Mailing industry groups hailed the latest findings of President’s Commission on the U.S. Postal Service but were uncertain about how willing organized labor will be in furthering postal reform.
The commission appointed by President Bush late last year to study the USPS held its final meeting on Wednesday and made some sweeping recommendations about postal labor and technology issues.
Chief among the commission’s recommendations were to:
*Cut the overall size of the USPS’s workforce, partly by taking advantage of the fact that 47% of the force will be retiring within the next seven years.
*Rework the USPS’s collective bargaining agreements with its unions, creating incentives for reaching negotiated settlements and speeding up the arbitration process in cases where the postal service and the unions can’t agree and giving the proposed Postal Regulatory Commission final say over salary caps for new employees.
“Some the commission’s recommendations were good while others might have gotten too bogged down in details but overall they were reasonable,” said Gene Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce.
Direct Marketing Association president H. Robert Wientzen said in a statement that the commission’s work “will form the basis from which we all can move forward towards the implementation of necessary postal reform.”
But William Burrus, president of the American Postal Worker Union blasted the recommendations as undercutting the collective bargaining process and violating the National Labor Relations Act.
“We’re going to use every tool in our arsenal to fight this thing,” he said in an interview.
The National Rural Letter Carriers Association had a more moderate reaction.
“We believe that, in general, the recommendations could improve labor/management relations, notably by encouraging more negotiated settlements,” said NRLCA spokesman Ken Parmelee in a statement. “However, we believe that making pensions and post-retirement health insurance benefits for newly hired employees subject to collective bargaining could adversely affect these programs that also cover thousands of current and retired postal and federal employees and retirees.
The commission also proposed that the USPS:
*Increase its amount of outsourcing parts of its processing network.
*Standardize all its processing technology to make sure that all postal facilities have the same levels of equipment.
Overall, the industry groups were positive about the ideas.
“I applaud the commission for taking on the hard questions and I’d be surprised if we don’t see some legislative proposals by the end of the current session of Congress in early 2004, said Neal Denton, executive director of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers.
Bob McLean, executive director of the Mailers Council, said that his group expects to support “many of (the) recommendations, notably those that would help improve the Postal Service’s productivity and keep postage prices reasonable.”
The Commission’s final report will come out on July 31 and go to President Bush from there.
Denton expressed concern about whether President Bush would ultimately support the Commission’s findings.
“That’s the $10,000 question,” he quipped.
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