Issa introduces bill to overhaul U.S. Postal Service, increase regulation

Source: The Washington Post

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) introduced legislation Thursday to restructure the U.S. Postal Service, saying more regulation is necessary to “prevent another taxpayer bailout” of the financially strapped agency.

The bill would eliminate Saturday delivery and give the Postal Service greater latitude to close post offices and regional mail processing centers. A panel would be created to oversee the agency, modeled on the District of Columbia’s Financial Control Board, with a broad mandate to reduce costs and bring the agency back to financial solvency. “Congress can’t keep kicking the can down the road on out-of-control labor costs and excess infrastructure of USPS,” Issa said in a statement.

The panel also would have authority to renegotiate collective-bargaining agreements with postal workers, a provision that will draw stiff opposition from unions. If the bill becomes law, employees will probably see reductions in their wages and benefits.

The plan from the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform would eventually save the Postal Service $6 billion a year. It comes on the heels of the agency’s announcement that it plans to suspend its contributions to the pensions of thousands of workers to help stem billions of dollars in losses.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/issa-introduces-bill-to-overhaul-us-postal-service-increase-regulation/2011/06/23/AG7CS4hH_story.html

Sounds like Big Government to me.

No one will answer the question, where has all the money from the UPS gone? A lot has been borrowed by the Federal Govt. and has not been paid back and there is an over abundance of management, administrators and the pay they receive. It's not the union members who have brought these problems to the Post Office, but it's been the administrators who have wrought so much destruction. :banghead:

I am the child of a retired Post Office Employee, and the sibling of a current employee (who is 17 months from retirement).

that loot go? Who gave that junk mail bulk discount rates?

I knew there was a reason that everyone was gonna get a pony.

My grandmother who is in her 90's pays all of her bills by mail and does not have a computer. How will this effect the poorer people in rural areas?

Will companies extend payment due dates if there is no delivery on Sat. and people receive them a few days later than normal?

This is a bad idea.

It's a requirement no other business or government agency has to meet. It is a requirement designed to put the USPS into the red and enhance the prospect for privatization.

There can be no other interpretation of that requirement.

You're right on all counts you raise, though- we have too many managers, and too many of them have no workroom floor experience.

"more regulation is necessary to 'prevent another taxpayer bailout' of the financially strapped agency."

...Issa is trying to get rid of the Postal Service. Bailout predatory banks with billions in profits, check! Bailout Postal Service, nah!

Morons!

to double the price of delivering junk mail? It might get the companies that I bought from ONCE, several years ago, to stop sending me catalogs for their crap. They've spent the profit they made on that discounted sale ten times over, if they're willing to spend it twenty times over, then at least they can fund postal worker retirements with it.

I remember, not that long ago (the 70s), getting twice a day mail deliveries, once on Saturdays.

Have you ever seen a business, like a store in a mall, start cutting its hours to save on payroll? What happens is customers adapt, go elsewhere, and the business fails.

Reducing postal service will result in more people doing their communicating on-line, more postal workers losing their jobs, routes being cut, offices closed, and ultimately, the complete collapse of a governmental agency that goes back to Benjamin Fucking Franklin.

Better suggestion: don't build 3 B-2s, and EXPAND postal service with the money saved.

Costly changes to their mailing schedule.

The part Time Flexible is an essential ingredient in assuring uninterrupted service. A five day schedule would undermine the delivery system. There would be no back up for the carriers.

I work in a distribution center.

Eliminating Saturday delivery would be a massive mistake. Please just take my word for it; I've already written long posts as to why when this topic has come up before and I really do not want to be up for half the night explaining this yet again.

Let me just say that Saturday delivery is absolutely vital to the timely delivery of mail during the week. We process an astonishing amount of mail on a daily basis; eliminating Saturday delivery would deal a huge blow to the timely delivery of the mail even with the reduced mail volume we've seen over the past decade and longer.

to your previous post(s) please post that.

from the chaff.

A DU search for the words "occulus USPS saturday" yields more than I can conveniently go through related to the USPS. To save you the effort, though, I'll be brief and restate some of it here.

We handle a truly astonishing amount of mail each day. Even in my building, one of the smallest distribution centers in the country, our goal is to process 1,000,000 pieces or more per night for delivery the next day. During the week, this is no problem, but beginning Saturday night, we start a two-day process.

