Posted on 01/21/2013 8:29:48 PM PST by Lancey Howard
(Reuters) - While delivering mail on Chicago's North Side, Lakesha Dortch-Hardy spoke about how much she loves her job at the U.S. Postal Service, and how much it would hurt if jobs such as hers were to disappear.
"These jobs are the middle class ..." said Dortch-Hardy, a tall, energetic 38-year-old, who took long strides as she wheeled her cart along a row of two- and three-story brick apartment houses. "Without this job, I don't know where I'd be right now."
The cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service has eliminated 168,000 jobs since 2006, and more cuts could result as it struggles to avoid its own "fiscal cliff." As the United States honors Martin Luther King's civil rights legacy on Monday, many African-American workers may be facing new obstacles to achieving and maintaining a middle-class life style.
African-Americans represent 13.1 percent of the U.S. population and 11.6 percent of the labor force, according to a 2012 U.S. Department of Labor report. Nearly one in five African-American workers hold government jobs such as mail clerks, firefighters and teachers, the report said.
"There's a long tradition of the public sector being more friendly, or less hostile, to African-American workers," said Robert Zieger, emeritus professor of history at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "The Post Office is the best example."
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Nothing hypothetical about it, you could hold my hand over a burning fire and I'd swear I saw it. Had the current postage rate on it too. I have to go back to the post office later this week, I'll ask if there's an Obama stamp and we'll put this one to rest, one way or another.
Thanks for your post.
Ok, so here’s a non-nasty response from a Postal worker. I’m sorry that you have lost several packages. There are some of us that really do care and work hard to make the system better.
Our scanning still sucks, but we’ve made vast improvements in the past year, with percentages rising from 70% up to 90+%. (But I still can’t track my packages, either)
Putting the value on the box is just crazy. I don’t know why they did that.
Also, when mailing packages, be sure to secure the package well with tape, and use a sturdy box. You wouldn’t believe the boxes I see with a couple of pieces of scotch tape holding them together, or a 60 lb package in a potato chip box.
Again, I’m sorry you received poor service. I can’t blame you for using the competition. I do the same. Fedex delivered a package to me today. It was on-time and in good condition. Can’t beat that.
I see. Unless we throw billions of dollars down a rathole called the Post Office, we’re racist.
This all would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerously ridiculous.
It was congress forcing the postal unions to pay for their own pension fund that done ‘em in.
it is irrelevant and simply proves you are too ignorant to be involved in this thread.
You aren’t even a postal customer ~
Yes, what a tragedy. God forbid they don’t get unlimited taxpayer funds for their future lifestyles! /s
You see how that worked out!
BTW, postal employees are fully funded ~ my own retirement is so terribly paid up I'd have to live to be about 200 years of age to begin any sort of subsidized lifestyle. Same with all the others ~ non-postal federal employees, and that'd include such free riders as the entire Supreme Court, the Senior Executive Service, the Congress and others are NOT fully funded.
Heh, I know you are trying to be informative, but I have to wonder what kind of reinforced kevlar box would have been necessary to prevent my package from being crushed by whatever process brought enough force to bear on that box.
:) to you, FRiend
I remember when we made NIH begin using break resistant glass and plastic flasks and flagons to ship around viruses and diseased tissue samples. They simply couldn't get it through their heads that glass breaks! They were astounded at the need to separate items with cushioning and cardboard.
They were people with multiple doctorates from the finest institutions of learning on the planet, so don't feel bad about it.
I am being helpful. Now, you can be helpful. Demand that safe packaging methods be used. Don't think anybody in the post office, or the common carrier who actually moved the shipment, wanted nasty red stuff all over the place. You want to clear a post office in 10 seconds flat, holler "it's drippling blood" ~ yup, USPS handles that stuff. The other guys avoid it like the plague!
My hard-earned money will bail out your ridiculously absurd retirement. You belong in the DUmp.
On the other hand my retirement package is secured with several hundred billion dollars in funds dedicated to doing exactly that. It has so much money the US government borrows it regularly rather than raise taxes on your income.
