Issue Date: June 2010 e-newsletter, Posted On: 6/1/2010
Hindsight's 20/20 The USPS had several options to avoid the mess they're now in; too bad they didn't use them. By Gene Del Polito, President, Association for Postal Commerce
For quite awhile now, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been turning up the volume in its messages to Congress that help is needed to address the issue of USPS funding of its retirement-related obligations. The Postal Service's focus, however, has not been limited to retirement obligation funding alone. In fact, its real focus has been to convince Congress of the need to overturn the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) and to create a new postal statute that gives the USPS a freer hand.
The Postal Service, at all levels, has done little to hide its disdain for PAEA. Most particularly, the USPS has bridled at the requirements in the law for capping prices for market-dominant products at the annual rate of inflation, the imposition of rules designed to ensure transparency and accountability, and the positioning of an external regulator with even a minimal of power to shape and direct the Postal Service's schedule of products and prices.
The concern is that the Postal Service is giving Congress only its part of the story. The other part is that it has passed up an abundant number of opportunities to avoid many of the straits in which it now finds itself. Here, for instance, is a short list of what the Postal Service could have done and chose instead not to do:
$ The Postal Service could have prepared itself for the decade long transformation that has marked how this nation communicates and does business. Instead, it sought comfort in the prognostications of feather merchants who assured them that, as in the case of the telephone and telegraph, there really was no danger to future mail volume and revenue.
$ The Postal Service could have explored and exploited every opportunity to ride the coming digital wave to empower the Postal Service to retain its relevance in the exchange of information and the transaction of commerce.
$ The Postal Service could have sought to use the flexibility provided by PAEA to re-engineer its products and services to better comport with the needs of a changing market.
$ The Postal Service could have moved quickly to bring to market an array of new products and services that more closely matched the needs of a changing market.
$ The Postal Service could have moved aggressively to restructure its physical network to more closely match the changing demand for postal services with available resources. Instead, it allowed itself to be cowed by the mere threat of possible congressional disapproval.
$ The Postal Service could have move more affirmatively with its employees and their representatives to address expeditiously wasteful work place rules.
$ The Postal Service could have mounted a much more affirmative stance to press home to Congress' attention the inequities associated with an over-funding of retirement-related expenses. That task, however, was left to the initiative of its Inspector General.
The USPS clearly had it within its means to make every element noted above a cause celebre. Instead, it has shown only the vigor to move forward with proposals to lessen the number of days of mail delivery and to raise postal rates beyond what ordinarily would be allowed under the 2006 postal act.
In short, instead of taking actions that could have spared its customers pain, it has chosen to exact the kind of pain a wise business would seek to avoid. Customers are being made the victims of the Postal Service's unwillingness to move smartly and with dispatch.
Postal customers are now the pawns in a struggle to absolve the Postal Service of its responsibilities and liberate the USPS from any real measure of public and political accountability and competitive restraint.
One can only hope that the Postal Regulatory Commission has a clear appreciation for what's gone on, what's going on, and what's at stake. The PRC will be facing its first real threshold test to demonstrate whether the confidence Congress invested in it was worth while. When the USPS files for its first-ever exigency rate case, the Commission will have to determine whether or not the "extraordinary or exceptional circumstances" test has been fully satisfied. Any rush to judgement for the sake of some overshadowing political expediency will only further undermine the viability of the postal accountability act by punishing postal customers rather than protecting them from a statutorily protected monopolist.
The Commission needs to keep its eye on the ball. Its mission in life is not to ensure the fiscal viability of the Postal Service, nor is its mission to safeguard the nation's universal mail delivery system. Those responsibilities belong to the Governors. Congress gave the Commission an entirely different, but still important, mission.
It has been said that the business model of the Postal Service is broken. Broken, itt may be. It wasn't, however, the customers of the Postal Service who broke it, and they shouldn't be held accountable to fix it.
Comments:
Wednesday, June 02, 2010 11:20:34 AM by Anonymous
Dr. Del Polito has an extraordinarily short memory. Some yeas ago, he was at the forefront challenging postal leadership for wasting precious resources (and adding unneccesary costs) to current ratepayers by exploring various electronic services. He loudly demanded that the USPS focus only on improving service and reducing cost.
I cannot recall him loudly demanding that the mailing industry put pressure on Congress to follow through on the obvious need for market and operational flexibility.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010 2:12:07 PM by Anonymous
As a USPS customer I see waste in the USPS daily. I have been in the industry for 21 years and I see more waste now than ever before. They say it is because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the PAEA but I say it is unions at their worst. They promote employees on seniority,not qualifications. They stand around and say that's not my job. We have a full time BMEU clerk at our facility now (Which by the way started 5-24-2010 after 70 years of mailing) and he does nothing. Then he always carried all our Priority mail (about 400 packages) to the post office and now he won't and another employee has to drive across town to pick up our mail. I could go on but there isn't enough room on this site. I say the post office needs to start a common sense campaign and then they might save some money and quit taking ours. I guess they want to put everyone out of business.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010 2:55:27 PM by Anonymous
Mean GENE! Get a Clue! Your ideas and false lies of how the USPS could have fixed itself is almost as bas as blaming the gov't for the OIL slick that BP is battling! If you took all the money that the USPS has lost from mailhouses and brought this back in house then companies would complain about the loss of jobs blah blah blah! Mail House Vendors have BANKED Millions of dollars on the work share discount, software development etc. The USPS may employ only 600,000 employees but the USPS has kept thousands of people employed due to the work share discount! Maybe its time to bring all of the mail back in house and quit giving away the business! All you mailhouses do is BITCH about how slow the USPS is anyway!
Friday, June 04, 2010 3:43:21 PM by Anonymous
In the last 2 years there have been many rule changes and rate changes that have drastically increased the costs to our business and, by extension, to our customers. The result has been the tremendous odf revenue for the Post Office and a loss of business for those of us doing the mailing. It seems there is a push to reduce the amount of mail being sent. Many of the rules only increase labor costs while seemingll making no real sense in the flow of mail in the Postal Service. Why is this happening? Are the environmentalists pushing to shut us down? It sure seems like it!
