Only days after it was introduced, a proposed Senate overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service is taking its lumps from both organized labor and the mailing industry. “This bill is fatally flawed,” Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in a Friday statement denouncing the legislation as a betrayal of USPS employees. The Association for Postal Commerce, which represents business mail users, has some “significant issues” with the measure, such as its idea for widening the Postal Service’s discretion in applying an inflation-adjusted cap on rate increases for standard mail and other areas where it dominates the…
Browsing: Gene del Polito
No doubt about it: The U.S. Postal Service’s third-quarter financial report was–on the surface–a bloodbath. With $5.2 billion in red ink spilled in just three months, you might think Freddy Krueger was keeping the books. Amid all the gore, though, the numbers reflect some faint flickers of hope. The question is whether those glimmers represent: (1) A blip; or (2) An early sign that finances are at least stabilizing, if not actually turning around. USPS leaders are naturally eager to accentuate the positive, particularly after this month’s failure to make a required $5.5 billion payment into a fund for future retiree…