When I was hired by USPS (40 + years ago), there were just under 1 million employees there. Today the number is a little over 400,000. More than half of those remaining employees deliver the mail to more than 80 million distinct delivery points (addresses) six days a week. The letter carriers. Your mailman. The simple story of the slashi…
When I was hired by USPS (40 + years ago), there were just under 1 million employees there. Today the number is a little over 400,000. More than half of those remaining employees deliver the mail to more than 80 million distinct delivery points (addresses) six days a week. The letter carriers. Your mailman. The simple story of the slashing of personnel is a reduction in mail volume. Banks, Insurance companies, advertisers and more began slowly and then rapidly moving to electronic distribution. But the larger issue was the subletting and subcontracting of equipment and personnel to perform the work of getting the mail ready for delivery. Functions performed at hundreds of mail processing and distribution centers were slowly contracted out to be performed more cheaply. Still today, more than 100 thousand humans work nights and weekends processing the mail to get it ready for the letter carrier to deliver the mail to the customer every day.
And the real problem is that delivering mail to every mail box in America - and checking every mailbox in America every day in case that mailbox might have a piece of mail going out- is a losing proposition financially. It always was. It might well be tenable in cities, where people live on top of one another, but in rural areas it is a loss leader every day. Maintaining the largest vehicle fleet in the western hemisphere is expensive. Paying half a million employees is expensive. The constitution (who cares?) provides for the establishment of the postal service. People trust the postal service more than any other government agency. But selling off the profitable sections (read: metropolitan delivery) of the USPS has been on the horizon for decades. And who will be most victimized by such privatization? The same folks who elect Republican leaders who will gladly sell them out in exchange for a campaign contribution from FEDEX, UPS And other entities who will send them an email that tells them to come and get their medication at the nearest center and pay an additional surcharge for their trouble.
When I went to work for the Postal Service, the old timers told me at the time, ‘kid, you’ll never get rich working here, but you’ll never go hungry either’. And they were right. I raised a family, sent kids to school, and paid a mortgage. I took advantage of an opportunity to contribute to a retirement fund and the organization matched (up to 5%) those contributions and allowed me to select options in managing that fund. I retired with a package that paid for continuance of my health insurance and consider myself very fortunate to have done so.
Thanks for this information. A lot of things has changed that the postal service has to deal with and the delivery at every mail box is quite a sticking point. The biggest issue for rural communities is that they can't easily benefit from scale and volume. Their services are expensive to provide, and they keep voting for the party that does not want to pay for their services. Then they get mad at the government. Speaking as someone who lives in the country and does not get made at the government. My rural carrier has gone out of his way to deliver my mail in a few different circumstances. I've had Amazon ignore my delivery instructions, with the end result that my packages have gotten destroyed by my dog. I prefer USPS.
There are so many mandates even by the government that specify USPS must be used, Congress was one of them but I don’t know now. What really made a difference for letters or documents is email, it matters.
When I was hired by USPS (40 + years ago), there were just under 1 million employees there. Today the number is a little over 400,000. More than half of those remaining employees deliver the mail to more than 80 million distinct delivery points (addresses) six days a week. The letter carriers. Your mailman. The simple story of the slashing of personnel is a reduction in mail volume. Banks, Insurance companies, advertisers and more began slowly and then rapidly moving to electronic distribution. But the larger issue was the subletting and subcontracting of equipment and personnel to perform the work of getting the mail ready for delivery. Functions performed at hundreds of mail processing and distribution centers were slowly contracted out to be performed more cheaply. Still today, more than 100 thousand humans work nights and weekends processing the mail to get it ready for the letter carrier to deliver the mail to the customer every day.
And the real problem is that delivering mail to every mail box in America - and checking every mailbox in America every day in case that mailbox might have a piece of mail going out- is a losing proposition financially. It always was. It might well be tenable in cities, where people live on top of one another, but in rural areas it is a loss leader every day. Maintaining the largest vehicle fleet in the western hemisphere is expensive. Paying half a million employees is expensive. The constitution (who cares?) provides for the establishment of the postal service. People trust the postal service more than any other government agency. But selling off the profitable sections (read: metropolitan delivery) of the USPS has been on the horizon for decades. And who will be most victimized by such privatization? The same folks who elect Republican leaders who will gladly sell them out in exchange for a campaign contribution from FEDEX, UPS And other entities who will send them an email that tells them to come and get their medication at the nearest center and pay an additional surcharge for their trouble.
When I went to work for the Postal Service, the old timers told me at the time, ‘kid, you’ll never get rich working here, but you’ll never go hungry either’. And they were right. I raised a family, sent kids to school, and paid a mortgage. I took advantage of an opportunity to contribute to a retirement fund and the organization matched (up to 5%) those contributions and allowed me to select options in managing that fund. I retired with a package that paid for continuance of my health insurance and consider myself very fortunate to have done so.
Thanks for this information. A lot of things has changed that the postal service has to deal with and the delivery at every mail box is quite a sticking point. The biggest issue for rural communities is that they can't easily benefit from scale and volume. Their services are expensive to provide, and they keep voting for the party that does not want to pay for their services. Then they get mad at the government. Speaking as someone who lives in the country and does not get made at the government. My rural carrier has gone out of his way to deliver my mail in a few different circumstances. I've had Amazon ignore my delivery instructions, with the end result that my packages have gotten destroyed by my dog. I prefer USPS.
There are so many mandates even by the government that specify USPS must be used, Congress was one of them but I don’t know now. What really made a difference for letters or documents is email, it matters.