The U.S. Postal Service is in a precarious financial situation, telling Congress it faces the "equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy." Losing billions of dollars a year, it is considering whether to close more than 3,600 post offices and lay off tens of thousands of workers.
The service faces many problems, including a drop in mail volume in recent years. But the service, which employs nearly 572,000 people, says some of its difficulties are inflicted by the federal government – through a law governing how the agency funds workers' retirement health benefits.
In 2006, Congress passed a law requiring the Postal Service to wholly pre-fund its retirement health package – that is, cover the health care costs of future retirees, in advance, at 100%. The Postal Service, which is a corporation owned but not funded by the federal government, is the only government-related agency required to prefund retirees' health benefits.
"No one prefunds at more than 30%," said Anthony Vegliante, the service's executive vice president.
Sally Davidow, spokeswoman for one of the unions that represents postal workers, calls it a "a ridiculous requirement."
"(The requirement is) so ridiculous, Congress doesn't do it. No other government agency does it. No private businesses do it," she said. "It's $5.5 billion a year, every year, for 10 years. That's what is causing the problem.
"The law was passed in 2006 and lo and behold, ever since 2007, the Postal Service has been suffering a tremendous debt."
The Postal Service reported a net loss of $8.5 billion last fiscal year.
The American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers don't want to lose the benefits. But Davidow says a solution is possible.
Click the audio player to hear the rest of the story from CNN Radio's Jim Roope, and hear what Davidow says should be done, and why some legislators oppose the plan:
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Junk mail or no junk mail, let's see what happens to this country when all those jobs are lost!!! Every job, no matter what it is is worth saving. If any of you compainers have ever worked with the public on a daily basis, year after year, you would soon find out how demanding and rude they are to deal with, so as far as Postal Clerks being rude...well, they learned to be that way from their customers. Maybe if all the customers were a little more friendly, then the Clerk would be also. As for turning to UPS, go right ahead, but don't be compaining at their shipping rates!!! You will be paying double the amount to ship a package using UPS....I was going to ship a package to Texas using UPS and found out it was going to cost me $70, so I went to my local Post Office and ended up shipping it, using Priority Mail for $36...plus UPS does not deliver cards, letters or any other kind of general mail.
Post Office needs to be privatized. As for rude, it doesn't matter how rude the customer is to the PO Worker, they should just smile and say thank you. We are the customer. As one said below it is not the pre-payment crushing the PO it is the amount of beenfits being given. The Post Office is just more proof that our Government can not run anything efficiently. God help us once Obamacare begins.
TwM – while I agree that professionalism is important, I still think SOCIAL courtesy on the part of the customer should not be neglected. You're paying for someone's services, not their soul or their dignity.
TwM, I am sorry but NOBODY deserves to be treated the way many postal workers are treated. Just because they are pseudo government workers does NOT give the general public carte blanche to treat a postal worker with any less respect than that afforded to any other worker at any other type of business.
Plus, I do not care what people say, the customer is NOT always right, and the customer does not have the right to abuse a worker, PERIOD!
You think postal workers are treated badly? At least they are paid well and have great benefits. Private sector job employees are treated just as poorly for much less pay. (Customer service, cashier, waitress, etc...) While I don't think ANY of them SHOULD be treated poorly or rudely listening to postal workers you would think they are the only ones dealing with the public.
They should only deliver mail only 2x/week and cut staff accordingly. I have just about everything (bills, etc.) being dealt with electronically. The sole exception is my stupid City government's sewer bill. Figures the government is so backwards technology-wise.
"I, My, Me" There are other people in the world outside of you that rely on the USPS. Next time you need money sent to you because of a major disaster, lets see how fast you get some greenbacks out of a monitor....
Postal1 you can transfer "greenbacks" from one account to another on your computer...you really don't need mail for that. As a matter of fact sending money via the mail is stupid, it has a huge chance of getting lost.
postal1 don't need the post office really anymore. What was that number? 85% of current mailings are JUNK? Imagine the trees we could save (No I am not a tree hugger) just by eliminating that garbage. Want cash it is really quite easy to send cash via computer. Many different ways. Bills can all go the more efficient e-bill route. Cards can be send via the various card programs out there. The Post Office really is not needed any longer. If we privatized it , the corruption,redundancy and total inefficiency would be stripped out of it. With any luck the Union portion which has directly pushed the Postal Service into ruination would be eliminated.
