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Postal Service trying to do more with less
...Nor economic gloom will keep the USPS from making the rounds.
By Suzanne Kubota
Senior Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio.com
Despite a drop off in the amount of mail being sent through the postal system, the mail still has to “go through”, as the saying goes.
US Postal Service’s Deputy Post Master General and chief operating officer, Pat Donahoe, tells FederalNewsRadio, “An average letter carrier is on the street everyday for about six hours a day delivering to about 600 addresses, so they’ve got to go to those houses whether they’ve got one piece of mail or five pieces of mail.”
“Just to put it in perspective,” says Donahoe, “in 2006, we delivered 213 billion pieces of mail. This year, we think that we’ll be delivering about 180, so it’s a substantial drop off.”
So income is down, demand is down, costs of delivering the mail are up… What’s a postal service to do? The answer, according to Donahoe, is to cut labor costs while increasing productivity through technology.
Early Retirements Offered
We had about 7,000 people take advantage of it the last time. We had the voluntary early retirement offered in the fall, and we think we’ll probably see similar numbers. Besides the number of people that can take the voluntary early retirement, we have about 120,000 additional employees who are already eligible for retirement. We think over the course of this year, from an attrition standpoint, people leaving and not replacing them, we’ll probably have about 35 to 40,000 people leave.
Donahoe isn’t worried about those left behind being able to get the job done.
Looking ahead from a retirement perspective, you’re always looking to cut costs, to position yourself strongly as this volume comes back. Our people have done a great job from a productivity standpoint in the postal service. We had on the rolls in 2000, 800,000 employees. Today we have 646,000 and that’s delivering to 10 million addresses daily – every day – more than we did back in 2000.
Technology
However, as the economy recovers and mail volume increases, Donahoe says the USPS is hedging its bets.
Even as we’ve had a downturn financially, we have continued to invest in technology – automated sorting equipment – for our mail, and as we come out of this downturn of the volume, we’ll employ some of that automation to pick up some of the jobs that have been lost.
The postal service is also considering cutting back on service.
We do have to take a look at the demand on postal services and the other question that comes up is “should the postal service be considered as an economic entity or a government entity?” And when you look at it from a government perspective, do you need to have delivery five days a week or do you need to have it six days a week. Those are a lot of the decisions that have to be made between Congress, our Board of Governors, and the industry in general.
But, says Donahoe, there’s nothing definite. “Not exactly. We’re exploring all options at this point.”
Despite the uncertainty, Donahoe says morale is “pretty good” and that postal employees still take pride in what they do. “We have a tremendous workforce, a very proud workforce,” he says, “who love to serve America.”
Listen this afternoon to The Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris for reaction from National Association of Letter Carriers to the decision to offer voluntary early retirements.
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On the Web:
USPS – Postal Service Continues Aggressive Steps to Cut Costs (press release)
FederalNewsRadio – US Post Service looks for new ways to cut losses
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