USPS goes to every address in the U.S. every delivery day. Why can't FedEX, UPS etc. handle getting the packages and mail to the cities and then have one delivery truck (USPS) make the final delivery. I can't even begin to calculate the fuel the U.S. would save daily. I guess I'm just a pragmatic dreamer.

John Nichols at The Nation:

Next to credit rating downgrades and stock market collapses, the threat by the US Postal Service to shutter at least 3,653 post offices (perhaps as many as 4,300) may not seem like a disaster in the making. But if the USPS goes forward with the plan, it will deal a blow to communities from coast to coast and further diminish one of America’s oldest public institutions.

In addition to providing employment—with an admirable record of hiring women, people of color and people with disabilities, and investing them with real authority—the USPS has kept reliable public facilities in small towns and city neighborhoods that have often been abandoned by chain stores and restaurants. Like public schools, post offices are sources of identity for communities that are otherwise neglected by big government and multinational corporations.

This is a benefit that’s hard to calculate. For decades there has been pressure to cut and privatize the Postal Service, which generally pays for itself but doesn’t return huge profits. In the current period of economic instability, the USPS has been losing money, in part because federal officials have pressured it to make huge advance payments to cover future pension costs. But its shortfalls—$3.1 billion in the most recent quarter—are negligible compared with Pentagon overages and bank bailout excesses. Rather than outsourcing work to private carriers like FedEx, the USPS should be allowed to compete with them. Postal unions are pushing back. So is a new website, savethepostoffice.com, which declares, “The Robber Barons are stealing the post office from the American people.” With smart pension reforms and an end to unnecessary outsourcing, thousands of post offices can be saved.