The entire system is available for public review at the Office of Personnel Management's webpages.
Now regarding what FDR said and may have believed in the 1930s, by the 1940s he had a problem with Communist Union organizers infiltrating the federal work force. He made a deal with the postal unions (then the largest federal unions) that if they put an end to the organizer's efforts he'd RECOGNIZE THEIR UNIONS and allow all federal government employees to write letters to their Congressmen
He made that deal with my grandfather, among others. Looked it up in the USPS archival library in fact ~
Just setting you straight on FDR. He changed his mind and he recognized the unions.
NOTE: People who think they can represent FDR as some sort of ubber Conservative got the wrong guy ~ he wasn't a Commie, but he wasn't Conservative in the modern sense either.
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.