In a world that often times seems to be unraveling, the latest blow to the self esteem of US citizens is the dire predictions of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) going belly up by the winter. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said in a hearing on Capital Hill recently that the US Postal Service is in a very grave situation if politicians don’t bail it out by September 30th. One option is to allow the Postal Service to buy out the contracts of 120,000 employees, essentially causing more unemployment.
There has been push back from the National Association of Letter Carriers. The claim is that mandatory prefunding of retirees from the USPS is what put the postal service in the dire situation it is in now. “The last four years’ reported losses can all be attributed to this prefunding and then some,” Fredric V. Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said in an interview. The problem is that a simple reversal of this policy will not change the mounting losses.
Many people have slammed Mr. Donahoe as a radical due to his willingness to lay off 120,000 postal employees, but he is willing to push back: “To your point it’s a radical change . . .you’ve got to start to take a look at some creative solutions. We can’t sit back and hope things resolve themselves,” says Patrick Donahoe.
Email Winning
The truth is that the real culprit of the USPS’s demise is the Internet. More and more people are using email instead of traditional postage. Essentially email and social media has become the new pony express. Some see this as a painful, but necessary and ultimately positive process.
This would obviously be a very painful process, especially for those work for the USPS. Over the long haul, however, it would be healthy, not just for the organization but for the broader economy. Devoting so much productive capacity to delivering pieces of paper when technology is making much of this unnecessary is not helpful for the economy long-term. It just preserves an anachronistic tradition. Just as the economy transitioned away from farming to industry, the economy will eventually transition away from the physical delivery of mail. This transition will take time, but it will happen, and the economy will eventually be stronger for it.”
-Henry Blodget, Yahoo Finance
Eventually the Nation’s postal service will have to be restructured and saved, but one cannot escape the feeling of a leaderless and rudderless boat drifting in the dark sea. Ultimately there will be some sort of rebound, but along the way the U.S.A.’s transformation maybe into something we barely recognize.
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