Like any bureaucracy, the Post Office, once created, never wanted to be un-created. In that light, they have tried to come up with creative ideas to keep their union employees on the payroll – like taxing emails and taking the revenue – but it hasn’t worked very well.
The Post Office has long claimed they were not benefiting from the government because they get no government money, but a monopoly mandated by the government means they never had to function the way a non-government business had to function – they forced the public to pay whatever they needed, so the costs rose even when the market did not. When Federal Express wanted to get into the letter delivery business and not just the premium delivery business, they were denied that ability by the US government. That means the Post Office is part of the government.
Like most government segments, they have run into a pension problem; namely that the costs are unsustainable. The Post Office can’t make a mandatory $5.5 billion payment into the U.S. Treasury for future retiree health benefits. And they may be out of money next autumn. Today, with the advent of email, no one wants to get into the letter delivery field and be burdened with trying to privatize a business that has never had to be well managed.
But now they are at least starting to think like a $70 billion business should think. They want to reduce deliveries to 5 days per week. Reasonable. And they want more layoffs, but layoffs are prohibited by current contracts with its unions and there is zero chance Pres. Obama is annoying a union in an election year. They also want to negotiate with unions on a possible alternate health care system that would cost less; namely, they want to leave the government health care plan the government thinks everyone should be forced to buy. They may be stuck.
We can’t be honest when it comes to unions because their sense of entitlement is through the roof, but the Post Office is sitting on $40 billion of bloated pension funds while it dies. Missing a payment is not meaningful.
Basically, the Post Office, which has long benefited from unfair protection by the government, now wants less government telling it how to operate. If they can’t be allowed to do that, R.I.P.