The Post Office Isn’t A Jobs Program
Here in North Dakota a group of postal workers were outside of the federal building in Bismarck today protesting against efficiency measures being considered by Congress to close the alarming deficits the Postal Service is facing.
Just so we’re clear, the Post Office is losing huge amounts of money, but the people who work for the post office oppose measures intended to cut overhead and make the service profitable. Among these proposals are ending door-to-door delivery in some areas, instead having carriers deliver to lock boxes located in neighborhoods from which citizens/business owners would retrieve their mail.
That sort of reform makes a lot of sense. It saves costs by allowing one carrier to cover more territory, and it doesn’t really add a lot of inconvenience to mail customers. But the postal workers dislike it, obviously, because it would cost some of them their jobs.
But the Post Office isn’t a jobs program. We shouldn’t do things inefficiently just because it’s more labor intensive and maintains more jobs. If we were to use that sort of thinking, we’d still be farming with horses, because it is less efficient and thus creates more agriculture jobs.
The nation is broke, the Post Office is going broke, and it’s time for some adult decision making. The Post Office should be run to service the citizenry, not as a jobs program for unions.
Tags: deficits, national debt, post office, usps
