usps cuts jobs
The plan was created in order to save $2.1 billion that will later become part of USPS's effort to save $20 billion over the next three years.
At the USPS location in the University Center, employee Megan Bass talked about her concerns regarding the affects this plan will have on Knoxville.
"We are a non-profit student service who has a contract with the United States Postal Service, therefore we will most likely not be cut but this plan will affect all locations in different ways," Bass said.
Customer Mike VanDuzer is concerned about the plan and knows that many staff and students will be upset when the plan takes place.
"I have heard a lot of students and professors who are concerned that cutting locations and employees will slow down the flow of sending and receiving mail," Mike VanDuzer, USPS Customer
"The plan will effect a lot of people on campus. I have heard a lot of students and professors who are concerned that cutting locations and employees will slow down the flow of sending and receiving mail," VanDuzer said.
The USPS plan not only mentions cutting locations and jobs, but it will also have an affect on Saturday delivery services and express shipping.
Although the UC location may not be directly affected by the cuts, Bass says that the plan to cut express shipping will directly affect many students and customers at her location.
"If express shipping were to be cut, students at the University would not be very happy. Express shipping is very popular at our location because student like to wait until last minute," she said.
The postal service will give employees a 120 day notice before releasing or moving them to a new position. Bass and other employees at the UC location do not think that 120 days is enough time for them to figure out their next move.
"If I were to be released from this company I would need more than 120 days to find a new job. 120 days in this day in time is not enough time to be notified because it is hard enough finding a new job, especially in the postal service considering the cuts they are planning," Bass said
The two dozen positions being eliminated all come from management, plant, maintenance and support staff, local postal service spokeswoman Barbara Elman told Providence Business News. All the employees whose jobs are being cut will be applying for other positions that have become vacant due to attrition, she said.
The restructuring will take place over the next few months, she said.
In additional to Rhode Island, the Southeast New England postal district also includes the Brockton area and Cape Cod.
The positions cut in the Providence-based district are being eliminated as part of a nationwide round of 25,000 job cuts by the cash-strapped Postal Service, which is forecast to lose $6.5 billion this year and still faces a $1.5 billion budget shortfall, The Associated Press reported.
Postmaster General John Potter on Tuesday told a mailing industry conference that the postal service now employs fewer than 635,000 people, down from about 800,000 a decade ago, The AP said.
Potter predicted the post office will process 170 billion items this year. At its peak, the USPS dealt with more than 210 billion items. “We have an infrastructure that, quite frankly, we cannot afford based on the income we’re receiving,” he said.
Although there has been some talk of reducing the number of days when mail is delivered, on Tuesday Potter said: “People should take it for granted that they’re going to get mail six days a week” for now, and will “hear from us if we should ever change the frequency of delivery.”
The cost of a first-class stamp rose by 2 cents last week to 44 cents.
The U.S. Postal Service was created in 1971 as a quasi-independent U.S. government agency. Before that, the service was the U.S. Post Office Department, a cabinet-level department.
THE PROVOCATION: How long are we going to keep the postal service on life support? It's as if we, as a society, were subsidizing the 8-track tape industry to compete with the iPod.
Part of me hates to say it, but the era of paper communications is behind us. Newspapers? Going down the toilet thanks to the Internet and cable news networks. Books? In a fight for their dog-eared lives with Kindle and its brethren. (With the demise of Borders, we're down to a single major bookstore chain). And the third prong in this triumvirate, the USPS, may be in the worst shape of all. It has already cut 110,000 jobs in the past four years, and the 120,000 it wants to eliminate by 2015 are on top of 100,000 being lost to attrition. That total of 220,000 constitutes 30% of the postal service's workforce.
To make matters worse, the USPS doesn't have enough money to make a $5.5 billion payment required by law toward future employee health costs. It has to scrape together that money by Sept. 30.
Over the past few years, the post office has suggested cutting costs by eliminating Saturday service, but it hasn't been able to get congressional backing. Another possibility involves closing some 3,700 post office branches across the country. But whatever steps are ultimately taken, it's clear something must be done. the post office's financial condition has continued to deteriorate at an alarming rate: It lost $8.5 billion, more than twice what it lost the previous year. In its plea to Congress, the post office warns that it's "facing the equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy."It's not hard to see why. Fewer and fewer people are using the postal service every day. Fewer people are mailing letters. Businesses, strapped for funds themselves, are sending fewer pieces of junk mail - those obnoxious sheets of newsprint that are seldom read and almost always wadded up to be discarded into the recycling bin (if the environment is lucky). It's a simple matter of supply and demand. The post office shipped 202 billion pieces of mail in 2008, but two years later, that figure was down to 170 billion. And in the meantime, more and more addresses are being added to the ever-expanding routes served by fewer and fewer mail carriers.
This trend isn't going to change. Cutting the number of employees won't help. It will only make service that much more work and persuade even more customers to switch to an alternative. FedEx. UPS. Or, in many more cases, email. If those 170 billion pieces of mail in a year sound like a lot, try this figure on for size: 290 billion email messages.Per day.
Even of one concedes that 90% of those emails are spam (not the canned ham - they still haven't figured out how to send that electronically). That still leaves 10.5 trillion legitimate emails making their way through cyberspace every year. Those messages can contain payments, scanned documents, tax payments and virtually anything else that can be sent through the mail. It's as though the Internet is saying to the post office, "Whatever you can do, I can do better." And it can. Better. Stronger. Faster. Cue theme musicIt will take a lot more than $6 million to solve this problem. What it will take is simply recognizing the fact that the post office is all but obsolete. Sure, some will argue that those without access to the Internet will be hurt if we pull the plug on this poor dying patient. But it should be feasible to scale back service to only those who don't have an Internet connection. Sound drastic? Maybe so, but only because we're used to the luxury of doing things in a certain way. More and more of us don't do things that way anymore, and in this economy, we simply can't afford the luxury of paying for something most of us barely use.
Forcing people to use the Internet should be something that conservatives and progressives can both agree upon. Conservatives will be able to trim federal spending by eliminating waste. Progressives will be able to point to all those trees they're saving by taking one more step toward a paperless society. Progressives and conservatives actually agreeing on something? That would be a miracle. And a miracle is just what it will take to save the postal service.