Direct mailers have cause to celebrate. They, along with many other partners, have won enactment of a reform measure that will keep postal rates fixed until at least 2006. Getting Congress to understand the importance of changing the way the U.S. Postal Service pays on its civil service retirement system (CSRS) obligations was no small feat. As one of my colleagues noted, while other bills had been introduced up to the time of S.380’s passage, only this one had wound its way to enactment.
While everyone likes to take credit for bills that make it to the president’s desk, in this instance the members of the direct mail industry deserve kudos for using their pens, computers, fax machines and telephones to let their senators and representatives in Congress know just how important this key reform bill was to the viability of mail in business communication and commerce.
Their message was a good one: CSRS funding reform was essential to the growth and vitality of an industry that accounts for 9% of the U.S. gross domestic product, $900 billion in goods and services and some 9 million jobs.
I sure hope everyone thoroughly enjoys their well-deserved pat on the back. In short order, however, we’ll have to move beyond the celebrating and get back down to hard work.
CSRS reform will do a lot to reinvigorate our industry. But it’s no substitute for longer-term and more encompassing postal legislative reform. While this bill has bought us precious time, let’s not squander it by forgetting that substantive reform is really the prize we should be aiming for.
The incentives underlying today’s postal service are as misdirected as ever. The USPS continues to create products and set prices in a needlessly arcane manner. And it remains overly fixed on striving for its own institutional welfare rather than focusing on the viability of mail as a key facet of our nation’s economy.
We’ve got a lot of work to do. If we approach this task with the same purposefulness we showed with retirement funding reform, we should come out a winner. After all, we’ve demonstrated that we’ve got the power. Now all we need is the resolve to use it.
GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.
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