Quote:
Originally Posted by justjim
With the current White House-----NO! The figures that I could quickly find on mail carriers was 46,970 avg. annual wage in 2008. Service clerks, sorters and processors was 50,150. Of course, benefits on top of the salaries. Salaries not as high as one might expect. I am sure there are administrative positions that could easily be cut. As far as I can tell the union contracts would not prohibit closing postal service offices around the country. In fact, some sorting and distribution centers are currently closing and consolidating. One could easily argue, that the lack of action lies with the Congress and White House and not with the Unions. Besides, union contracts can be negotiated. But we cannot vote out a Congress person who is not in our District.
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I did a bit of checking just to satisfy my intellectual curiosity on this, and think I can present a few different sides (with no opinion which should make you happy, at least not until I read more about the history)
This is from this past February.....It sort of shows the problem and the two different angles to fix it..
"Although the Postal Service is a self-funding entity that doesn’t use taxpayer dollars to pay for its operations, it is a significant piece of the unified federal budget because its workers and retirees draw benefits from federal workers’ compensation, retirement and health-care accounts.
Postal Service officials said last week that the agency lost $3.3 billion in the quarter that ended in December. While the Postal Service generated $200 million in profit from mail deliveries, $3.1 billion in obligations required by law to prefund future worker retirements — a charge unique to USPS — offset the gains and resulted in the overall loss. "
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" In the budget plan released Monday, the White House proposed relaxing those payments by allowing the Postal Service to include fewer employees in the payments and to make the payments over a longer period of time. Obama also backed an end to Saturday mail deliveries and proposed granting USPS the authority to raise the price of stamps beyond the rate of inflation, if necessary. Obama also would refund $10.9 billion to USPS over two years from a credit it has with the Federal Employee Retirement System.
If enacted, the White House said the proposals would help USPS save $25 billion in the next 11 years. "
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"Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who is sponsoring a House GOP postal reform bill, said Obama’s proposal “lacks the necessary comprehensive approach to restore the Postal Service to solvency.”
Issa agreed that ending Saturday mail delivery is necessary, but he added that “infusing the agency with cash and hiking postage rates without requiring USPS to reduce costs and realign itself to meet America’s changing use of mail is just buying a very small amount of time with a very big check.”
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So it appears that both parties are for nixing Sat but the Republicans feel the plan is just a band aid and not a cure