A Letter From A Former Letter Carrier

[Egalitarian Thug]

17. Completely full of shit.

A very close relative is a rural carrier (rural carriers are a separate group from city carriers, they have their own contract and union) and your attempt to paint your experience as typical is flat out bullshit. 'G' has worked for the USPS full time for about 12 years. 'G' works 5 days a week now, but previously it has been 6 days every week or every other week as 'G' has bid onto other routes.

Rural carriers are paid based on the number of hours it is calculated that it should take (not the actual hours spent) to deliver the volume for their specific route and this rate is determined by a "count" which is carried out a couple of time per year on average. During count supervisors shadow the carriers and track everything they do over the course of two weeks and the results of that determines how much they will be paid until it is done again. (This in itself is outrageous to me. Imagine doing your own job with your boss literally following or standing behind you and tracking every single thing you do every day for two weeks, then deciding how much time they think it should take!)

The loss of Saturday delivery doesn't alter the volume of mail, it is simply docking workers pay. When they come back in on Monday, all that mail is still going to have to be delivered, so it is guaranteed to make Mondays a very long day for less money. That's bad enough, but three day weekends are going to be absolutely unmanageable. As a result of this idiocy, that mail is going to have to be rolled into the following day, so your service will decline.

To review, this "former rural letter carrier" is advocating that it is right that workers do more work for less money and that degraded service is the right thing to do. I would doubt that this poster has ever been a USPS carrier except that I've known so many who are just that dumb.

And again, the only reason the USPS is losing any money is because of the ridiculous pension prefunding requirement (funding pensions for future employees not even born yet) imposed by Congress in 2006 that would literally put any private or governmental organization out of business. There are plenty of place where the budget could be cut and savings in operating expenses that are certainly possible, but they would effect the outrageous salaries and benefits of the political class employees and halting the forced subsidies to "private" carriers. Funny how those cuts are never even mentioned.