Recently the United States Postal Service announced plans to lay off 120,000 workers and to cut 220,000 jobs in all.
In an official statement, the US Postal Service (USPS) said: "Our most significant area of cost is in compensation and benefits, and one key driver of those costs is simply the sheer size of our workforce.
"Based on current revenue and cost trends, and assuming a move to 5-day delivery, the Postal Service can only afford a total workforce by 2015 of 425,000, which includes approximately 30% lower cost, more flexible, non-career employees."
In other words, the United States can no longer afford a post office, even though the constitution specifically mentions establishing a post office as one of the powers of congress (Art. I, Sec. 8).
The layoff strategy is perverse. The easiest and best new stimulus package, with 'workplace ready' employment would be in the post office. Instead of laying off and cutting back nearly a quarter of a million jobs, the USPS could easily have been empowered by congress to hire an extra 100,000 workers every year for a few years. This job growth could allow for twice a day mail delivery, creation of mini business centers in rural post offices, (where these services are not provided by other outlets) with internet, fax, printing and copying facilities available to customers at reasonable cost, and integration of banking transfers into its core business.
I have never understood why the post office and postal workers have been targeted for public contempt. Think about it: post workers actually do deliver almost every piece of mail you have ever received by personally bringing it to your house within 48 or 72 hours of someone mailing it in another part of the country. During the anthrax attacks of 2001, postal workers were most at risk of contamination, but they continued to bring each one of us our mail, with no noticeable interruptions in service. Nor do I understand why people sneer at lines at the post office. Hello, people, there are lines everywhere. The service at post offices I have frequented is no worse than, and frequently better than, the service at supermarkets, banks, or fed -ex centers.
My conjecture: the post office has been scorned and defunded because it is the backbone of the blue collar middle class (aka working class) and while popular sentiment supposedly celebrates upward mobility, these last decades it really resents it. That's why teachers and other public employees have also been targeted for popular and political contempt as well. The last decade has been a time of entrenchment of privilege and class position. Getting rid of blue collar and white collar public employment helps kick millions of striving working -to- middle class families to the curb, where apparently, the malefactors of great wealth think they belong.
(cross posted at Possible Experience)