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Originally posted by: 777rojen777
In an effort to break the postal union, our legislators mandated that the USPS fully fund their pension for the next 72 years. Yes, fully fund the retirement of workers who aren't even born yet. They gave them ten years to fully fund the pension. Most businesses who pay into a pension fund do it to be fully funded for a few years at a time. So a huge part of the USPS's problem is getting that fund intact. There are of course some other problems. Also, as per the article, the USPS needs congressional approval for changes in their operation. So they need to ask an organization trying to destroy them to approve measures meant to save them. The USPS has seen this problem coming for awhile and have been stymied when trying to take proactive measures. It's not until they're running in the red that they're granted the permission to fix problems they've identified years ago.
It's a great organization and is unfairly maligned due to people's perception about government and unions. Luckily, the elderly and the rural, people who generally don't like government and unions, are the ones who will be hurt the most by this. Have fun getting your mail order prescriptions on Monday instead of Saturday. You asked for it, now you're getting it unlubed
USPS operations are much, much better today than they were up until about a year ago. When word got out that they were losing tens of billions annually someone finally started cracking the whip. It now takes 6-7 days to ship a regular parcel cross-country instead of 11-12 days. And never anymore does a package come up lost in the system only to show up 1 month later if it showed up at all. Every package that shipped from one Las Vegas address to another Las Vegas address used to first go to Bell, CA(western hub) only to be shipped back to Las Vegas. I used to marvel at the stupidity of that. Finally someone had enough sense to see how inefficient and wasteful that was and now the package is delivered the next day instead of 4 days. Surly employees are now rare whereas they were commonplace in the past. And to think this has all been accomplished while slashing the workforce.
