Public Employee Unions Are Our Friends!

I'm fine with giving FedEX and UPs the option to deliver letters, on the condition they deliver to ALL addresses without price discrimination. Something tells me they'd pass on that deal.
 
If it was my office, having xtra workers come in who could pick up the slack if there were absences or just an unexpectedly heavy day, it would sound like a situation that offered some plusses. Might not be the best idea, but it could be useful.
 
"All addresses" and "all 'types' of addresses" are two different things.


Those "types" are USPS designations. So no, UPS and FedEx won't be adopting those same labels any time soon.


Rural routes are routes where carriers drive out to deliver mail to a collection of mailboxes on the corner of a couple dirt roaRAB. Rural areas will also often have auxiliary offices with PO Boxes, and that wouldn't be called a "rural route," but they would most definitely be considered "rural" by everyone else's standarRAB. Very rarely do carriers actually deliver mail to home addresses out in the boonies (notable exceptions are when they're in the outskirts of a city), and even when the mail's destination is a street address, the mail might still be on a rural route or landing in a PO Box.

Here's the kicker: it's illegal for anyone other than USPS to deliver to these locations, so everyone else has to actually deliver to the street address (where USPS won't go), hence the premium that you pay.
 
I have no dispute with the contention that the USPS monopoly distorts prices for FedEx and UPS (which is the point I think you're trying to make).


I think the evidence is strong (if not indisputable) that rural service would suffer dramatically without guarantees such as those offered by the USPS. If common carriers accept these same sorts of obligations (as entrusted to the USPS currently) in exchange for elimination of the monopoly, I'd be fine with that. Hell, USPS could be cut completely loose from government subsidies in that case.
 
Yeah, I know. They can't be reassigned to another postal office for the day. They can still do whatever it was they are assigned to do in their own post office. If another mail sorter called in sick the mail sorter on standby would do the work. They wouldn't have had been reassigned. I think we already went over this.
 
Long-standing labor agreements with two major postal unions prohibit the Postal Service from laying off or reassigning workers because of broken equipment or perioRAB of low mail volume. Instead, idled employees show up for work, sit in a break room or cafeteria and do nothing.
That's pretty much exactly what TKG was saying. You lose.

Now go ragequit for a couple years.
 
why is it not?

when you drop something in the mail, you have the satisfaction of knowing that it will be delivered for a small fee of 40 cents or whatyever the hell it is now.

having the mail take an extra week because that post office had personnel issues costs money.

the benefits are realized on a global level, but the logic is the same as the fire fighters.
 
Congress is largely to blame for this mess. In 2006 they passed a law that mandated USPS to prefund future employee's, retirement health care, and half of the Federal governments retiree force, besides their own retiree's. This amounts to a whopping 5.5 billion per year, which accounts for more than half of USPS's 8 billion dollar annual loss.

Add to that, 7 or 8 postmasters who each have their own staff employed within a 30 mile radius and all pull in 90k a year, you can see that management is raking in all the dough. Yet everyone wants to lay blame on all of the low level mail carriers and clerks who have to fight management for their hours just to get by.
 
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