Saturday delivery is vital for the
elderly, disabled, people in rural areas, and those who need medicine or
equipment delivered to their doors.
Yes,
making a profit. When you count how much money the Postal Service earned on
postage, and subtract how much it spent delivering the mail and paying related
bills, the Postal Service earned a $100 million profit in the last three months
of 2012. And remember, the USPS uses no taxpayer money.
So
why all this talk about the Postal Service losing money? And why is Postmaster
General Patrick Donahoe planning to end Saturday mail delivery?
There’s no question the Postal Service faces big challenges. Both email and a struggling economy are dragging down mail volume. But the Postal Service’s financial problem is actually driven by Congress’s decision to “pre-fund” retiree health care costs. Beginning in 2007, the USPS has been required to pay 75 years of those costs in advance, and to do so within just ten years.
This pre-funding
accounts for about 80 percent of the “losses” sustained by the Postal Service
over the last six years that you’ve heard so much about. Indeed, that last
quarterly profit was wiped out by a $1.4 billion pre-funding payment.
No
other government agency or private company is required to pre-fund retiree
healthcare. This isn’t the same thing as postal pensions, which should be, and
are, pre-funded. Most businesses just pay retiree health care bills when
they’re due, but the pre-funding law forces the USPS to pay these bills all at
once, far in advance.
Any
other company would use its available funds to modernize so it can stay
healthy. The Postal Service should be taking advantage of the enormous growth
in package delivery driven by Internet sales. Instead, because it must put
every spare penny into pre-funding retiree healthcare, it’s stuck in crisis
mode.
What’s
more, the savings from dropping Saturday delivery would be much smaller than
they appear. Cutting Saturday service will drive away some
Monday-through-Friday customers too, such as magazine and newspaper publishers
that may just switch to other delivery services for the entire week. A study by
the Postal Regulatory Commission found that ending Saturday delivery would hurt
the public and save significantly less than previous claims suggest.
Saturday
delivery is particularly vital for the elderly, disabled, people in rural
areas, and those who need medicine or equipment delivered to their doors. No
other company provides universal delivery service to every address in the
country, six days a week. Even private shippers such as FedEx and UPS use the U.S. Mail for up to a third of
their final deliveries to customers’ doors because they can’t match the
efficiency of the postal network.
Congress
has required Saturday delivery by law for three decades. Instead of trying to
defy Congress, Postmaster General Donahoe should urge lawmakers to fix the
pre-funding problem and give the Postal Service room to adapt for the future.
Letter
carriers aren’t waiting for Donahoe to figure this out. We’ll be out in full
force across America on Sunday, March 24. At rallies in Mobile, Alabama,
Bismarck, North Dakota, San Diego, California, and more than 100 other cities
and towns, we’ll have a clear message for Congress — keep Saturday delivery,
end the unnecessary pre-funding, and develop a real reform plan that gives the
Postal Service the freedom to grow and innovate in the digital era.
Fredric Rolando is president of the National
Association of Letter Carriers, which represents nearly 300,000 letter carriers
across the country. NALC.org
Distributed via OtherWords. OtherWords.org
Distributed via OtherWords. OtherWords.org