If you’re looking for good news about the economy, this news is enough to make you “go Postal:”
The U.S. Postal Service will be cutting more than 3,000 jobs and offering nearly a quarter of its work force early retirement as part of its efforts to streamline operations amid the worsening economy, the agency said Friday.
Among the job cuts are 1,400 district administrative staff positions and another 1,400 mail processing and management jobs nationwide. More than 500 employees will be out of a job with the closure of six district offices that house only administrative functions, the agency said.
The cuts will save the post office about $100 million annually, the agency said.
The post office ended its first quarter — October 1 through December 31 — with a net loss of $384 million caused by a drop in mail volume of 5.2 billion pieces. The 9.3 percent drop was the eighth consecutive quarter of volume declines, the agency said.
Further research will likely indicate this is yet another sign of the impact of emails on the Postal Service. In a sense, the Postal Service is going through a smaller version of what many newspapers are going through. (Certainly bills and demands from banks for mortgage payments are going out).
In late January, Postmaster General John E. Potter warned Congress that service cuts may be necessary, telling a Senate subcommittee that the agency may be forced to cut mail delivery from six to five days a week.
Such a change would have to come from Congress, which mandated the six-day schedule in 1983.
The early retirements would be offered to some 150,000 workers. These are all signs of the almost across-the-board downsizing of America. Will America up-size again?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.