My novel centered on the conflict between several—but mainly one— supervisor and myself. It loosely followed the same story that Charles Bukowski had used when he published his first novel, Post Office in 1971.
The situation we both described were ones common to a lot of businesses—in fact most businesses. The problem the Postal Service is facing today is very unique in that they are practically being forced to go bankrupt by the Congress and Board of Governors charged to manage it.
This column appeared in today’s Virginian-Pilot Forum section
USPS: Set up to fail
THIS WHOLE Postal Service issue seems to be very much like the weather — everybody complains about it, but no one wants to do anything about it. Fact is, there are only seven people, those members of the Board of Governors, who can do anything about it, and they choose not to.
For much of the Post Office’s history, the U.S. government subsidized it, and no one seemed to mind because receiving a letter in the mail was pretty important.
About 40 years ago this subsidy stopped, and people started looking more closely at the Postal Service’s bottom line. What did they see? They saw a nonprofit organization that, by and large, broke even or ran a slight profit every year. But because the price of stamps had to go up to do this, people began looking less kindly on the organization — even though the price of absolutely everything else under the sun also increased.
The question on everybody’s lips was “Why couldn’t we have 3-cent stamps like we used to have?” Nobody was asking why can’t new cars cost $500, or why can’t we buy a loaf of bread for 11 cents anymore.
Cable bills arrive every month and rise every six months or so, whether you watch TV or not. Same with phone bills, power bills and just about every other service most Americans receive.
The cost of mailing a letter has gone up too, but you will pay for it only if you choose to mail a letter. The cost for someone to pick up a letter at your house and mail it to someone 3,000 miles away is 46 cents.
Forty-six cents will get you absolutely nothing else in this country. Zilch. Nada.
Is the Postal Service a good deal? Absolutely. Is it having problems resulting from email, Twitter, faxing, etc? No question. But that’s not why it’s losing money.
It is losing money because it is the only organization in the country that is prepaying its health benefits 75 years before the money will be needed. Some of the people who might receive those health benefits being paid for today are not even born yet.
Those payments are the outcome of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 — an 85-page document that outlined what the Postal Service needed to do to stay viable. In this long document, which discussed every single aspect of the postal business, actual money figures are mentioned on only 10 lines.
“The United States Postal Service shall pay into such Fund $5,400,000,000, not later than September 30, 2007 ... $5,600,000,000, not later than September 30, 2008” and so on, detailing required payments of between $5.4 billion and $5.8 billion every year through 2016.
This comes to more than $55 billion in payments for a company adjusting to a significant loss of revenue. The Postal Service was actually still showing a profit until just a few years ago, despite these payments, but these are pretty big chunks of revenue to be giving up each year, and they are beginning to take a toll.
People keep asking why Congress doesn’t put a stop to this, or postpone it or reduce it to a more manageable figure.
The reason is that the people who put this into law don’t want the Postal Service to survive. They want to break the back of the Postal Service so that the only answer will be privatization, and some big investors with a lot of money will get their hands on a business that goes into every home and business in America.
The CEO of this company will make a lot of money. So will the people working under him — until you get to the people doing the actual work. These workers will make less money, receive fewer benefits and will represent just one more fraction of the ever-declining middle class that used to be.
The people who want to break up the Postal Service are the same people who would like to break up Social Security and Medicare.
Congress enacted the 2006 law specifically so the Postal Service would become a burden. And now these so-called stewards of the public trust are secretly bragging as they watch its decline: “Mission Accomplished.”
Shame on them.
Phil Terrana, a retired letter carrier who lives in Virginia Beach, is author of “Postal Service,” a novel.
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