The US Postal Service has made headlines lately for their financial troubles. Some of the causes of the current financial crisis are the economy, the recession, and a sharp decline in volume due to electronic communication.
A bigger cause of the current financial crisis is a governmental requirement that the Postal Service prepay retirement benefits and healthcare costs for their employees up to 75 years in advance.
A bipartisan Senate committee introduced Bill S. 1789 in an attempt to save the US Postal Service last week.
Among the bill's measures is returning $7 billion that the Postal Service has overpaid in prefunding retirement costs and reducing the amount of prefunding required in the future for retirement and healthcare benefits.
Some of this money would be used as incentives for 100,000 employees to retire instead of potentially being laid off.
The Postal Service's plans to overhaul USPS include the consolidation and closure of over half of the mail processing facilities in the country and thousands of small Post Offices, many in rural areas.
Included in the first wave of planned closures are mail processing facilities in Lynchburg and Roanoke.
If plans follow the course that Postmaster General Donahoe has established, all mail from the areas currently served by Lynchburg and Roanoke facilities will be trucked to Greensboro daily to be processed and return to be delivered two days later, ending overnight delivery of First Class Mail.
The Postmaster General states that USPS will save millions of dollars with each consolidation and thousands of dollars with the closure of each small Post Office. However, if those savings are realized, they will take place at the expense of hundreds of thousands of human lives changed and impacted.
In Lynchburg, assuming that the planned consolidation takes effect, over 100 lives will be permanently changed. In Roanoke, over 300 employees will be impacted. Nationwide, the number of affected employees is staggering.
Many of these workers have spent most of their adult lives working for the Postal Service and are proud to be identified as Postal employees. They have raised their children in a middle-class environment as a direct result of employment with the US Postal Service.
Although the official company statement says that these are merely studies to determine feasibility and no firm decision has been made, all plans are in place for the consolidations and closures to take place. Public meetings are a formality with few if any answers given to the questions asked by Postal workers and the general public.
The timeline is short for consolidation decisions with public meetings in Lynchburg and Roanoke this month. Postmaster General Donahoe's timeline is charted out to begin closures in February or March 2012.
If employees knew now that they would be impacted and how, they could plan for the rest of their lives. But that's not the way it will work.
Decisions will be rendered in the first group of consolidations including those affecting employees in Lynchburg and Roanoke in December, just in time for Christmas. Even then, a date may not be set and individual employees may not know if they will stay or they will go.
Additionally, there aren't enough jobs into which to transfer all of the impacted employees. Postal officials have noted that although they are holding all vacant jobs within 100 miles of Lynchburg, Roanoke, and other affected facilities, those openings won't be enough for the many employees who will be impacted in the 100 mile radius.
Where will the rest of the employees go? Nobody seems to know and those who know aren't telling. For now, Postal workers in Lynchburg, Roanoke, and throughout the country will just wait and hope.
They can't plan because they don't know where they will be in a few months, what they will be doing, if they will have to move, or any of the other details that make up life. They can only hope that they won't be discarded like the blue collection boxes that are no longer needed.
Although many critics of the Postal Service cite the monopoly to deliver First Class Mail, they never mention the Universal Service Obligation.
Only the US Postal Service is required by law to uphold the standards of
- uniform pricing of First Class Mail
- quality of service
- access to services by every American
- 6-day delivery
Critics of the Postal Service also fail to mention that the Postal Service predates the US Constitution. Article 1 of the Constitution gives Government the duty "to establish post offices and post roads."
Many changes have taken place since 1775 when Benjamin Franklin was appointed as the first Postmaster of the US Postal Office. The US Postal Service was established as an independent agency in 1970.
It's doubtful that Benjamin Franklin could have forseen the events taking place in the US Postal Service today.
It's even more doubtful that Benjamin Franklin would approve of the Postal Services plans to eliminate jobs, decrease service to the American public, and forever change the face of the Postal Service.
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