USPS Plans to Eliminate 155,000 Full-time Employees – 283,000 Eligible For Retirement

The Postal Service projects a FTE reduction of 155K by 2016 in connection with the Strategic Initiatives

The US Postal Service has presented its new proposed business plan to Congress. A copy of the presentation used to explain the plan is below.

USPS-sponsored insurance would be significantly more cost effective and yields equivalent or better coverage
for the vast majority of annuitants and current employees

The Postal Service projects over $7 billion of annual savings from the adoption a new USPS-administered
healthcare program (including elimination of prefunding and transfer of retirees into USPS Plan)(1)

RHB Pre-Funding elimination of ~$5.5bn annually plus reduced healthcare costs of ~$1.5bn annually
Address
Reduced
Network
Density
 Network costs are fixed and too high relative to mail volumes and reduced density
 USPS needs flexibility as well as cost reduction
 Better align network size with volumes
 Facilities need to be re-evaluated and streamlined/consolidated
 Local Post Office cost reductions
 Service levels must be addressed
 6-5 day delivery
 Modify overnight service standard for First-Class Mail
 Facilitates network optimization
Revenue
Management
 Targeted price increases
 Historically inelastic single-piece First-Class Mail
 Careful changes to Standard (Bulk) Mail pricing regime (Advertising is highly ROI-focused and sensitive)
 Pending exigent case could secure moderate price increase; PRC must approve
 Legislative change allowing single-piece First-Class Mail stamp to increase to $0.50 could yield approximately $1bn of incremental Contribution
 Pursuit of marketing initiatives which are consistent with the core competencies of USPS
 Update access to USPS products and services to align with evolving customer behavior
Half of Career Employees are retirement eligible

  •  283k total employees
  •  Nearly two times the needed reduction

USPS Presentation 2 16 12

30 thoughts on “USPS Plans to Eliminate 155,000 Full-time Employees – 283,000 Eligible For Retirement

  1. Management has been going about it ass-backwards. They’ve cut the retail service down to bare bones when they should be expanding the number of employees working retail because that’s where the revenue is. RETAIL is the Postal Service’s breadbasket but they seem hell bent on running it into the ground just to save a few bucks. IDIOTS!!

  2. The indiviuals, running the place, have no clue, how to run it, let alone, save it.
    Too many bosses, that don’t have the qualifications, and are promoting their friends, to higher level positions, to make more $, without having the experience

    Ridicules! And, what’s with the Overtime! If they are losing $ DUH!!!
    Someone, needs to look into that. Auh! maybe someone from Washington?

    Save the Post Office! Reform!

  3. the postoffice was a nice place to work, but now, they treat you like dirt, management cares less about you. and all the years that you put in, I can’t wait for this buyout, they have been putting it off for a while now. I going to wait till May, if no buyout. I’am out of HERE>

  4. Get rid of all the MANAGERS/SUPERVISORS in the post office. We do not need all of them. Too many means more money going out the window. They are the ones that are getting paid too much money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Yeah we need some, but it seems to me that all they do is BULLY all of us into doing what they want. Some of them are real idiots. I have customers calling telling me that the MANAGER didnt do what they promised that they would TAKE CARE OF!!!!! I, as a clerk, answering the phone feel sorry for these customers. I dont know what to tell them since the manager has been dragging them around for weeks about their mail problems.

  5. The Unions may try to delay any VER or buyouts, Union dues come first, who cares if you were excessed to a carrier job and cannot preform your duties!

  6. Take Action to Pass Amended S. 1789 and S. 1853
    Click here to send a quick message telling both of your senators that the postal reform bill, S. 1789, is acceptable in the amended form. Several crucial amendments have been made to S. 1789.
    This week, a group of twenty-seven senators came together to sign a letter to S. 1789 sponsors, Senators Carper, Collins, Lieberman and Brown to approve the amended bill along with Senator Bernie Sanders sponsored bill, S.1853.
    The passage of these bills S.1853 & S.1789 will enhance the Early Retirement Incentives for our APWU craft workers , when the offers are announced in March 2012.
    To read more about this legislation, including the full text of the bill, click here.
    After you send a message to your representative, make sure you also take a minute to call their office and tell them to vote for S. 1789. You can reach both of your senators by calling the Capitol Hill switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

    To find your senators, please click here.

