OK, the President's Commission on the U.S. Postal Service has finally issued its long-awaited recommendations for postal legislative change. Now what?
Well, now we find ourselves in the same place we were before the commission ever started. Now we have to convince Capitol Hill and the White House which of the commission's recommendations should be enacted into law.
One of the realities of postal political life in the United States is that change is often slow in coming and difficult to achieve. For any postal legislative proposal to wind its way to enactment, the agreement of all postal principals is essential. That means mailers, the USPS, competitors and postal employees must define a course of action that can win the greatest support.
If agreement is the goal, then postal scapegoating has to end. If a finger must be pointed at a cause of blame for the postal service's current dilemma, look no further than the “incentives” that were set in place when postal reorganization was enacted.
Human beings are rational animals. Often they behave the way they do because the positive and negative reinforcers in life point them in a particular direction. If the people who function in today's postal system conduct themselves in some way that seems at odds with business realities, you may not have to change the people, but you will have to change the incentives. If you expect people to act as if they truly are operating in a competitive environment, you must make sure the incentives laid before them reflect that.
Some people like to gripe that postal employees are paid a premium above the wages and benefits offered to comparable private sector workers. I, for one, wouldn't want to deny any worker or his family the income or benefits they now receive. They got what they've gotten because of the structure of reorganization. In other words, they've behaved as the incentives underlying reorganization indicated they should have behaved. Why punish anyone for behaving rationally?
If the incentives, on the other hand, are somehow misdirected, then the challenge we must accept is to redirect them in a manner that will keep the postal system humming.
In short, either we come up with reform that works for everyone, or all this effort will be for nothing.
GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.
