Got mail?

[pecunium]

Maybe not for much longer:

USPS to consider reducing offices by as much as two-thirds

Two-thirds of the over 4,800 postal stations and branches nationwide will be submitted for review, a review process which does not involve public or media notification, involves only a ten-day input period from the public (remember, with no prior notification required), and for which there is no appeals process. These evaluations of post offices in your city will happen over the course of sixty days. Sixty. That is all the time they are going to take to determine how much this will affect the American public and paying USPS customers....

The USPS management also wants to outsource retail and delivery services, completely destroying what is called the "sanctity of the mail," and creating enormous potential for exploitation. Very dangerous exploitation. Without the USPS' rigorous background checks, you would never know who was delivering your mail, including bank statements and official documents and records, personal items, and so on. They would know where you lived, what sort of car you drove, whether you had children, what your names were, all sorts of personal things. They would have a good idea of when you were home, what your cars looked like, how to get into your yard, whether you have a dog.

Have you thought about this? Have you thought about the fact that your mail carriers and in-plant mail handlers have been selected to be safe and trustworthy people? And what it would mean if they were not?

What would it mean if the USPS outsourced these services? What would happen if your mail was being delivered by the lowest bidder? Do you think that the level of service would remain the same? Would it be consistent countrywide? Would it be safe?

Look at how well privatizing, and the associated "slim-lining" and so forth have gone. The US Mail is amazing. It gets greif, but it really is outstanding. How many times have you mistyped an e-mail address (.com, not .net, or inverted a set of digits, etc.). Generally, it bounces.

I had a girlfriend in San Diego. I miswrote her address, and the mail got there. It got there for months. It wasn't until the sixth or seventh letter was sent back that I knew I had it wrong. I sent her an e-mail, asking if she'd missed any letters... nary a one.

Think a contractor is going to be so assidous, as to figure out the address is wrong (there was no such piece of the street) and look to see that a simple inversion gets to a name she recognizes, and then deliver it?

I'm not willing to bet on it. Who, by the way, is going to be making the money? This is a tax. A tax from me and thee, to some corporation. We are being forced to pay them (unless we want to forego the mails). That's a redistribution of wealth,and it's going the wrong way.

Comments

[dianyla.livejournal.com]

If they're interested in improving efficiency, why not just ban all junkmail forever? Wouldn't that be a better solution? Gah.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Except that makes for profit. Direct mail helps pay for the USPS

[dianyla.livejournal.com]

Yah, but... If they wanted to continue delivering all of the "real" mail using fewer resources (staff, trucks, offices) they could drop all of the junk. Real mail is certainly about a third (or less) of my total mail volume.

[kodi]

I can name some businesses that don't experience a positive effect from economies of scale, but I don't think the USPS is one of them.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

It's a lovely thought, but it doesn't hold up. The volume of items isn't the costly part. It's the delivering to every door, every day. Further, junk mail prices are kept high in order to subsidize first class mail.

I do think media mail could be discontinued. It's heavily subsidized, as one of the purposes was to deliver educational materials to the home-bound and disabled. What with the internet and speech programs, media mail is obsolete.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Maybe. I just sent a bunch of books to myself. And a lot of shipping is done via "book rate". From the standpoint of meta-effects, my folk's business would have to increase prices if they ha to ship first class.

[soon_lee]

Interestingly, New Zealand post was getting increasingly moribund for a while but appears to have been saved by trademe, our equivalent of eBay. Delivering items bought/sold online has become a significant part of its business.

[kokuten.livejournal.com]

It's my personal opinion that the USPS would experience a salutatory effect by amputating its Union gland.

My personal opinion, however, is extremely biased.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Care to explain?

[kokuten.livejournal.com]

not.. in any great detail, due to anonymity concerns.

A family member of mine is a non union person in a union shop - he has been threatened, has received numerous false accusations of illegal/unethical behavior, and is constantly referred to (inaccurately!) as a 'scab'.

This amuses me - since he's not a scab. It also infuriates me, and strongly influences my opinion of 'labor unions' as a whole.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No, he is not a scab. Depending on how the union's negotiating has improved his position he's probably a freeloader, but not a scab.

[kokuten.livejournal.com]

now we're getting outside of the _information_ I have, but my impression is "not at all". It is my understanding, which may be incorrect, that he does not get a union payscale, does not have union-level medical coverage, nor is he covered by the union retirement policy rules.

In my personal opinion, none of that would justify organized harassment, even if he did share in those benefits.

[mycroftw.livejournal.com]

My opinion is that, very likely, it would. However, said salutary effect would not be anything the customers got to see. As I am on the serviced side of this particular service economy, that's what's important to me. Cost? Not so much.

I don't work in a union, I don't work in a career that is un-ionised outside of places where the whole shop is (governments, mostly). But I can take my skills to any company bigger than a mom-and-pop, so if my employer hoses me, I can leave. However, I have colleagues that do, and it's very right. If you have skills that are single-employer (in an area), without a union, it will become Wal-Mart - and the happy, well-paid, numerous enough, enjoying-their-work employees at Wal-Mart make it so nice for the customers, right?

