With No Layoffs Clause - Post Office Broke Again

NY Times - The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency's expenses. “Our situation is extremely serious,” the postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in an interview.
“If Congress doesn’t act, we will default.” In recent weeks, Mr. Donahoe has been pushing a series of painful cost-cutting measures to erase the agency’s deficit, which will reach $9.2 billion this fiscal year. They include eliminating Saturday mail delivery, closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers — nearly one-fifth of the agency’s work force — despite a no-layoffs clause in the unions’ contracts. Read full story here: News New Mexico

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1 comments:

Anonymous said...

The United States Post Office is another of the unconstitutional arms of the federal government.

Note: Congress was empowered "to establish post offices and post roads". Compare that grant to the power "to provide and maintain a Navy". These are very different grants but they both occur in Article I, Section 8, the powers of Congress. Had the Framers envisioned that the federal government would "provide and maintain" post offices and post roads, they would have used the language of the Navy clause. But the Framers did not. They merely meant for Congress to decide where the offices and roads needed to be and then let others provide and maintain these post offices and post roads.

Whenever the government gets involved, things go broke. When you spend other people's money, you don't concern yourself with spending carefully.

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