Slashdot Mirror
Adapting the Post Office To the Digital Age
Hugh Pickens writes "Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui write in the Washington Post that with projected deficits through 2020 of $238 billion, the debate over potential changes at the US Postal Service is like a fight over the dessert bar on the Titanic: email has already supplanted letters, more people will send money via PayPal rather than mail checks, people will download their movies and books, check their bills online, and receive information about their investments electronically. Delivery volume for first-class mail fell 22 percent from 1998 through 2007, tumbled an additional 13 percent last year and was down 3 percent in the first half of this year despite heavy mailings from the Census Bureau. USPS's future lies in things that need to be delivered physically: shoes, computers and other objects, and the USPS has assets that could let it take on UPS and FedEx. 'USPS needs to start with the future and work backward to the present,' write Carroll and Mui. 'It needs to forecast volumes for all types of its business five, 10 and 15 years out and design a business model that will thrive under those scenarios. Only then can it figure out what radical changes need to be made now.'"
The monopoly has been removed here in the Netherlands, and the old monopolist -- now owned by TNT -- is going broke. States granted a monopoly on mail delivery in return for a commitment to deliver to every address -- the private companies only want the easy work, delivering in towns and cities. Once the former monopolist goes broke, mail delivery in rural areas will stop forever. To prevent this from happening, the Dutch government will eventually have to legislate -- tinkering with the business models of the competitors -- or accept that if you live in a village or on a farm, you have to drive to the nearest town to pick up your mail.
A lot of that "inefficiency" is that mailing a letter from a rural village in the south to a similar village in Alaska costs the same (and has roughly the same quality of service) as mailing a letter from one side of a major city to the other. If you break up the monopoly and allow USPS to exit markets it finds unprofitable, a whole lot of places will stop getting mail. If you break up the monopoly but do not allow USPS to exit markets, then their revenue will reduce even further as the popular ones are taken by competitors.
Also as far as USPS is concerned, a county made up mostly of farms that sees 15 pieces of legitimate mail a month is not worth their time. But when those 15 pieces of legitimate mail are vital to our food supply...
Some of us need an alternative to PayPal... Online only works for those who carry the mark of the beast (have a bank, or PayPal account, or a credit card)
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Exactly this happened in Sweden.
The postal service had a monopoly on delivering mail across all of Sweden. The postal service was regulated by law to cover as much of the country as possible.
Then the monopoly law was removed, opening up for City Mail. City Mail took over the profitable city areas while completely ignoring the unprofitable countryside. The postal service is now having extreme difficulties to maintain itself, because it is suffering from competition within the only profitable districts. This leads to lack of efficiency and inhumane policies at the postal service workplaces thanks to regulations from management. (I should know, I have worked there)
Competition doesn't lead to efficiency if the competition isn't equal, and the competition isn't equal because the postal office still has to serve the countryside. You could say that the regulation is the fault of the government, but the fucking POINT of the postal service is to serve mail everywhere. If that regulation is removed then the countryside will no longer get any mail as the postal service and city mail will both compete within the profitable areas.
The only other possibility is that prices in the countryside explode to ridiculous levels to compensate for the lack of profit in these areas.
The contract between USPS and the APWU doesn't say they can "never decrease their workforce" at all.
You may be thinking of the part of the contract which says that employees hired before September 15, 1978 have "lifetime protection against layoff" (Article 6(1)), and that employees who have more than six years service have a more limited set of protections against layoff (Article 6(2)). Everyone else gets sixty days notice (Article 6(B) and 6(C)).
The Joint Contract Interpretation Manual is here, and took me a whole five seconds to find via google.
The article starts from a false assumption: that the postal service must be profitable, or at least break even.
Framing the issue this way has nothing to do with what the USPS should or should not carry, or how much they should charge.
Why is that so for the postal service but not for the military, department of transportation, or most any other government agency that provides a service? Universal free mail delivery is something that the citizens of the US want -- or at least did at one time. As a government service, it's something taxpayers agree to pay for.
Now clearly the two authors of this article, management consultants, have a different view of that need. Perhaps they are ideologically inclined to expect that government services should break even or better, in which case, they ought to take on a real challenge and explain to the Pentagon how they can "save" the armed forces. Or perhaps they have a financial interest in private delivery services like FedEX and UPS, who knows? It's clear from early in the article, "Should the federal government continue to compete against the private sector?" that the authors have a sense that somehow there's money to made for UPS, FedEx, and other private delivery services if the postal service was forced to compete on the same level as them. I'm sure they wouldn't advocate for reforming USPS if they thought it would take money away from the private sector.
In any case, before people go trying to reform USPS, let's first decide if we want to continue to support the current expectation of free (for the recipient) door-to-door mail service for everyone in the country everywhere. If citizens clearly want that, then budget (and tax) for it, and shut up about billion dollar "losses" that pale compared to the "losses" racked up by other services we expect as a modern nation. On the other hand, if the country decides that hey, we don't need to deliver everywhere any more, then go ahead, revamp the postal service to be just another profit-motivated competitor.
Why do you care what contract postal workers have? You don't pay for it. The USPS has been self-sufficient since 1972 and have a much higher customer satisfaction rating than either UPS or FedEx. They have higher public favorability ratings than the National Park Service, the US Forest Service or NASA. Apparently most Americans don't agree with your criticisms of the USPS
And what makes you think you know what staffing levels they need or don't need?
Here's what I don't get about the Political Right: They claim to believe in "free markets" but don't want workers to be able to collectively bargain for their own best contracts. The only reason the US had a healthy middle class for so many years is because of labor unions. It's not accidental that the attacks on Labor that started under Ronald Reagan and the subsequent decline of unions has coincided with the decline of the middle class and the decline of the US manufacturing sector. Manufacturing in the US was healthiest when labor unions were healthiest. Germany, which is arguably the most successful free manufacturing/exporting economy on Earth happens to be the country with the most favorable laws regarding labor unions.
You are welcome on my lawn.