    Click here to take action and send a quick message to your representative. Tell them to vote no on H.R. 7!
    The payroll tax cut extension bill passed both the House and the Senate. It is on the way to President Obama’s desk and is awaiting his signature.  Unlike previous versions, the legislation as passed would not require current postal workers to pay more into retirement. To read more about the payroll tax cut extension, please click here.

  7. I retired from the USPS in 2009. All I have seen from the management is the quest to reduce the workers to make more profit for themselves. What they need to do is to reduce the numbers of EAS to about 80,000, and the number od EAS 23 and abouve by about 75 percent. The supervisory salaries are included in the labor costs. This is the reason that the USPS’s labor cost is so high! This is the “TOO MANY CHEIFS AND NOT ENOUGH INDIANS”!
    What this means for some of you that are much younger and have only heard the politically correct is that there are too many supervisors, and not enough craft workers. The majority of Postal workers do not need supervision, the supervisors are the biggest burden on Postal Revenues next to the fuel costs. Get rid of the needless supervisors.

  8. when is this early out incentive coming?
    if they add 5 years to csrs and fers, alot of people would retire..
    $25k and 5 years….

  9. USPS in charge of my healthcare…..THE HORROR!!!!!

    These buffoons can’t even get a FMLA request correct….

    Can you even begin to imagine the problems we’ll have when you go put in a insurance claim with these proven incompetents…

    IOD employees comes to mind, like the way they were treated!!!!?????

    Escorted out the building like criminals….FTPO

  10. Good! reform, the people running it, have no business experience, and are running it to the ground!!!!

    They have a Supervisor, Manager, senior Manager, Assist to the senoir Manager, and so on, and so, on, and so, and none of them know how to run the place.
    REFORM!!! The Mail Professing Plant, is so, unorganized, unprofessional, it’s no wonder, it’s losing $, when they have people coming in to hang out gossip, and exercise, their biases, Please!!!! Reform! GET real Business minded in there, to fix it and bring it to the 20th Century! Get rid of all these unqualify mangers, that don’t know thier job!

  11. I feel sorry for everyone who has to stay but at lease you have a job how about the ones who dont? just make the best of it what comes down the pipe and you will be find remember health comes first thank god. So hang in there and take day by day god bless

  12. about time… $30 k and add 5 years to csrs… and i’m gone !!!
    save the post office,for the long term…..thank god.

  13. For all of the people that want others to retire so that they can have their positions, don’t let the door hit you in the fanny on the way out. When people retire is their own business and not something that they need to consult YOU about. No one owes you anything, least of all a voice in their retirement plans. Either put your time in like everyone else ,or move on and see if the people at your new job want to retire just to make room for YOU.

  14. The postmaster general on down seems to think closing 250 plants is going to really help. That’s BS. What about all of the employees that will be displaced and have to commute very far distances to the new location. Will they be paid for the mileage they incur with the cost of gas these days. It seems USPS wants us to sacrafice but not give anything in return. Look at what these jerks are proposing as far as funding retirement, now they want us to contribute 3.2% of our pay and get back only 0.8%. Postal executives who came up with this should be fired along with that idiot Donahue. You have these guys that are hanging around which are way past the age to collect social security, they should be given a good incentive and then retire. Donahue and politicians need to pull their heads out of you know where instead of trying to screw over the employees that get the job done. It has been their substandard leadership and guidance that has resulted in this fiasco. The politicians need to be gone too, votes do count so use them to get rid of these crooked bastards.