@ Terri – Money sent via mail does not have a huge chance of getting lost. That's ridiculous. Despite perception, the USPS is very reliable and loses very little.
Reading another article about the USPS another comment pointed out something that I thougth was very much on point. After Katrina destroyed New Orleans, you didn't see Fed Ex or UPS out delivering packages in those areas. You didn't see people lining up at computer terminals for help. What you did see was USPS carriers doing whatever it took, including paddling around in canoes, to deliver mail and help as best they could.
I'm not going to say the USPS shouldn't change with the times, but the idea that all postal employees are lazy or that the USPS should just be done away with is beyond foolish and shortsighted.
Send it Western union.
vfr800cr250, I get mail that is addresses to someone else on a very regular basis, I would say at the least once a month. If that isn't a high chance of mail getting "lost" when you consider how much is delivered I am not sure what is.
Like any other group or force comes down to the way they are managed. I've been witness to a "scaled down" number of postal carriers in our town. Because of their shortage of carriers not only do they have to carry their route but they must split the other routes and carry parts of those as well. When management is approached about the work load the response is always, "We're trying to hire more carriers." It never happens. When somebody is hired (usually a female)they enter this "supervisor training" program where they don't carry mail! They just hang around the office answering the telephone. The workload to the carriers is never relieved. I have great respect for the carriers who do carry the mail and none for the losers that management breeds with the union in their back pocket. Here's to the U.S. Postal Service Mail Carriers across the country! MAIL CARRIERS ARE HEROS TOO!!
YES!!! MAIL CARRIERS ARE HEROS TOO!!!
at one time the USPS was the largest employer in the US
the USPS was a client and I can say that most of the workers there could be classified as "working welfare"
probably the most unproductive group pf folks I have ever had to work with – they hid behind the union rules and abused the system
let's face it you don't even need a GED to deliver mail
many days I watch our postman sit in the shade (midday) and nap we live in a secluded area near a lake the perfect place to hide magazines are read
three blocks away there is another carrier we have 5 houses on our street and we have our carrier
waste and abuse – and they expect a federal bailout for their benefits?
Stop those that are double dipping and retiring when they are 38 and then taking another gov job and work another 20+ years...........and have another retirement package from the gov
stop the junk mail
Maybe they are on their lunch break? You are wrong.
You mean the ones that retired from the military when they were 38 and then got a good civilian job when they finished 20 YEARS of service to our country – are those the evil double dippers you're talking about?
You realize that your letter carrier gets to take a lunch, right? – or is that too lazy for you?
Let us disagree here, I have seen my postal carrier at the OTB offices, in the local bar and reading in his truck. Sorry can't claim lunch when the carrier is seen eating in his truck and reading, then off at the OTB , finally at the local bar all in the same afternoon. I wasn't even following the man, I am retired and passed him in his truck while he read and ate, later I was at the OTB when I saw the carrier making his bets, then hours later passed his truck by the bar. WASTE !!!!
Uhm Yeah I see that everyyday too. A: Their routes just happen to be that near and close. and B: They are allowed an hour lunch/break a day. Of course they are just going to pull over to the side of the road or a park and nap and eat lunch. What else would they do, drive all the way home?
As always, no one is looking at the source of the problem. The problem in the USA is the wooden framed single houses we live in. Only China style apartment buildings will solve ALL the problems this country has.
The way we live, that resemble "lets divide the loot", make the distances costly on the envorenment and our resources.
USA is going down for this very and only reason.
lol...... I thought my tinfoil hat wasn't thick enough.
You are not too smart, eventhough your mother told you that you are.
Possibly the USPS needs to go thru a ritual bankruptcy bath, like GM and Chrysler, to cleanse itself from all its contractual obligations like union contracts and benefits?
Yeah, all that does is stick the taxpayer and other creditors with the loss and let them take the hit for bad management. That is the government way.
