On Friday the U.S. Postal Service announced a plan that break existing labor contracts in a cost savings move. The proposal
would:
lay off 120,000 workers […] and to shift workers out of the federal employee health and retirement plans into cheaper alternatives.
I am not going to deny that the U.S. Postal Service is hurting. With e-mail and competition from FedEx, UPS and other companies, they are struggling. The fix for the post office is really rather simple. Eliminate some delivery days, like Saturday and stop treating it like a for-profit company. The requirement that Congress stuck the post office with in 2006 isn’t helping either:
…the requirement that it pay, over 10 years, enough to cover the cost of 75 years worth of future retiree benefits—at a cost of more than $5.5 billion a year.
That is insane: Name one government agency that has that same requirement. The Post Office should be fully funded by our taxes and postage. The idea that it has to turn a profit goes against what our Founding Fathers' vision was for the post office. Article One, Section Eight of the United States Constitution states:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States… To establish Post Offices and post Roads…
The U.S. Postal service was established under the U.S. Constitution, under the part about revenue and taxation. Our Founding Fathers knew that mail service was so important that they put it in our nation’s most important document. Their vision was for a government run postal service. Not this semi-private, sort of government agency that has to turn a profit and has to have unreasonable restrictions placed on it by Congress.
I admit I do not use the postal service as much as I used to; I pay most of my bills online. Most of my correspondence is via e-mail, instant message or text message. I would gather that the majority of people today are much like me in that regard and that someday we may not need a postal service for daily home mail delivery. That being said, it is time to bring the Post Office back to being a full-fledged government run operation. It should not be there to make a profit. The post office should be there to provide a vital service to the people of the United States of America.
The fix for our postal service is simple and it does not have to mean mass lay-offs, broken contracts, busted unions or anything else that would further damage our economy and the labor movement. The answer is to shift away from privatization and back to what the postal service once was, a full-fledged government agency and stop Congressional meddling with the agency. We need to move away from the idea that the only way to save a troubled entity is to slash the workforce...more often than not, that only makes things worse.