oldmailman: The BEST summation of the Postal Problem!

I was recently at the website of the excellent Save the Post Office! Read it- there is much valuable, real information there, as opposed to the official USPS info, which is total self-serving propaganda to serve the management that is now in charge of this venerable institution.

Here is the article from Postmaster Mark Jamison. Read it, and you will understand the real problem!

A post office worth preserving

January 18, 2012

BY MARK JAMISON

[Mr. Jamison serves the town of Webster in the mountains of North Carolina as its postmaster. He has written extensively on postal issues. In keeping with the USPS Administrative Support Manual, Mr. Jamison does not "speak for or act on behalf of the Postal Service." These are his thoughts on where things stand and where we ought to be headed. Mr. Jamison can be reached at Mij455@gmail.com. —Ed.]

FOR MANY MONTHS NOW, postal management and a chorus of pundits have delivered one message: Out-of-control deficits are dooming the Postal Service, and it will survive only if management is given the authority to radically downsize the system. Half the country's post offices and processing plants must close, Saturday delivery must go, service must be reduced, and over two hundred thousand jobs must be cut.

These steps, however, will not ensure the survival of the Postal Service. This is not a vision for the future. It's an invitation to a funeral.

After Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe spoke at the National Press Club at the end of November, it should have been clear to anyone following the trials and tribulations of the USPS exactly what vision postal senior management had for the future of the institution. Mr. Donahoe stated that it was his goal to wring $20 billion of costs out of the system within the next few years. He essentially demanded free rein from Congress to disassemble the postal network as we know it.

The vision expressed by Mr. Donahoe was one of declining mail volumes, an entity that had outlived its relevancy in a technological age, and the need for a business model which transformed an institution of national infrastructure into simply another player in the mailing and delivery business. He spoke of a future that consigned the purpose and the past of a national treasure to the dustbin of failed business models, right next to the graveyard of buggy whip makers.

The plans advanced by senior postal management involve shedding much of the current retail network and well over half of the plant facility network. In addition, the service standards that have made the Postal Service useful and reliable were to be revised downward in what appeared to be a relentless quest for mediocrity.

The plans also involved eliminating tens of thousands of good, middle-class jobs and replacing many more with low-wage casual workers, while also dismantling retirement and health benefit systems that have served generations of workers well.

What Mr. Donahoe offered was a vision that has become popular among a small segment of the American political class. It is a vision of an impotent public sector, a downsized, out-sourced, minimum-wage work force, and it shows a complete disregard for infrastructure. It is a view of globalization come full circle, America as a third-world country.

Not long after Mr. Donahoe’s speech, several members of Congress awoke from their slumber and began seeing the future Mr. Donahoe proposed. As calls from their communities became more alarming, telling of closed post offices and shuttered plant facilities, and as it became apparent that the proposed changes were not merely a matter of rightsizing postal operations but dismantling them and denigrating service, Congress began showing heightened interest, eventually demanding a moratorium on some of the proposed changes.

Yet even after agreeing to a moratorium on plant and post office closings, the Postal Service continued with the procedures and steps needed to close facilities. Even after the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) found in its Advisory Opinion on the Retail Access Optimization Initiative (RAOI) that the Postal Service’s plans to rationalize the network had very little foundation, the Postal Service continued with requests for vendors to take over the hub-and-spoke operations that would be eliminated by plant closings.

The fact is the PRC found, as many of us have been saying all along, that the Postal Service’s plans were less about finding a successful business model than they were about simply carving up the postal network into bite-size chunks. The RAOI decision returned to many of the same points raised in previous decisions, like the exigent rate case and the five-day delivery case — primarily that the Postal Service’s plans lacked substance.

The plans espoused by the management of the Postal Service appear less the articulation of a successful outcome, the re-envisioning of a successful business model, than they are the actions a vulture capital firm might undertake when dissolving a business by extracting whatever value might exist and leaving the rest to “creative destruction.” No one from the Postal Service has yet offered a picture of what a successful outcome might be. Actually that isn’t terribly astonishing since it would be awfully hard to describe success when your every action is built towards taking the enterprise apart.

AT THIS POINT, the story is clear in terms of what got the Postal Service in these straits. We know the excessive extraction of funds from the Postal Service by the poorly conceived 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) has resulted in non-operational deficits. We know too that various retirement accounts have been over subscribed and that other accounting devices, like accounting for workman’s compensation obligations, have been rigged to transfer funds from the Postal Service to the Treasury.

We know too that volumes have dropped, and while some of that may be due to changing technology, a good bit is due to the ongoing recession and some may even be due to the continual atmosphere of crisis that the postal management has ginned up.

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