When I was younger if you had a Post Office job you had one of the best jobs in town. Now it is just like working for a mill or factory. America is not what it once was and will never be again. GW Bush bankrupted America with his crazy wars. Most of the former industrial areas are just ghost towns where wild dogs range and the winds swirl and the building are all boarded up.......... The New America!
Oops, missed the point again. The problem is not prefunding benefits, which have to be paid sooner or later, it is the excessive amount of the benefits to begin with. The fact that other government agencies or private businesses don't prefund their retirement benefit plans at a higher rate is why many of them are going under.
Why are they required to do this when no one else does in either the public or private sectors? The FedEx/UPS lobby perhaps?
Wow, someone that actually thinks....amazing.
Bottom line – many people have turned to other services such as UPS and FedEX for a reason. I can't help but imagine that all the post office woes would be solved with a service so great that no one needs FedEx or UPS.
The post office is loosing money because most businesses I know, and myself, with the exception of junk mailers for adds and letters, use alternate carriers.
In 15 years of shipping, here's my record :
USPS – 6 packages lost, 1 certified letter lost
UPS – 0 lost packages.
FedEx – 0 lost packages
USPS is very hard to deal with because system is so compartmentalized that you have to speak with 5 different people who all tell you you actually need to speak to someone else, or the person you just got off the phone with that referred you to them. 3 of my lost packages were insured, only 1 claim was approved. I lost a lot of money.
Sorry to those who think I am "loosing compassion for the middle class workforce" – that is such a BS cop out. Just because the Post Office has fortified themselves into an inefficient machine with arbitrary restrictions, and policies that cripple itself, doesn't mean a have a beef with the "middle class". I have a beef with the class that sets the policies that make dealing with the post office so difficult. I NEVER use USPS. EVER. It's simply too risky. I lost faith when they lost an item that cost me over $3000, it was fully insured, and the reason they would not cover the claim was because it was a rare irreplaceable book, and it fell outside of their criteria because they could not look up a value in a new bookstore. That shouldn't matter, I paid for $3000 worth of insurance. Never again will I be duped by this idiotic bureau of morons.
UPS and FedEx use the USPS to deliver a very large percentage of their packages since they don't provide service to all addresses.
You just pay a lot more.
The American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers don't want to lose the benefits................................Got to love those unions!!!
Yea Dean!
Stupid Unions wanting people to have good medical insurance, decent wages, safe working conditions and a decent retirement – what the hell are they thinking?
First off, note that the discussion isn't about losing benefits, it's about how those benefits are funded and the fact that congress is requiring this to be done in a manner that no other organizatin uses, including congress. Read the article next time before commenting.
Second, if the discussion were keeping benefits, would you want to give up benefits that you were offered when you were hired? Of course not. Why hate people and insist they have it as bad or worse than you when you should be insisting that your employer treat you as well as they get treated.
Third, union membership has been declining since the '70s. Middle class income has been stagnant (in adjusted dollars) since the same time. Upper class income has doubled (in adjusted dollars) during the same time. Coincidence? Maybe, but when you examine other factors, I'd suggest not.
Obama can get the illegals to do the mail for half the price. Maybe that way we can get 11 million people to pay taxes.
I have four PO's within a 10 minute drive from my house in a largely rural area. They could easily be combined into one larger facility without losing too much staff and sane a bundle on operational costs.
Unions telling someone else they are ruining the company....And had the federal government applied that same law to itself we all would either be facing 50% taxes already or the government would be much smaller....hypocrites.
Or we wouldn't be facing a "debt crisis" (manufactured by Tea Baggers) because the Social Security trust fund wouldn't have been cleaned out long ago.
They are required to prefund the retirement costs so that they will not have to bailed out later on. These are benefits that have to be paid either from current or future income, and if the burden is too much, it's only because the retirement costs are too high. The question isn’t why other pensions are not 100% prefunded; the question is why they are not. The postal unions have been allowed to run rampant over the USPS and now they have to pay the price.
Excellent point. I agree. In defense of all the union postal workers, they are just trying to save what they have already been promised by people who hadn't put thought into future situations like our country is facing right now.