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My family despises FDR, and everything the dictator represented and his legacy including WWII and his manipulations (this being from close personal knowledge within his admin). The point being made about his position on public employees unions is a matter of history-— to be repeated to every lib AFSCME SEIU or fed employee union BS’er there is, since the activists believe they are the second coming of FDR statists. It does not surprise us that he changed his mind for the usual political reasons, liar that he was, and with his admin rife with communists throughout and labor organizers masquerading as social workers. Pure socialism. If there ever was a demonstration of how busybody govt cannot run a business it is the P.O.- how to ruin what was an essential part of our govt’s real purpose. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Civil Service, unionized jobs for life, which are rarely “short term” (but if they are, they still have to be paid a pension rather than a termination one time payout) coupled with a deathgrip from the unions in Congress, make it impossible to downsize the number of these positions and reduce the biggest cost elements in the losses. Management that is at a minimum autocratic in reaction to the union fanatics. The internet has not helped the revenue side (try as hard as they did to introduce “e-mail” the PO could not stop the avalanche)

The large up front pension contributions mandated by Congress to fund these pensions at any level is at the behest of unions and unlike the requirements placed on private business pension funding, which has more latitude.

Quite familiar with FERS— the fact it is available for public review doesn’t make it any less onerous— it just makes the PO another big bloated federal department. It would not be a bad thing if the service were privatized and not to obamaomau cronies (make it a stock held company).

Being in the private sector, got little use for govt. bureaucrats— and cannot be convinced they would ever be conservatives. Social ones maybe. Current reference: look what they are doing to the military.

you definitely sound like you are of two minds about all of it. privatization of the mails should be remarkably easy to do but the last folks you'll ever hear call for it are the various express and package service folks ~ 'mostly because my plan, the only viable one, would do a leveraged buy out of both FedEx and UPS (because they've been financially weakened by the Great Obama Recession)

Then, the two airlines would be disposed of ~ while UPS management would be brought in to provide the higher level corporate infrastructure.

Due to the complexity of the field service local management would be retained, 28,000 small offices disposed of, and rural service regularized and expanded.

There are several other grandfathered services I"d have dumped, and guarantee at least one of them would be something you like and would hate to lose, but that's the way the potatoes roll out of the cart when you dump it along side the ditch.

Now, your intense jealousy of the federal retirement system, USPS pays up front for the 1% annuity ~ and all the other agencies are supposed to do that too, but they don't. The revenue feeding into USPS Comes from Reaganesque USER FEES, not from taxes, so those retirements come out of the postage people pay.

There are other payments made directly by the employees, and then there's the Thrift Savings Program.

The source of 100% of the money put in there by postal workers or on their behalf is postage, not taxes.

You want to kvetch about military or nonpostal government employee retirements go talk to somebody else ~

Now, about citing FDR's lies ~ they're still lies and don't get improved with the retelling. However, he did issue an executive order that allowed federal employees to contact their Congressmen.

Your other thoughts on unions are too disjointed to respond to at this time ~ wait until we get 4 feet of snow on the ground and we can go into all that one point at a time ~ for hours and hours and hours.

I"m quite possibly the only Freeper on board these days whose ever passed around union representation cards ~ and that was solely because the guys we were organizing against were criminals!

The old saying that management gets the union it deserves is true ~

Podesta is doing that to the military. Remember the Andrea Doria? It was sinking. The all italian crew got to the life boats before the women and children.

Podesta missed the old stereotypes ~ just in case you wanted a motive for his nonsense.

Technically, the government appointees like Podesta are not bureaucrats ~ after all a bureaucrat ought to know something about his own job. None of the Obots has any idea what they're doing.

NOTE: OPM follows this sort of thing closely ~ the average age a federal employee is hired is 35.

That means he's only got 21 years to earn any retirement at all worth having, and no more than 30 years work left anyway, and that's not likely to be in the USPS because those are physically demanding jobs.

That means all those government employees were previously in the private sector for an average of 17 years!