DESPITE THE MORE than sufficient signs that the U.S. Postal Service is an institution under stress, there persists within the mailing community, throughout the USPS and among its customers a sense of denial.
Just recently, postal officials suffered the chagrin of revealing that the past four years of unprecedented postal prosperity were coming to an end. USPS financial statements have begun to show that the postal service’s “pink palace” (as scoffers have described the L’Enfant Plaza headquarters in Washington, DC) is a monument to government bureaucracy grounded on quicksand.
There still are some in the postal sector who fervently believe that Congress will not allow the postal service to die. They simply cannot fathom the possibility that universal mail service actually could exist without the USPS.
It’s time those whose lives depend on the preservation of a universal mail delivery system take a postal seismic reading, because the tranquility of the past four years is merely a mask for the cataclysm that will inevitably come-unless we do something quickly and substantive to redirect the incentives underlying today’s postal service toward a more business-rational point.
Toward that end, it is important to note that the postal service is about to enter binding arbitration with one of its most important labor groups, the National Association of Letter Carriers. Whether letter carriers deserve more than the USPS has offered will be up to an arbitrator to decide. But besides issues of wages and bonuses, something more important is at stake: work rules. For it’s work rules more than anything else that can choke an institution under stress to death.
Given the changing market engulfing the postal service, we can only hope the arbitrator will be wise enough to know that if anything is to change, it must begin with work rules.
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