  15. Still NOT ONE WORD on reducing the VAST Bureaucracy, that NEVER touches mail and THEREFORE does NOTHING productive to make USPS money. Got to start their first guys!

  16. Control Freak is Issa game.

    Doesn’t care what the other Congress people have to sayif its not what he wants, the meeting yesterday about birth control he wouldn’t even let this one WOMAN speak.

    Its all about the Freakazoid Issa….So today is FUCK ISSA FRIDAY.

  17. What you have here is a postmaster general who was hired to totally bankrupt the USPS. Let’s see, raise rates, reduce service, push full timers out the door and project to the nation how the business you’re in charge of is failing. Why wait for a buy out.? I left last year and have NEVER looked back and wondered if I made the right decision. As long as this idiot is in charge, things are only going to continue to crumble, because that’s exactly the job he was hired to do! With support from morons like Issa, I give it less than two years…and again, that’s exactly what certain members of Congress want. Tea, anyone?

  18. hey 1st cav, i know you. you are right. lee, people should retire when ready. i am sure your parents wouldn’t like to be forced out before they were ready. maybe if the absolute mis management of the postal service was ever addressed we could turn this place around. why do we cut service on ist class and give discounts to standard mail ? walk sequence discounts are still given then we take it out of sequence to mix it back in walk sequence again . we pay overtime to do that also. where is the logic? we still don’t get it.

  19. Obama may be re elected. Making history. First black president elected to a second term. The economy is helping him.

    But the PO? Who has the answer? It is a beast in itself.

    I can’t go anywhere. Only have 15 years.

  20. 283,000 eligible for retirment. Reire them. OPM notify as to effective date and options available. Many fossil employees hanging around for early out. Retire them give them $5000. tax free and send them on their way, Young folks with families need jobs.

  21. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite sounded just great, until they turned the guillotine on themselves.

    the passive apwu burrass/guffy team did not say one word about the 100,000 clerk positions that have been lost the last 5 years. their silence was their consent.

    155,000 positions to be RIF will come from the union workers, not the 110,000 po mismanagers…..you will not hear a peep from apwu guffy/morris team. they sold you out-they were payed off!

    that is what happens when you have a company union. PMG Donehoe was approved, vetted, and appointed by POTUS Obamma……..once again his silence is his consent.

    funny how the po mismanagement that ran the ship into the iceberg….is not going down with the ship. like the italian cruise ship captain they will just it was not their corrupt fault. bring it on, bring it all down man!

  22. The GOP Party Line–Today, Mitt Romney, son of George “Brainwashed” Romney, does not blame the Pentagon for his views on unions, but follows a script against unions written by the Koch superPAC and affiliates. Money from the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and others happily portray unions as a socialist plot to wreck the “free market”, a notion that has the blessing of the GOP.

    In point of fact, however, unions are more American than they, if American means working for a more equitable share of a common enterprise. Our history is the struggle of ordinary Americans to realize a better way of life, in all senses.

    Even the GOP School of Entrepreneurship 101 tells us when an entrepreneur gets income from his investment of time, labor, expertise / education and/or materials, this is called “fair return” for his labors.

    Likewise, “Joe”, the autoworker and entrepreneur, after investment of time and training, is entitled to a fair return for his own labors. That return (and profit), the GOP tells us, is the glorious engine of progress in the American economy.

    Put another way, all factory workers, from management to the assembly line, are workers and entrepreneurs entitled to a fair return and profit.

    Entrepreneurship applies in all cases, the GOP tells us– except when the entrepreneur wears an assembly-line uniform. Yes, given to convenient self-conTradiction, the GOP– the self-styled “party of the entrepreneur”– is actually hostile to entrepreneurs who also happen to be assembly-line workers and union members.

    Apparently, only when an entrepreneur meets the qualification of wealth, does the GOP decide the entrepreneur is one of its own. Suitable candidates include nearly bankrupt corporate CEOs, nearly bankrupt Wall Street fund managers and bankers, and that arch anti-patriot and politically bankrupt demagogue, George W. Bush. Not to mention Mitt Romney.

