Letter-writing and phone calls haven’t worked; conventional lobbying hasn’t worked. So, starting this morning, 10 active and retired U.S. Postal Service employees are resorting to a more dramatic tactic: A hunger strike intended to prod lawmakers into dropping a requirement for the beleaguered mail carrier to “pre-fund” a retiree health care benefits fund. “We’re trying to turn up the heat on Congress, which is stuck on stupid,” Jamie Partridge, a recently retired city letter carrier from Oregon who’s participating in the strike, said in a phone interview from outside a House office building. After a news conference this morning with…
Browsing: Postal Service
Don’t look now, but a key piece of the U.S. Postal Service’s downsizing drive this year is at risk of getting smoked before it even gets started. It’s the piece that involves closing or consolidating 48 mail processing plants in July and August. As part of that effort, the Postal Service is seeking a legally required advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission on a related proposal to revamp first-class mail delivery standards. The problem is that the commission doesn’t plan to issue that non-binding opinion until early September—after the downsizing is supposed to have been completed. That doesn’t sit…
What lies ahead for the U.S. Postal Service if nothing is done to brake its financial slide? Postmaster General Pat Donahoe tossed out an attention-getting benchmark today. “This is Greece,” Donahoe told participants at the PostalVision 2020 conference, as he highlighted a slide showing the Postal Service with $92 billion in debt by 2016 (up from about $12 billion last year), assuming that Congress doesn’t act on pleas for relief from the requirement to pump billions of dollars annually into a health care fund for future retirees. Greece, he said, has a debt-to-gross domestic product ratio of 1.6 to one.…
For the U.S. Postal Service, the words “digital” and “opportunity” are two words that don’t normally go together. After all, the mail carrier has lost billions of dollars in revenue to customers’ growing fondness for Internet bill-paying, electronic greeting cards and so forth. Last month, however, Postmaster General Pat Donahoe announced the launch of a “digital solutions group” intended to sniff out potential money-makers in the online sphere. More recently, the USPS inspector general has singled out one in particular: Putting the agency in the digital authentication business. You can read the IG’s full report here, but in a nutshell,…
The American Postal Workers Union is out with a somewhat cryptic news release on the status of negotiations over possible buyout/early out incentives. The bottom line: Stay tuned. Although the union acknowledged “informal conversations” with the U.S. Postal Service, “no official offers have been made or discussed,” according to the release, posted on the APWU’s web site late this afternoon. “We expect the Postal Service to make a formal request to negotiate over early-outs and incentives after several other outstanding issues have been addressed,” APWU President Cliff Guffey said in the release. Guffey didn’t say what those issues are. Spokespersons…
In connection with a story, Federal Times is interested in getting postmasters’ views on the $20,000 buyouts that the Postal Service is offering. Does this look like a good deal to you (or not)? Are you considering it and, if so, what factors are on your mind? If you’d like to discuss this, please shoot me (Sean Reilly) an email at sreilly@federaltimes.com and let me know how best to reach you or give me a call directly at 703-750-8684. Thanks very much. Sean
When it comes to predicting the impact of its proposed mail processing plant cuts, the U.S. Postal Service has been throwing out some pretty big numbers that don’t always seem to jibe. Back in February, for example, a USPS spokesman said the downsizing would eliminate 35,000 jobs; under a revised plan unveiled this month, that figure dropped to 28,000. And while USPS officials have pegged the projected savings at about $2.1 billion, they’ve also used the figure, $4.1 billion. What gives? Well, it’s complicated and some of the figures are in flux, the Postal Service acknowledges. The estimated job effect,…
In the mood for a little irony? Even as Congress is laboring to rescue the U.S. Postal Service from a protracted financial crisis (proposed solutions include pumping billions of dollars into the mail carrier), federal agencies are now under orders to take steps that will reduce their spending on postage. Among those steps: Using flat-rate boxes and envelopes whenever possible; taking more advantage of USPS discounts; and reducing hard-copy mailings between agencies, according to a recent General Services Administration bulletin to agency heads. As reasons for the new policy, GSA cites several Obama administration executive orders instructing agencies to reduce waste,…
The U.S. Postal Service, an organization inextricably associated with the delivery of lots and lots of paper, is creating a new enterprise focused on the online sphere, according to a memorandum today from Postmaster General Pat Donahoe. The “digital solutions” group is intended “to better explore growth opportunities in the digital space, and to translate those opportunities into new streams of revenue, enhance the value of our current offerings, and improve customer experiences,” Donahoe told Postal Service officers in the memo obtained by Federal Times. The venture comes as the agency is under pressure from Congress and postal employee unions to explore alternatives to service cutbacks. “We are convinced there…
The U.S. Postal Service’s inspector general is out with a new overview of employee retirement options. This is a hot topic nowadays, given that USPS leaders have been open about their interest in using early-out incentives as a glide path to a much smaller agency. One finding: More than 189,000 postal employees (that’s well above one-third of the current career workforce) are eligible to retire in fiscal 2012. That number appears to be a good bit higher than the figure used by postal execs, who generally put the ratio at around one in four. The report also notes that the…