Congress’s war on the post office
The Postal Service faces a threat greater than email or economics: Politics
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/congresss_war_on_the_post_office/singleton/
Just like the whole war on contraception is really a war on women, this war on the Post Office is really a war on unions. It is crystal clear to me that this idiotic mandate (exclusively applied to the Post Office!) to fully fund their pension and health care is entirely motivated to destroy the post office and as a consequence destroy one of the largest remaining unions in the US. I am not a general fan of unions and have seen plenty of examples of grievous mismanagement and outright crookery (compared to Wall Street, though, they are babes in the wood), but when a union has worked so closely with management, as the Post Office union clearly has, any objection has to be due to clear and unyielding ideological bias, nothing more. Much like the blather about the public service sector unions being a ‘drain’ on state and local budgets (a blatant lie since the state and local governments failed to properly fund the benefits to begin with (much like the whole social security funding scare is a blatant smoke screen because our ‘great’ government has bled the fund dry)) and therefore should be stripped of their collective bargaining powers, it is purely and simply an ideological war. There are plenty of things wrong in the US today, but based on my analysis unions and contraception are so far from the top of the list that this attention would be amusing if there wasn’t such an organized and well funded effort to push the agenda.
Now, if it is true that this is really what Americans want, then I clearly am in the wrong damn country!
I have helped design and build a number of machines for the USPS. The faults with the USPS, as with most organizations, lie in multiple places.
I have a friend who has been with the post office more than twenty years. The union has saved her from unfair actions on the part of management several times.
The current situation in this area is, to put it mildly, in flux. The local office has been downgraded to reduce the level of the postmaster. They can (and have) put in a postmaster that makes less. In order to do this, carriers had to be moved to the adjacent city. My mail now has to be delivered from there. I can still buy stamps, rent a P.O. box, or mail stuff here.
On the other hand, a counter-example. I’ve helped design and build a number of machines for the USPS. In the late 70’s we built a computerized forwarding system. This is the system that slaps the little Dennison label, with your new address, on the envelope.
When the machine was complete I went off to Merrill, VA, to supervise the installation and make sure everything worked properly. There were 5 people at the facility performing this task. The were using a computerized database to determine the new addresses and print them on labels. They then applied the labels by hand.
Our machine required one operator to input and extraction code based on the address and to select among the possibilities if there was a hash collision. Everything else was automatic and the piece was never individually handled. The five could be replaced by one.
A year later the USPS fellow was in our facility to talk about another machine. I commented that the CFS must have saved them some money. He replied, “Well, no. We couldn’t get rid of the employees so four of them are just sitting there.”
I could tell you several similar stories, some reflecting on management and corruption and maltreatment of employees, and others reflecting upon the institutionalized inability to manage properly because of the union.
Unions are certainly not the solution to all of life’s evils, but neither are they necessarily the cause. According to the article (and others I have read like it) the union negotiated to reduce the headcount by some 130K people (mostly, as I understand it, through attrition and early retirement). To me, that shows they are committed to the health of the organization. On the other hand I have read about several unions that, when the company announces that they are having problems meeting payroll because of lost business, choose that exact moment to go on strike. Cutting your nose off to spite your face doesn’t even come close to describing that level of idiocy! In my opinion much of the problem with unions has been union bosses that have never worked a day in their lives and are basically just corrupt politicians who would prey on people in other ways if they hadn’t lit on the union leadership approach first.
Yes. Power begets greed and greed begets corruption. It doesn’t matter which pasture you’re in, it’s virtually universal.
During this same period in my life we lost a USPS contract to Recognition Equipment. Something about it triggered an investigation. REI forfeited the contract and was banned from bidding for five years. It’s what killed their company. An Assistant Postmaster General went to prison.
Such activities too infrequently result in that sort of justice being meted out. Activities of the past three years (to be conservative about it) should have resulted in the deaths of several companies and the imprisonment of dozens of corporate executives.
When it comes to the financial sector, the military-industrial sector, and the government in general, Bernie Madoff was a cheap-ass piker.