I am not feeling generous or sympathetic to their cause.
Posted on 12/22/2012 3:42:05 PM PST by traumer
Despite most of Congress leaving town for the holidays, postal workers are continuing a hunger strike protesting legislation to save the United States Postal Service (USPS) through budget cuts.
The hunger strike began Tuesday and is expected to end late Saturday, according to The Washington Post.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Anecdotal comments don’t change my view. The USPS is in the same position as newspapers. They need to restructure dramatically because technology is quickly reducing their business.
I can cut their costs and increase their revenue. At individual offices, M-W-F sort the mail; T-Th-Sa deliver the mail. Hours per week cannot exceed 40 hours for current employees. Gas consumption will decrease 50%. Convert the entire local fleets of 30 vehicles or more to natural gas engines from the 50% savings. No salaries for top 500 Postal Service officials to exceed $150,000 annually. Triple or quadruple the charge for commercial bulk mailing, i.e., junk mail.
You are completely unaware of the volume of mail that is delivered each day. So was I before I took a job at the Post Office last Spring. Though the volume is declining, so, too, is the number of workers processing it.
That has dropped by almost 100,000 in just the past year. Since 1969, when the USPS employed almost 1 million, some 650,000 positions have been axed. So, the Postal Service is adjusting.
This year, several thousand small, rural Post Offices will see their hours reduced to six, four, or two hours a day. Highly-paid Postmasters will be replaced by part-time employees with few, if any benefits.
As for reducing the number of days that mail is delivered, my original comment stands. Post Offices are staffed pretty tightly now. Eliminating one [or, as you suggest, several] days of deliveries will only cause the mail stream to pile up and require even more help on the days designated for delivery.
Now, I am not resisting efforts to make the USPS profitable, but I think improving service is a better solution than making it worse. If Congress were to eliminate the $15 billion annual payments for future employee pension costs, the Postal Service would probably break even next year.
Isn’t the amount of first class mail fading fast?
Hasn’t electronics taken over the role of most time sensitive communication?
To me the USPS is very much like newspapers, except because of the unionized govt workforce they can’t restructure fast enough to meet their diminished role.
Hasn’t electronics taken over the role of most time sensitive communication?
To me the USPS is very much like newspapers, except because of the unionized govt workforce they can’t restructure fast enough to meet their diminished role.
My impression is that it is much less the unions that are an impediment than it is Congress. The USPS has, for years, had a plan to close thousands of small, rural post offices. Congress refused to give permission because Congress-critters don't want to hear the complaints from their rural constituents.
This year, the USPS planned on closing several dozen sorting and processing plants. In this area, for example, Buffalo was going to close and all of Western New York's mail would be processed through the larger and more modern Rochester facility.
Senator Schumer and the local congressional delegation effectively nixed that, too. So, in this case, I wouldn't blame the unions. The Post Office operates under its own labor laws and union membership isn't compulsory. In my small office, the rural carrier, the Postmaster, and I [clerk] do not belong to the union.
The Post Office is a funny beast. It operates without tax money [unlike GM or AMTRAK, for example] but still is subject to Congressional meddling. And, yes, First Class mail is declining rapidly, but is still considerable.
Bulk mail [so-called junk mail] is growing and the package business is growing rapidly. That is probably the future of the USPS. Priority Mail is quick and about 60% the price of UPS of FedEx. Yet it's quite profitable.
Forgot to mention I drive an F-350 Powerstroke and it thrills me to mash it to the floor, kick in the turbo and cover these goofballs up in a cloud of diesel exhaust.
The roads were built and intended for motorized vehicles. My fuel taxes pay for a lot of "bike trails" that these jackasses never use.
"Unfortunately, the U.S. Postal Service also is effectively bankrupt. The USPS expects to lose about $7 billion this year. The post office already has borrowed roughly $13 billion from Uncle Sam. At the end of 2009 USPS had $33.5 billion in outstanding liabilities and another $54.8 billion in unfunded retiree health and pension obligations."
Bottom line? If the USPS didn't shell out SALARIES FOR LIFE AT THE EXPENSE OF THE TAXPAYER, they'd not be in the mess they're in.
It was in the post office so long that the packaging tape had started to unstick. Everything was still there. They never sent out the pick up package slips so it sat in the PO the whole time.
Can someone beat this?
.
As in ancient Egypt where the elite declared themselves to be gods our government now uses slaves to design and build massive tombs to worship themselves in the here and now and for their slaves to worship them in the afterlife
Sort of a GREEN self-perpetuating thing
.....until the rivers dry up and nobody will loan them anymore water
Then the next bunch of colorful cannibals will come along and use their dried up bodies as fuel for super-trains to nowhere through the deserts
Just look what the Egyptians and others of Africa have become:
Detroit
Chicago
Washington DC
- and an insane Muslim jackal is your leader
.
“..........The Post Office is a funny beast. It operates without tax money [unlike GM or AMTRAK, for example] but still is subject to Congressional meddling......”
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Yes, Congress wanted to make it largely a self-funded organization but constantly refuse to allow it to make all the adjustments that are appropriate in its current business situation. The USPS should be allowed to close offices where that is called for and limit 6 day delivery where that is appropriate. Let it compete—if it goes bankrupt, it goes bankrupt and reorganized under bankruptcy laws.
I am not feeling generous or sympathetic to their cause.
Yeah, for example, Congress has forever prohibited the shipment of alcohol via the Postal Service. That leaves the increasingly lucrative mail-order wine business to UPS and FedEx. Several years ago, Congress forbade the shipment of cigarettes through the mail -- it was for the children, of course, who had evidently stolen their parents' credit cards and arranged for the evil weed to be delivered when only the kids were home.
That decision cost the little Post Office I work at [a mile or so away from the Seneca Nation] to lose half its annual revenue. It's now slated to be cut to four hours a day.
The Post Office causes enough trouble for itself without the Congress-critters' meddling.
Oregon hippie postal workers.
These are the same gools who try to kyack in the large irrigation canals and then try to sue when they get decapitated/hurt when they hit a barbed wire fence separating pastures or properties.
They just think they have the ‘right’ to do anything they wish.
Oregon hippie postal workers.
These are the same fools who try to kyack in the large irrigation canals and then try to sue when they get decapitated/hurt when they hit a barbed wire fence separating pastures or properties.
They just think they have the ‘right’ to do anything they wish.
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