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What are people — and the Post Office — for?
Conservatives are doing the same thing to public schooling. Far as I can tell, they're winning 
THE POST PLAN is little more than a cruel joke. It offers hope to those who thought they might lose their local post office. In reality it is little more than an interim step towards closing 13,000 post offices, maybe more. The fact is that the dramatic prescriptions originally offered by Mr. Donahoe could never have occurred at the rate initially announced. It would have been operationally infeasible to close offices at the rate Mr. Donahoe wanted — 15,000 in five years. But just by threatening those closures, POST PLAN looks like a reasonable alternative.
It isn’t.
The POST PLAN — combined with DUO (Delivery Unit Optimization to move carriers from one office to another) and other retail initiatives like the VPO (Village Post Office) — will simply provide a methodical way of degrading offices, reducing their revenue-generating potential, and starving them into oblivion. The plans will replace trained and committed career employees with low-paid, casual labor — the mantra of today’s economy.
The plan will proclaim an efficiency that is both false and destructive. It will simply allow for closures to take place at a steady, predictable rate, while allowing time to transfer the retail network into the hands of private operators. It will inure the public to lower levels of competency and service, thereby justifying arguments of irrelevance.
WE ARE TOLD that the current postal network is inefficient and increasingly expensive. The first betrays a lack of imagination, and the second is based on a lie that has become well known and yet accepted as fact. The simple truth is that PAEA (2006 Postal Accountability Enhancement Act 1*) set terms that undermined the financial sustainability of the postal network. It wasn’t the unions or overpaid workers, it wasn’t managerial salaries or bonuses, and it wasn’t the dysfunctional and myopic institutional culture that created this crisis.
Although all of those things are contributing to weakening the premises that create value in a robust postal network, it was PAEA— with the burdens it imposed and the underlying philosophy it espoused — that has brought us to this juncture.
- See more at: http://angrybearblog.com/2014/09/what-are-people-and-the-post-office-for.html#sthash.9XwYxsXo.dpuf
It isn’t.
The POST PLAN — combined with DUO (Delivery Unit Optimization to move carriers from one office to another) and other retail initiatives like the VPO (Village Post Office) — will simply provide a methodical way of degrading offices, reducing their revenue-generating potential, and starving them into oblivion. The plans will replace trained and committed career employees with low-paid, casual labor — the mantra of today’s economy.
The plan will proclaim an efficiency that is both false and destructive. It will simply allow for closures to take place at a steady, predictable rate, while allowing time to transfer the retail network into the hands of private operators. It will inure the public to lower levels of competency and service, thereby justifying arguments of irrelevance.
WE ARE TOLD that the current postal network is inefficient and increasingly expensive. The first betrays a lack of imagination, and the second is based on a lie that has become well known and yet accepted as fact. The simple truth is that PAEA (2006 Postal Accountability Enhancement Act 1*) set terms that undermined the financial sustainability of the postal network. It wasn’t the unions or overpaid workers, it wasn’t managerial salaries or bonuses, and it wasn’t the dysfunctional and myopic institutional culture that created this crisis.
Although all of those things are contributing to weakening the premises that create value in a robust postal network, it was PAEA— with the burdens it imposed and the underlying philosophy it espoused — that has brought us to this juncture.
- See more at: http://angrybearblog.com/2014/09/what-are-people-and-the-post-office-for.html#sthash.9XwYxsXo.dpuf
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