If you’ve been reading the news lately, you’re aware that the U.S. Postal Service isn’t what it once was, and it’s rapidly becoming something quite different.
The travails of the USPS are no longer a secret and those who have been dependent on the U.S. Mail, including The New Era, may no longer be able to depend on that institution as we once did.
We’ve been hearing news stories in the last few weeks about how the Post Office is not only considering halting Saturday delivery, but is talking large-scale closures and other service reductions.
Last week the USPS announced it will close down 252 of its 461 mail processing centers, eliminate 28,000 jobs and end overnight delivery of first-class mail.
The National Newspaper Association has actively worked to head off some of these changes because they are going to affect newspaper operations.
At The New Era, we are experimenting with options to make sure you get your paper on time. Today, for instance, we are doubling up deliveries to some of our subscribers, who will also get our total marketing publication – the Extra – with a bundle of ads inside. In doing that, we are using a slightly different service provided by the Post Office that could prove more reliable than regular mail in making sure our advertisers’ materials get to you when they’re supposed to, along with the news.
None of this is set in stone. Over the next couple of months we will figure out what will work best. I have to say that our local Postmaster, Carrie Wilson, is kind of caught between our needs and the dictates of the Post Office in all this, and she and her staff have really been trying to help us find a way to get this done. More on that in a bit.
Locally, of course, the concern isn’t just mail delivery. Cascadia’s Post Office was on the list of those being considered for the chopping block and the plot has thickened now that it burned down a month ago.
Meanwhile, the Post Office is simply unable to continue to do what we’ve always expected from it. The days of “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” which a lot of folks used to believe (falsely) was the Postal Service’s creed, is almost laughable in light of the most recent news that includes talk of not only considering halting Saturday delivery, but large-scale closures and other service reductions.
Bottom line: They’ll deliver your mail when they get to it.
The reasons why the U.S. Mail is in the condition that it is are really a combination of many factors.
Founded in 1775 as one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized in the U.S. Constitution, the USPS was one of the forerunners in its field, particularly in a nation as far-flung as the United States. The fairly reliable postal delivery system organized by Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s first Postmaster General, was one of the keys to the successful formation and development of the United States. Over the next two centuries, innovations such as the Pony Express, rail service, air mail, commemorative stamps, ZIP codes, and modern computer automation were introduced to get the mail where it belonged.
A former Sweet Home Postmaster, referring to the organization necessary to get the mail delivered, once told me, “It’s really incredible how it all works. It’s amazing.”
It’s easy to criticize when we’ve had to stand in a long line to mail a letter, or when a clerk hasn’t given us the answer we want. Actually, the Post Office is an amazing organization in many ways. It has the second-largest civilian work force in the United States – over half a million employees – and operates over 218,000 vehicles, making it the largest fleet in the world.
It delivers to remote rural locations for the same price it delivers across the street. Locally, our local carriers have, for the most part, done a great job of delivering our particular products – The New Era and the Extra. They have taken good care of us and of you, delivering weekly to the thousands of households who receive our publications in the local community.
But the future does not look rosy. From a business standpoint, the Post Office has not always operated in the same world that the rest of us businesses, which are forced to make a profit to survive, do.
The Post Office has always been a government agency, more or less, even though broke free of nearly all support from taxpayers about a decade after it became an independent agency of the U.S. government in 1971. Despite repeated rate increases, it continues to struggle, particularly since the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 obligated it to pre-fund 75 years worth of its retirement benefit plans by 2016 – a requirement not shared by any other government agency. Some have suggested that that requirement is the real reason why the Post Office is on the verge of bankruptcy.
The General Accountability Office has called the Postal Service’s business model “not viable,” citing the fact that the Postmaster General can’t really take any substantial action without congressional approval – which is incredibly unwieldy and subject to political whims. Another big problem is the USPS’ labor costs, which accounts for 80 percent of its cost structure. According to the GAO, the average postal employee earns $83,000 a year in total compensation and 85 percent of its workforce is covered by collective bargaining agreements that pay even more generous benefits than even other federal agencies, which are already hard to beat, at least by private employers not coasting along on taxpayer dollars. They include high contributions by the USPS to health and life insurance, a federal workers compensation program more generous than those the private sector can offer, no “lay-off” provisions for most full-time workers, and other protections that are far broader than most unions offer.
One of the provisions most obvious to customers is the fact that the union contracts restrict managers from from assigning employees to do tasks outside their particular job description. Ever wonder why you stand in line watching postal employees seemingly puttering around in the background while the counter personnel try to deal with you and all the other customers in the long line? They can’t help and that’s why they don’t.
There are other difficulties for postal officials trying to get you your mail besides rising fuel prices and all the other things the rest of us businesses struggle with. The volume of first-class mail has plummeted in recent years due to the rise of the Internet – Facebook and e-mail. How many Christmas cards/letters are you sending/receiving this year? How many stamps are you buying to pay your bills?
Another problem for us, particularly newspaper customers, is the The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, variously known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act or the Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act. Passed in the wake of the accounting scandals of the late 1990s (remember Enron?), it tightened standards for U.S. public company boards, management and public accounting firms.
That is fine, except that the Post Office is among those affected by Sarbanes-Oxley and it has tightened many of its accounting practices, including deadlines for submitting mail, which makes life increasingly difficult for customers such as weekly newspapers, who have their own tight production and mailing schedules that suddenly no longer line up with what the Post Office wants. That’s one reason why we’re experimenting with this alternative mailing process today.
In light of all of this, we need to remember that the local postal employees are not the cause of what we’re talking about here. So don’t go down to the Post Office and rage over the counter at an innocent clerk who simply might be working a job with nice benefits but otherwise has little control over deadlines and what they can do for you. Fact is, the Postal Service’s problems are the fault of the politicians, the management and the union leaders who set up this whole house of cards.
The situation is clearly one that can’t continue. Some have suggested that the best way to preserve effective mail delivery in the United States would be to end the Postal Service’s monopoly – something long advocated by many bottom-line business and conservative organizations.
The Post Office has a clear monopoly created by Congress, which gives the U.S. Mail exclusive access to your mailbox or mail slots. That’s why, if we were ever to deliver the newspaper or Extra (which goes to non-subscribers) ourselves, we’d have to deliver it to your doorstep or walkway, or to a tube. It’s also the primary reason why the U.S. Mail hasn’t been overwhelmed, particularly in cities, by competitors such as United Parcel Service or FedEx.
There are obviously no easy answers here. Our local postal employees, with whom we work nearly every day, go out of their way to do what they can to get our publications to you, which we appreciate. In the next couple of months we will figure out the best way to solve these problems in a way that will make sure The New Era and the Extra get to you when you expect them here in Sweet Home.