Postal service shouldn't have to worry about operating at a profit.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
137 points (97.2% liked)
News
22839 readers
3623 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It shouldn't, though to some extent, it operating more efficiently can be a good thing if the efficiency gains can be gotten without significant detriment to service, because then more money is available for either improvements to the mail service or for other services. Profit does not impy efficiency of course, but making something more efficient can make it more profitable.
No. They’re strangled to pieces as it is.
RepubliQans hate the USPS for reasons and have gone to extraordinary lengths to injure it. It’s bullshit. Fuck that.
They are a service, like the army is a service. It costs taxpayer money and they're out here selling pencils in a cup to make barely enough to pay everyone. Fund them properly, for fuck’s sake.
It costs taxpayer money ...
No it doesn't. USPS does not receive taxpayer funds to operate. It's all funded by postage and shipping services.
Edit: Since at least two of you don't believe me: https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/do-my-tax-dollars-pay-postal-service
USPS does not receive taxpayer funds to operate.
It should. Maybe take a few hundred million from the army that doesn't even want it.
This 'efficiency' hit us a few years ago as one of the cities mentioned in the article. Since DeJoy's changes, our local sorting facility was shut down and if I want to mail a letter to my neighbor, they drive it an hour north, sort it, and then drive it an hour south where it's then put on a truck for delivery.
Ask his other efficiency and profit ideas are floundering.
I'm not arguing that this idea in particular is necessarily a good one, just that the concept of making the service more efficient has merit. Obviously, to actually see the benefits, the idea in question has to actually succeed at making the service more efficient.
the concept of making the service more efficient has merit
I’m really not sure it does. USPS needs to serve all citizens, regardless of efficiency. Just the fact of having to be everywhere for everyone necessarily means accepting all sorts of situations that can never be efficient, but nevertheless should have service
Absolutely agree.
Somebody ask how much revenue their corporation's IT dept generates. Then, ask the executives if they'd be fine if servers crashed, critical payment systems failed, and (God forbid!) their laptop stopped working...
The government as a whole shouldn't have to worry about it. Republicans think the government should be run like a business when it is nothing like a business.
They think that it is like a business because it provides services and a business does too and they equate paying taxes with paying for restaurant food. It's utter nonsense.
Government is a service. An expense. Nobody says the military is unprofitable.
We don't have enough money for public Healthcare or even just mail, but we always have room for more fucking bombs!
How else are the oligarks who owns the majority of stocks in the weapons manufacturing industry going to take even more wealth from the general population? Line. Must. Go. UP!
In layman's terms, they wanna move carriers to sorting facilities to cut down on cost for shipping mail to local offices. This could cause carriers who live in the towns the deliver in, like myself, to drive upwards of 45 minutes to an hour away to a sorting facility (this number is based on what my office's situation would be, could vary office to office). After clocking in and sorting our routes, we would then have to drive back that same amount of time to town to deliver, then drive that far back to return to office.
You can see the issue here, sure you're cutting on transportation costs to local offices, but you're now spending a lot more on carriers fuel in the already inefficient mail trucks to drive back and forth to their routes. We wouldn't get compensated for the milage and time going to and from the new office and it would lengthen our days because of the new drive time. That being said, if that drive time is accounted to our routes, our routes are supposed to be adjusted to 8 hours total time for normal mail volume. Now you're adding that much time, you gotta cut deliveries per route. Now you have to add more routes to compensate, which means paying more salaries to cover said routes. Sure it's good for us as carriers because routes need readjusting anyway, but is not the cost saving measure they think it is.
Edit: Another idea they've had is create regional delivery offices where 3 or more towns are in a single building, but this can cause the same issue, and in some regions it may not be possible due to the distance between offices in highly rural areas such as the Great Plains.
TLDR: will cause more problems than it solves.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk
I knew in my heart this would end up wasting money rather than saving, and would make life hell for employees. Thank you for explaining how it would happen. I hope it gets the same analysis in the news, and gets dropped as the bad idea it is.
Losses of $87 billion from 2007 to 2020. Why might they have chosen such odd dates to calculate? Perhaps it's because in 2006, Republicans passed a bill requiring the USPS to prefund their retirement benefits for employees 75 years in advance. They're forced to fund retirement benefits for employees that haven't even been born yet and this is the #1 reason why they're seeing losses. Fuck DeJoy and fuck Republicans who want nothing more than to destroy the institutions of this country.
Plus sending empty trucks out, getting rid of automatic sorting machines, generally burning as many man hours on things that could be more efficient - the idea is, as ever, to ‘prove’ it doesn’t work by making it as shitty as possible so whoopsie gotta shut it down.
Some of those automatic sorting machines are so bad. The manpower required to maintain the duds costs way more than just hiring people to sort the mail manually.
Stop funding the retirement fund 70 years in advance, and they would be operating in the black.
Until just a couple of years ago that was still true. Fortunately it no longer is, but it hasn't really been long enough to turn such a massive ship around yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Service_Reform_Act_of_2022
I didn't realize this, didn't get enough press. Another notch in Biden's belt, that's fantastic!
We could have done much worse than Joe Biden as president again, but I'm still glad to see the excitement behind Kamala's campaign. Hopefully she'll do a better job of advertising accomplishments.
Right there with ya.
Wow, this is huge, and bipartisan! Somehow I missed this
Bullshit. Let them raise money. They’re intentionally hamstrung by idiot rightwing Congresses going back fifty years or more.
Funding the retirement fund 70 years in advance is the sole reason it's floundering! The Republicans did it so it could be eventually privatized and if that happens millions will be absolutely fucked.
Fuck DeJoy with something hard and sandpapery. This dude is scum, any plan he has for the USPS is aimed squarely at damaging it and privatizing essential public services.
I really hope an incoming Harris administration will find a way to get rid of DeJoy.
I mean they got rid of the drop boxes that we could drive up to, because DeJoy is a piece of shit.
OK, now show me the monetary losses from the military and tell me how we are trying to fix that. I'll wait.
Exactly.
Stop treating the USPS like a business and start treating it like a government service.
Fund the Postal Service.
Finally, slower mail. The one thing that was keeping the Post Office from being profitable was how fast the mail got sent.
The whole idea of a public service needing to be "profitable" is stupid
Associated Press - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for Associated Press:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United States of America
Wikipedia about this source
Media Bias Fact Check | bot supportSearch topics on Ground.News
https://apnews.com/article/us-postal-service-delivery-changes-f7ca9fbf047c512aeeddaa2c6bbc500d