That's on the postings box ~ do you think you can forbear from violating the rules for just a day or so.
So, report me. You belong in the DUmp, union guy.
You should have brought it back unoppened to the Post Office
My family despises FDR, and everything the dictator represented and his legacy including WWII and his manipulations (this being from close personal knowledge within his admin). The point being made about his position on public employees unions is a matter of history-— to be repeated to every lib AFSCME SEIU or fed employee union BS’er there is, since the activists believe they are the second coming of FDR statists. It does not surprise us that he changed his mind for the usual political reasons, liar that he was, and with his admin rife with communists throughout and labor organizers masquerading as social workers. Pure socialism. If there ever was a demonstration of how busybody govt cannot run a business it is the P.O.- how to ruin what was an essential part of our govt’s real purpose. And it doesn’t have to be this way.
Civil Service, unionized jobs for life, which are rarely “short term” (but if they are, they still have to be paid a pension rather than a termination one time payout) coupled with a deathgrip from the unions in Congress, make it impossible to downsize the number of these positions and reduce the biggest cost elements in the losses. Management that is at a minimum autocratic in reaction to the union fanatics. The internet has not helped the revenue side (try as hard as they did to introduce “e-mail” the PO could not stop the avalanche)
The large up front pension contributions mandated by Congress to fund these pensions at any level is at the behest of unions and unlike the requirements placed on private business pension funding, which has more latitude.
Quite familiar with FERS— the fact it is available for public review doesn’t make it any less onerous— it just makes the PO another big bloated federal department. It would not be a bad thing if the service were privatized and not to obamaomau cronies (make it a stock held company).
Being in the private sector, got little use for govt. bureaucrats— and cannot be convinced they would ever be conservatives. Social ones maybe. Current reference: look what they are doing to the military.
BTW had two uncles who were postmasters— medium sized towns. You are right about the carrier efficiency being changed with automation, and stopping the relay boxes (which were a security issue too). They carry their entire load with them on the route.
Later the “time and motion” studies came in, the routes got shorter and the staffing issues and on and on— the unions were not of any help. And neither was the internet. Many many people miss the old post office. And many even now conduct their business through it still— for example in town here is a guy who sends out health/vitamin products daily to over 40 or 50 customers a home based small business, bulk mail user. So this still continues. Most people also miss or do not know how important 3rd class mail is as revenue vs. decreasing first class, nor do they know about partnering with FedEx. (not so much UPS which is teamsters throughout).
Then, the two airlines would be disposed of ~ while UPS management would be brought in to provide the higher level corporate infrastructure.
Due to the complexity of the field service local management would be retained, 28,000 small offices disposed of, and rural service regularized and expanded.
There are several other grandfathered services I"d have dumped, and guarantee at least one of them would be something you like and would hate to lose, but that's the way the potatoes roll out of the cart when you dump it along side the ditch.
Now, your intense jealousy of the federal retirement system, USPS pays up front for the 1% annuity ~ and all the other agencies are supposed to do that too, but they don't. The revenue feeding into USPS Comes from Reaganesque USER FEES, not from taxes, so those retirements come out of the postage people pay.
There are other payments made directly by the employees, and then there's the Thrift Savings Program.
The source of 100% of the money put in there by postal workers or on their behalf is postage, not taxes.
You want to kvetch about military or nonpostal government employee retirements go talk to somebody else ~
Now, about citing FDR's lies ~ they're still lies and don't get improved with the retelling. However, he did issue an executive order that allowed federal employees to contact their Congressmen.
Your other thoughts on unions are too disjointed to respond to at this time ~ wait until we get 4 feet of snow on the ground and we can go into all that one point at a time ~ for hours and hours and hours.
I"m quite possibly the only Freeper on board these days whose ever passed around union representation cards ~ and that was solely because the guys we were organizing against were criminals!
The old saying that management gets the union it deserves is true ~
Podesta missed the old stereotypes ~ just in case you wanted a motive for his nonsense.
Technically, the government appointees like Podesta are not bureaucrats ~ after all a bureaucrat ought to know something about his own job. None of the Obots has any idea what they're doing.
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