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Saving the Post Office
Post offices give away small, cardboard scales to help customers determine how much postage their mail needs.
(By Julia Ewan -- The Washington Post)
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Later this year, the agency will also begin renegotiating contracts with four major unions in hope of winning concessions on some high-cost benefits such as health care. Union leaders are ready for a fierce fight.
"The employees that I represent, they should be rewarded for a job well done," Burrus said. "All of the savings [the Postal Service has] achieved came on the backs of the employees I represent."
And the Postal Service faces an even bigger battle with Congress, which is considering reforms that would change some of the service's legal requirements and create a new oversight body. But critics of the legislation are everywhere, and bills in the House and Senate are stalled.
"Everyone who wants something to be done throws in their oar at the 11th hour," said Nolan, the former deputy postmaster general, leaving the bills full of favors to private industry and regulations that will hamstring postal officials. "If you wanted to design bad legislation, this is it."
But there are critics of the Postal Service who like the idea of more regulation, if only because it would create more accountability for its failures.
"There is realistically no one that can force the Postal Service to do anything," said Rick Merritt, executive director of PostalWatch, a nonprofit watchdog group. "The Postal Service does not get appropriations from Congress, so one huge lever in the typical governmental oversight is not there."
For all the dire predictions mail-industry experts make about the Postal Service, though, there remains an underlying feeling that somehow it will get worked out. It's like this: You just can't let the post office -- the one we feel so connected to -- go away.
"Because there's such power in mail,' " Nolan said, "I have to believe that people looking at it intelligently will find the right answer before it's too late."
