Posted on 01/21/2013 8:29:48 PM PST by Lancey Howard
(Reuters) - While delivering mail on Chicago's North Side, Lakesha Dortch-Hardy spoke about how much she loves her job at the U.S. Postal Service, and how much it would hurt if jobs such as hers were to disappear.
"These jobs are the middle class ..." said Dortch-Hardy, a tall, energetic 38-year-old, who took long strides as she wheeled her cart along a row of two- and three-story brick apartment houses. "Without this job, I don't know where I'd be right now."
The cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service has eliminated 168,000 jobs since 2006, and more cuts could result as it struggles to avoid its own "fiscal cliff." As the United States honors Martin Luther King's civil rights legacy on Monday, many African-American workers may be facing new obstacles to achieving and maintaining a middle-class life style.
African-Americans represent 13.1 percent of the U.S. population and 11.6 percent of the labor force, according to a 2012 U.S. Department of Labor report. Nearly one in five African-American workers hold government jobs such as mail clerks, firefighters and teachers, the report said.
"There's a long tradition of the public sector being more friendly, or less hostile, to African-American workers," said Robert Zieger, emeritus professor of history at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "The Post Office is the best example."
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
if the USPS is losing money, they must streamline even more, and that means fewer jobs....
as always, its not so much the pay as it is the benefits and the pensions....
gee....if pensions weren't so high, maybe they could keep more actual workers on...
Over-representation.
Elections have consequences. Which means they’ll just raise postal rates to avert affecting ‘black jobs’.
This story reminds me of an old joke, regarding a shoe store chain, and their commonality with The Postal Service. Anyone ?
Why do I see another “bailout” coming, courtesy (of course) of private sector taxpayers who don’t get half the retirement bennies that government workers get?
Worst-rated PO in the country is Merrifield, VA in the Peoples Demokratic Socialist Republik of Fairfax County, outside of Washington, D.C.
Gee, I wonder why?
This situation really is not about ‘jobs’. It is about how to sustain an ongoing wealth transfer to a minority group that lacks the education and marketable skills to compete in the private economy.
The fact that these obsolete jobs pay upwards of $50K annually with full benefits and essentially ‘tenure’ amounts to another entitlement that has to be dealt with. Looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2009 to 2010, the federal job rolls grew by a million from 2009 to 2010 from 15 to 16 million. A lot of that is Homeland Security, another largely intrusive and unproductive cost drain.
The Congress hasn’t got the will to stand up to Obama and the Democrats. When default comes, and it will, our collapsed government will bring us to Civil War II.
Sympathy can be found in any Webster dictionary...... it’s between sh!t and syphilis.
Around the DC area, there is a strong black middle class. Many are highly educated with master’s degrees or higher, and have pretty strong families. Most are directly or indirectly connected to government money though, and so they will vote to keep the money flowing as long as possible. But when the inevitable cuts have to happen, they will be cut like everyone else. They will have to take a step down in pay when they enter the private sector, but it isn’t like they don’t have any marketable skills. They will survive.
LOL, I sure am glad to hear that.
The article made me think of that too.
” I read somewhere recently that the USPS really needs to shed 250,000 positions.”
TRUE...but based on what our postman told us directly. Our downtown office is close by one of the busiest hubs in America, the L.A. Alameda office, and this dude (yeah, he’s a black dude) claims they are overwhelmed and “hiring”.
Notice how the comrade from Reuters doesn’t mention that the Chicago area has the second-worst delivery rate of any PO in the nation.
“TRUE...but based on what our postman told us directly”
I think it’s probably like the nonsense that goes on with the airlines post “deregulation.” There are a lot of places where a window at the back of the local hardware store would do just fine, but the USPS, in all its wisdom, went ahead and built a building that is underutilized and overstaffed. They’ve gotten away with not “running the operation out of the till” until now, but the Congress isn’t in the position of bankrolling them any longer. Still, thanks to Harry Reid, you have “scheduled air service” from Ely to Las Vegas. Often the plane flies empty and Harry makes sure that Uncle picks up the tab!
Well, first I would rather see employees like emeritus professor of history Robert Zieger lose their cushy jobs. He doesn’t even deliver my mail.
One thing we noticed is that when we send Priority into Chi-town, the rates almost double. we only use UPS or Fedex when shipping more than 1 pound to that sh*tty city.
Lets think about the real world here for a second.
There is nothing the post office does better than any method of communication and their parcel delivery is substandard to UPS and FedEx. Trust me, never send a 2-3 package to any country using the USPS.
I go to the post office a couple of days a week and the people who work there are minorities but they really are nice and they do work hard. Now there is another Po 2 cities over and they are also minorities but they are total slackers.
Unless that private sector job is a Unionized job.
ping...
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