    The Ultimate GOP Hypocrisy–A livable wage is the issue– one that lets a union family buy the house in about 30 years, affords medical care and lets the kids attend college, if they wish.

    But that involves money which management never has liked to share with fellow workers.

    A fair wage is the issue. In 2008, UAW wages averaged $28 hourly, not the untruth about $73 hourly the GOP floated just before its election defeat. By comparison, the non-union worker at an American plant of Honda or Toyota makes $20 to $26 hourly.

    And UAW wage scales let UAW hires start at $14 hourly, entirely in line with current labor rates.

    Yet, have we heard the GOP and Mitch McConnell or the sages of Faux News condemn American executive pay scales? Not until the Wall Street crash, we haven’t. Yet, average CEO pay at a large American corporation is around $12 million, versus only $1.2 million for a comparable CEO in Japan.

    Moreover, Wall Street-style perks have been the rule for more than two decades (and directly responsible for widespread damage to shareholder value and assets). Yet, little unrest about executive pay from the same people now complaining about union hourly wage or national competitiveness.

    When Bank America distributed $4 billion in bonuses to executives after a year of disaster, that dramatically defined the “dent in national competitiveness” the GOP wants to blame on union wages.

    This dual standard– or call it the hypocrisy it is– about union wages vs. executive pay runs deeply in the GOP, as well as circles of the American Enterprise Institute, and Cato and Hoover Institutes.

    Creator of the American Middle Class–In fact, unions have helped maintain the American standard of living. Robert Reich explains the radical concentration of wealth just before the Great Depression probably ushered in that disaster. Not surprisingly, only when unions began to flourish in the 1930’s did income begin to diffuse to most Americans again.

    Unions made a massive contribution to American prosperity, putting wages at a level where millions of workers could enjoy a middle-class living. And by so doing, unions undersigned this country’s claim of upward mobility. Without unions, we would lack the American middle class we so often take for granted.

    Likewise, were it not for unions, millions of sharecropper black American families in the South would have had no economic future but as slaves of the Jim Crow system. Unions are also a boon to Hispanic Americans. With too many of the GOP, unions are a racial mobility issue and threat to a white-only zone of comfort.

    Finally, the GOP canard about union wages symbolizes the hypocritical stance of the party about Detroit, and the rest of the country. GOP spokesmen say nothing about Detroit perks, limousines, redesigned offices, golden parachutes or corporate jets, but love to sing false choruses about union wages and health care costs.

  23. I’m surprised the GOP doesn’t convince this clown of a post master to run for president they both share the same ideas (slash and burn). If he doesn’t know what to do with the worlds largest distribution network then it’s time for President Obama to replace PMG Donoughe with someone with more progressive ideas.

  24. Eliminate more higher paying management personnel and there would be less to let go. I have seen up to three supervisors watching one while talking on their cells in my office. Give us back our over-payments to retirement accounts and we would be fine. Have you ever noticed when the supervisor is gone and there is no replacement or the station manager acts as if they are supervising we do just fine and get our work done on time, etc ?

  25. And you can bet NOT ONE of those projected cuts in employees will come from the EAS ranks.
    Only the craft ranks will be affected.

    Postal mgmt. is SOLELY responsible for the sorry shape of the USPS. Period.

  26. Where are the ideas to create revenue? Flats and letters are not paying the bills. Parcels…maybe. In my 25 years with the USPS I have never been so embarrassed. Management and craft have to work together if we want any kind of pension. E-commerce is taking away first class letter mail,….we are the most trusted organization in America,….someone get your head out of your a** in Washington and diversive into electronic communication. It is the only way we will survive. Making all these cuts is putting a band-aid on when a tourniquet is needed. The PM complains about the business model, but doesn’t address that. Change the model, or we can close ALL the plants.

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