USPS is amazing. I ordered $300 worth of stuff from Maryland, and it arrived where I asked (which was not at home, as there's no package delivery ability there), a day before the minimum they said to expect, and didn't play moron games with Customs (I paid duty, and I paid $5 in "postage" that they told me in advance was the brokerage). My friend ordered $60 worth of stuff via UPS, and it was late, and we had to pay $35 in "brokerage fees" to take it. Of course, they only told us that at the door.

And the USPS people (and the Canada Post people) are nicer than the courier people, don't do stupid things like walk up to the door and write a "didn't catch you" note without ringing the doorbell, or leave electronics on the front step in the rain, or... Please note that I don't blame the workers too much at Big Brown for that, except the nicer bit, because it's a fault of the working conditions; they get fined for being late, and then they get routes that can't be done properly without going late. All in the name of efficiency. Strange how a union tends to complain about unmeetable schedules, and by and large, stops them from happening.

Yes, there's a lot of things wrong with the USPS, and there's a lot of things wrong with a closed shop (I think the unions currently are as bad as the corporations that they have, effectively, become). But I can't see it getting any better for the customer if the check on employer behaviour was removed.

[kokuten.livejournal.com]

heh, but where's the check on union behavior? In my comment to the Original Poster, above, I mentioned:

"A family member of mine is a non union person in a union shop - he has been threatened, has received numerous false accusations of illegal/unethical behavior, and is constantly referred to (inaccurately!) as a 'scab'."

Also, I have direct disproval of your anecdata. I can assure you that USPS personnel can and do treat members of the public like dirt, do write fraudulent 'didn't catch you' notes, and do leave electronics on the stoop, in the rain/snow. All of these have happened to me.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

You can't disprove somebody else's experience. Directly or otherwise.

If you could, I'd have no trouble at all "disproving" this:

"A family member of mine is a non union person in a union shop - he has been threatened, has received numerous false accusations of illegal/unethical behavior, and is constantly referred to (inaccurately!) as a 'scab'."

As it is, I will content myself with noting that it's not especially common for that to occur, that I have worked in mixed shops and known people in mixed shops quite often, and that I have never seen this behaviour nor anything close to it. It appears to be rare, much like unprofessional and incompetent behaviour on the part of the USPS, which has always favourably impressed me when I have had occasion to deal with it seems to be.

[kokuten.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, that was very poor word choice on my part!

I should have said 'directly conflicting', or 'directly opposing'. Of course, that doesn't do anything more than put two points of anecdata into the ring.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Um... you can disprove his experience?

I know that, given the choice, my personal experience is the USPS is superior to UPS, and FedEx; in terms of service per dollar. I've never had the USPS leave something which required a signature at the side of my house (a high-end printer, in a clear plastic wrapper), when no one was home.

I've had more than one USPS worker tell me, very clearly, how to make sure my customers would be able to get a valid claim when I was insuring something. Routinely the things I ship USPS arrive before the predicted date of delivery.

On the rare occaisions I've had something sent on a guaranteed delivery date arrive late (twice in 20 years), the refund was grante without question.

I've had to fight FedEx to get a refund on something sent to me, which arrived late (and the only reason I was able to collect it was I'd ended up in hospital. It was three delivery days late (it was supposed to arrive on a Thus, got there on a Monday, I was supposed to be leaving on Saturday... if I'd not been sick, I'd have been chasing it down from 3,000 miles away). I had to fight tooth and nail to get the money back; because they told the company I'd bought it from they delivered it on time.

[kokuten.livejournal.com]

I have to admit to poor word choice, there. 'Directly conflicting', or 'vastly different' would have been better.

However, my anecdata is just another point, with just as little statistical relevance.

[mycroftw.livejournal.com]

Well, has this been reported to the union - and I don't mean just the local shop steward? Reporting it to the union local management, with suggestions that the next report would be to the company and Fox News, might get somewhere.

Is the person doing the same job as unionized employees, or is it a different category (that, one would assume, the union would like to get under its umbrella)? If it's the same job, you can see where the resentment would lie, especially if he is (as you said) not served under the collective agreement, being paid significantly less, not having the same benefits, ... He may not be trying to do it, but what the company is doing (if that is the case) is called "trying to break the union". As I said, you could see where the resentment would lie.

If everything's legal, the treatment from co-workers is wrong, and shouldn't happen, whether the company is trying to break the union or not. I'm not saying at all that unions are shining bastions of decency, nor are all their members - far from it. I currently think that union management has picked up all the bad habits of management in general (you know, the stuff that required the unions to form in the first place), and frankly, most unions are blue-collar, and there are some in those industries known to be a little rough, and maybe not the most genteel about airing their grievances.

So no, I can't dispute your data point. Of course, all the experience I have with unions have been closed shops. All I can say is that I am very glad that my friends in union jobs are in union jobs, because they are given the respect and safety they deserve (and, unfortunately, because another problem with union shops is that by nature, there will be an adversarial relationship between management and employees, even if there wasn't B.U., exactly and only what they deserve, and the push to degrade is everpresent).