Drinking the union Kool-Aid...mail volume to return?

While we at PostalIntelligence would never advocate privatization of the US Postal Service, we were intrigued by the American Postal Workers Union response to a recent New York Times editorial on the subject of privatization. The Times wrote an article outlining the USPS's financial difficulties, followed by a call to privatize the organization.

We would, of course, expect APWU President William Burrus to vigorously fight any effort to privatize, and then offer his solutions to help restore the USPS to solvency. Instead, he has offered a surprisingly weak response, claiming the current financial troubles are not the result of diversion of the mail to email. After all, he says, electronic diversion was well established prior to the volume declines, which began in 2006.

President Burrus needs to step out of the lounge at the APWU headquarters for a few minutes and see what's going on outside. Almost NOBODY uses the mail anymore for personal correspondence. Talk to people under 20 and they likely won't even know how to use the system for anything but eBay shipments. If you receive bank statements, voting proxies, mutual fund statements, phone bills and now even credit card bills, among the hundreds of other types of business correspondence, chances are they soon won't be arriving in your mailbox, but by email. Just last month Vanguard Mutual Funds offered customers $10 to eliminate all correspondence by US mail. No President Burrus, this didn't all happen in 2006, much of this diversion began as recently as 2009.

Burrus blames the mail slump almost entirely on the recession-driven decline in business mail. We expect President Burrus may be the only person on the planet who believes this, if in fact he really thinks this is true. But this comes as no surprise. Burrus needs to hold out the carrot of an eventual return of mail volume to his overworked and overstressed employees in the hopes they'll hang on for a few more years until it 'turns around'. Sorry President Burrus, we don't see many in your ranks drinking the Kool Aid. As much as we all wish it to be, you'll never again see the volumes of 2006... no matter how much you cross your fingers. This fact was verified by none other than the Deputy Postmaster General only a few weeks ago.

How about looking into solutions to some of our basic problems: a grossly overloaded management structure that would strangle any normal business; lack of innovation to find new products and services (look to European countries for this one); uneducated managers who lack even the most rudimentary 'people skills'; union rules that put bad employees on the window due to hopelessly outdated seniority rules; policies that prohibit 'burden sharing' within employee groups to reduce the need for future layoffs (all employees taking a reduced workweek); and prohibitions on voluntary leave without pay opportunities to save work hours. And this is only the beginning.