I'm going to simplify things here and leave a lot out for brevity's sake, but simply put, each letter you receive goes through several sortplans on several machines before it ever even reaches your carrier. The days of banks of people sitting at stations throwing mail into cases by hand is long past; we use a machine called a Delivery BarCode Sorter (DBCS) to automagically put all the mail into each carrier's walk sequence (their route). Each machine has 270 individual bins (stackers) or more and sorts between 30,000 and 40,000 pieces per hour, depending on the quality of the mail being run.

The mail is run in a bulk mode to put it into individual ZIP codes (one bin for all of 49009, for example; another for 49010, yet another for 49080, and so forth). This is called the "sectional center facility" operation, or SCF for short (I did this operation just this evening, actually). Once it's put into those broad ZIP ranges, the mail is run in a two-pass operation on the exact same type of machine.

The two-pass operation is why we can't get rid of Saturday delivery. When we perform this operation, the mail is run in a special sortplan that places it into sequences. These sequences have no meaning to anyone other than the machine, and it uses those sequences to put the mail into the carrier's actual route sequence during the second pass. The upshot of this is that all the mail that the carrier is to deliver the following day must be run during the first pass. Once the first pass is complete, we can only add to it before doing the second pass; once the second pass starts, it's impossible to add new mail.

Think of two decks of cards. You're going to give them to someone, but they have a condition: they want the cards given to them in ascending order, by suit. If you begin with only one deck, and you get them all ordered the way they want, when you go to try to add the second deck, you have to start the whole process over again if you want to be as fast about it as possible- it's much harder to add the second deck in manually than it is to just start over with both.

Such is the case with the mail. Once the second pass begins, if we want to add more mail, we have to start the whole first pass over again and rerun everything. Obviously, we don't want to do that, so we try to get as much mail into the first pass as we have time for (time, including the second pass).

Now enter the weekend.

Saturday night, the late shift starts the first pass operation and then sets it aside until the next day. The reason for this is that we still have Saturday collections (as well as other mail) coming in on Sunday. Some of that mail simply doesn't get to us the day it's mailed, and besides, we have two days to get two days' worth of mail done. We can do that; because we don't take collections on Sundays, we do have the time to process everything over the weekend.

Now eliminate Saturday's deliveries. Suddenly, Fridays are a lot heavier on the collection end (adding to the first pass I talked about above), but at the same time, we still have mail coming in (we get bulk mail deliveries and drop shipments from major mailers seven days a week). Now, we have to run the first pass, set it aside, reload it all into the machines the next day, run first pass again, set it aside again, and then run a third first pass, adding to the previous two days, and then run the second pass.

I forgot to mention that each sequence in the first pass is one tray, about two feet long. If there's more than that, instead of Seq. 1, Seq. 2, Seq. 3, etc., we get Seq 1., Seq. 1.5, Seq. 2, Seq 2.5, etc. The machines don't understand half-sequences; we have to keep track of those. Mail detected to be out of sequence shuts down the machine.

We simply can't process three days' worth of mail in one run; we simply do not have the time we need to do so. Some of our scheduling is very tightly tied to the train and air traffic schedules, too, so we can't just arbitrarily adjust. It just isn't possible using our methods, which are in the end actually very finely-tuned to ensure delivery and processing that is as efficient as possible. Maybe, if we had longer machines and more employees, we could consider it, but we've just gone through a huge workforce reduction. We just don't have the people we need right now, and we don't have enough carriers, either.

I hope that answers your question. If they would let me, I would take a video of all this; it's actually a lot simpler than it sounds.

I see in March of this year the GAO produced a report on 5-day delivery, it can be found here:

http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-270

(with podcast even here: http://www.gao.gov/podcast/watchdog_episode_51.html )

Keep the government's grubby mitts out of the Post Office!

Republicans in the House are going to do what they do.

The USPS is run by the Board of Governors. I think they can eliminate Saturday delivery all by themselves, with no input from Congress.

It would be monumentally stupid of them, but I think it's within their power.

I could be wrong.

In the grand scheme of the entire federal budget, the USPS's "shortfall" is nothing. And they service many locations that private companies like UPS and Fedex will not even touch. The USPS provides a valuable service to all Americans, and diminishing the quality of that service makes absolutely no sense. Please raise taxes on the rich first before you touch USPS.

I've been a postal employee since 1996 or so. When was the LAST postal bailout, Mr. Issa?

Issa is a JACKASS and makes my blood boil.

What an a-hole...and a crook...and a thief...and a dirt bag...and scum.

Because I live rural.