My day job is perfectly suited to my life as a ponderer (Why do colas remind me of race tracks ?), designer, and all-around dabbler in the garden of earthly delight.
Why? Because I work for the Post Office as a rural carrier, which is one of the few jobs that pays a salary without requiring an employee have a specialist's degree.
And a salary, my friends, means that when one's work is done for the day, one goes home. No 'dogging' the clock or otherwise 'killing time'. Instead, if one is clever, one builds efficiency into one's routine, organizing the mail so that it takes less and less time to deliver.
The Post Office, meanwhile, is facing a major financial crunch. An article in Business Week (May 26th, '11) lays out a worst-case analysis under the sub-heading:
Facing insolvency, can the USPS reinvent itself like European services have--or will it implode?
Herein I lay out the case for why said article is likely off-base. I also provide the persevering reader with my own take on what need be done to fix USPS finances.
First off, let's keep in mind that the USPS delivers a full 40% of the world's mail. In other words, we send and receive more mail than most other countries, so a gradual decline in mail volume will still leave the USPS with much to deliver.
Secondly, salaries and benefits make up a surprising 80% of all USPS costs. That sounds depressing, until you realize that as mail volume declines, a reduced number of employees is almost all that's needed to make ends meet.
Take the route that I deliver. As mail volume has fallen off over the past few years, I've added new boxes as new houses are built. The upshot is that I'm carrying about the same amount of mail, traveling a bit further each day, but my salary hasn't changed.
That takes care of routes in areas with growth; but what about locations with declining population? Simple: retiring carriers are not replaced. Instead, their routes are split up among other nearby routes.
The same thing is true for clerks. Less mail can mean a gradual lowering of employee numbers.
And currently, for both carriers and clerks, automation is ongoing. For example, the USPS is involved in an on-going transformation that will see carriers receive their flat mail (newspapers, magazines, large envelopes) pre-sorted by machine. This automation follows a similar transformation for letter mail. The up-shot is that fewer clerks or carriers are needed. This is obvious for clerks; machines sort mail many times faster than do humans. And for carriers, we'll be paid much less to deliver sorted flat mail, meaning route consolidation when carriers retire.
What I'm suggesting, then, is that declining mail volume, if it isn't too precipitous, can be managed, without resorting to overly dramatic changes in the status quo (a 5-day work week, for example).
Two questions remain, however. What about the $15 billion or so in debt that the USPS has accumulated over the past 4-5 years? And what would I do, if I were able to tweak the system?
In addition to the automation referenced above, management is looking at closing hundreds of small, inefficient post offices around the country. There is also talk of five-day delivery each week, instead of six. Plus, there is the huge amount that the USPS must pay each year--for the next half dozen or so years--to pre-fund retiree's health benefits; if that mandate were waived, the PO would currently be in the black. Some combination of these things would seem likely in the near future.
And what would I recommend?
* The salary-based work I do has taught me to look for efficiencies in all things
* I wish others had the ability to control their work, treating it as if one were a farmer doing chores.
This is something I will expand on in the months and years to come.
