Canada Post strike: Residents ask if they really need a postman

Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo! News ^ | Jun 23, 2011 | Anita Elash

[goodwithagun]

When Canadian letter carriers went on strike three weeks ago they hoped to force the national postal service, Canada Post, to back down from a cost-cutting proposal to dramatically reduce wages.

Three weeks later, lawmakers are preparing to legislate them back to work, but Canadians are asking just how much a modern cyber-connected society needs the post office anyway.

“If I get my mail, I get my mail, but if I really have to do something I go on the Internet,” says Janina, a bank teller.

True, some businesses say they have had to scramble to try to fill orders and receive payments that would usually be sent by mail, and charities some say they are missing out on donations. But observers say that by going on strike, postal workers have likely sealed their own fate by proving it's possible to function without daily mail delivery.

[goodwithagun]

My husband and I were talking about this yesterday. We could survive without USPS, especially if our taxes are less because all the subsidies are gone.

[BamaDi]

My brother is a postmaster and he said if Congress would cut out just Sat delivery it would save millions.....why won’t they? I said if they would just have Mon-Wed-Fri delivery just imagine what would be saved!

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Since the 1970s, he USPS operates on revenues earned from services provided, not through taxpayer subsidies.

The American national postal unions have never gone out on strike.

[kristinn]

Didn’t South Park do an episode like this?

[FormerACLUmember]

The US Post office is little more than a taxpayer funded Junk Mail distributor.

Who needs it? Who can afford this?

Buh Bye.

[meyer]

My brother is a postmaster and he said if Congress would cut out just Sat delivery it would save millions.....why won’t they?

Because they're creating "make-work" jobs for otherwise-unemployable drones. Thedefinitelyly could eliminate one day of delivery a week, though I'd prefer to keep Saturday delivery and skip Monday instead. Special Monday deliveries could still be made, at "postage-and-a-half", presumably with a small skeleton crew on overtime.

[meyer]

“Thedefinitelyly” = “They definitely”.

Spell Checker gone astray. :-)

[Oceander]

Yeah, right. Not according to the USPS' own financial information, as per its own annual report. In fact, the Financial Highlights section from the 2010 report shows that the USPS ran a net operating loss of $8.374 billion dollars - even if the $5.5B pension funding payment was made, that still leaves an operating deficit of almost $3B.

More to the point, those self-same financial highlights show that we, the federal taxpayers, made a so-called "capital contribution" of $3.132 billion in 2010 alone. Keep in mind, that is a "contribution to capital," not a "payment for services rendered," so it wasn't paid for any services the USPS might have provided to the federal government.

Now, you can call that whatever you want to, but since the USPS hasn't earned a profit for years and years and years, it's a subsidy, plain and simple, for the simple reason that this so-called "contributed capital" will never, ever, ever be recovered.

So, sorry to burst your bubble, but the federal taxpayer subsidizes the USPS to the tune of a little more than $3B a year.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

they're creating "make-work" jobs for otherwise-unemployable drones

I worked there a quarter a century ago and I wish they hadn't made the work so hard. If it was just "make work" they should have made it a lot easier than bending, carrying and sorting parcels from midnight to nine AM. This otherwise unemployable drone would have appreciated a soft day job in a dust-free air conditioned office.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

If it merely exists on just taxpayer subsidies, i wonder why there is such a big deal about raising the rate. Let's just have a 2 cent stamp like a century ago and let the taxpayers foot the bill.

[Ciexyz]

btt

[meyer]

I worked there a quarter a century ago and I wish they hadn't made the work so hard. If it was just "make work" they should have made it a lot easier than bending, carrying and sorting parcels from midnight to nine AM. This otherwise unemployable drone would have appreciated a soft day job in a dust-free air conditioned office.

Ummmm, yeah. Like my present carrier that can't figure out what "suspend delivery" means. Or those drones in the Cleveland, Ohio distribution center that play cards all night while 10% of the people there do 90% of the work. Or that certain ethnic "supervisor" that followed my carrier around 10 years ago, analyzing a route that hadn't changed since the 1950s.

I have no grudge against the ones that do their work, but there are a lot of folks in the postal service that think that their paycheck is a welfare check. At one time, potential employees were judged solely on their performance on tests and tasks that related to the job. Today, their gender, race, and military status have more to do with their being hired than their potential as an actual employee.

[Katya]

Can’t remember the last time something important came to our house via the US mail service.

[festusbanjo]

I wrote elsewhere yesterday that the mail delivery should be restructured to a once a week delivery similar to the way trash is picked up in different sections of the city on a different day of the week. We could eliminate over half of the employees and 80% of the delivery trucks, etc. What do we really receive in the mail that is so important and time sensitive? If it needs to be there overnight, let Fedex do it.

[StolarStorm]

Sounds like a good plan. I can go months without using the post office. I email/fax or use UPS or fedex for everything else.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Even in the old days we had the ones who wouldn't carry their weight, but they were a minority and mostly professional grievance filers.

[Oceander]

Did I say it "merely exists on just taxpayer subsidies?" No, I did not. Why get me involved in a non-existent argument you're having with some strawman you set up?

I've a better idea: let's get the federal taxpayer out of the business altogether; in this day and age there is absolutely no justification for something as medieval as a state-controlled postal service - we are no longer talking about gallant King's Men braving perilous, bandit-plagued trails through primaeval forests, or even the Pony Express.

Cut the USPS and its parasitic unions free from the federal trough and let them sink or swim on their own merits (or, more to the point, lack thereof). My money's on their lunch getting eaten by FedEx, UPS, DHL, and even the half-witted bicycle messengers who race around NYC streets like maze-rats on speed and 'shrooms.

[Politicalmom]

I love the post office and I love my mailman. He brings me my Netflix movies, and my craft supplies, and my puzzle magazines....

:)

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Cut the USPS and its parasitic unions free from the federal trough and let them sink or swim on their own merits (or, more to the point, lack thereof). My money's on their lunch getting eaten by FedEx, UPS, DHL, and even the half-witted bicycle messengers who race around NYC streets like maze-rats on speed and 'shrooms.

You might be surprised. Believe it or not, there's good conservative, people, many veterans who work in the USPS. If they were put in a sink or swim situation, freed from the labor-management bureaucracy, I'm sure they are quite capable of competing with The Fed-Exers and the UPS Teamsters.

Ideology sometimes tempts us into wielding a too broad brush.

[Oceander]

If they really were as good as you suggest, and were motivated to earn through effort and merit, they wouldn't be at the post office in the first place - certainly not once they realized their strengths and then came face to face with the reality of unions and seniority.

I have no doubt that there are some decent folk there - that's the problem with unions, in fact: they consist of decent folk in the rank-and-file who have been lied to and deluded into thinking that the union, and the union leadership, have their best interests at heart, which neither has.

But all of that is neither here nor there until we put the pudding to the proof, shall we say, get the federal taxpayer completely out of the business of paying for something as archaic as a government-controlled national mail system, and then let the competition begin.

I rather doubt that FedEx, UPS, DHL, and the brain-addled bike messengers would be that concerned about the USPS becoming a truly private competitor - they already compete against the USPS with one hand tied behind their back because of the massive subsidies the USPS gets each year and still they're eating the USPS' lunch (hence the multi-billion dollar losses each year for years on end).