Game on! The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee just officially announced what is certain to a highly charged hearing next Tuesday afternoon, titled “U.S. Postal Service in Crisis: Proposals to Prevent a Postal Shutdown.” The focus is expected to be the Postal Service’s recently unveiled bid for the freedom to lay off some 120,000 unionized employees, along with creating its own retirement and health insurance programs. No witnesses have been announced yet, but they will presumably include U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe or a stand-in, as well as labor and mailing industry representatives. Unsurprisingly, all three proposals have…
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More than eight months after their contract talks hit an impasse, the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association and the U.S. Postal Service are headed to arbitration, according to a new USPS financial filing. While mediation would normally be the next move, both sides are interested in bypassing that step and going to straight to arbitration, the third quarter financial report says. The next step will be to select an “interest arbitrator” and decide on some dates for the proceedings. A Postal Service spokesman had no further information Monday, but in a phone interview that evening, NRLCA President Don Cantriel said…
The Postal Regulatory Commission has laid out an expedited schedule for considering the U.S. Postal Service’s plans to close up to about 3,650 post offices. The bottom line is that the public phase of the commission’s review will take about three months, with an advisory opinion presumably coming fairly soon after. USPS attorneys filed the request for the opinion Wednesday, one day after releasing the list of retail facilities that the agency wants to study for shuttering. Nothing will be closed before late December, according to the filing, but members of Congress are already weighing in. At a Thursday confirmation…
Here’s a fun fact to know and share about the post office downsizing process unveiled today: From Alaska to Rhode Island, every state (and the District of Columbia) has post offices under review for closing. Except one: Delaware, which is also the home state of one of the U.S. Postal Service’s closest allies on Capitol Hill: Democratic Sen. Tom Carper. Carper not only chairs the Senate subcommittee that oversees the troubled mail carrier, he is also lead sponsor of the Postal Operations Sustainment and Transformation (POST) Act, which is the Postal Service’s preferred bill for addressing its many problems, mainly…
Lest anyone’s forgotten, today’s the day that the U.S. Postal Service kicks off its biggest campaign to close post offices since . . . the last one, which quickly flamed out two years ago. At a 10 a.m. news conference, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is expected to release a list of more than 3,600 post offices that could be shuttered after a newly created review process. (That list is supposed to be up on the Postal Service’s web site at 10:30 a.m.) On Wednesday, the agency will ask the Postal Regulatory Commission to formally weigh in on its plans, according…
It’s no secret that there are a lot fewer postal workers than there used to be; the size of the agency’s total career workforce plunged 26 percent between 2000 and 2010, from about 787,500 to 583,900. But which crafts took the biggest hit? The agency’s inspector general put together some figures recently and found that a steep drop in the number of clerks accounted for almost two-thirds of that shrinkage. From 2000 to 2010, the ranks of clerks—a category that also includes nurses and motor vehicle operators–nosedived from 291,494 to 164,581. By itself, that’s a 44 percent tumble. Do a…
Newsflash: On Tuesday, U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe will release a list of post offices to be studied for closing, as well as announce “a new concept” for possibly replacing P.O.’s that close, according to a news release. The morning news conference will come less than two weeks after the U.S. Postal Service published the final version of regulations aimed at making it easier to shutter some of its 32,000 post offices. Despite some changes to the draft released in March, the final version preserved a key element allowing the Postal Service to target facilities that suffer from “insufficient customer…
Postal unions and Rep. Darrell Issa are mixing it up again. This time it’s over the California Republican’s bid to scrap a long-standing congressional requirement for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail six days a week. That requirement is the main obstacle to the Postal Service’s ending most Saturday delivery, a step the agency says will save $3 billion per year. In a letter last month, Issa asked Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., to drop the six-day language from an appropriations bill that her financial services subcommittee was drafting. Emerson didn’t go along, but Issa, who chairs the House…
In a letter released today, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., takes aim at a union’s claim that the U.S. Postal Service gets no taxpayer support. Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, concedes that the Postal Service no longer receives a direct government operating subsidy, but cites a 2007 report that the agency benefits from many “implicit subsidies” and “extra powers” worth several hundred millions of dollars a year. Those include federal, state and local income tax exemptions, Issa wrote, as well as the ability to borrow from the federal treasury at low interest rates. The letter, dated Monday, is addressed…
The tug-of-war over the U.S. Postal Service’s very uncertain future hits the nation’s airwaves today with the kickoff of an American Postal Workers Union ad campaign that will run on national cable channels for up to two months. Contrary to what you might expect, given how testy the debate is becoming, the 30-second spot doesn’t bash anyone. Instead, it highlights the fact that the Postal Service generally operates without taxpayer support. While APWU members move millions of pounds of mail each day, the ad says, their work is “funded solely by stamps and postage.” So what’s the point? In a release, APWU President Cliff Guffey describes a two-fold…