Postal service job-cut plan ‘tought’ to get done

The U.S. Postal Service, which expects to run out of money next month, would have a hard time carrying out a proposal to cut 220,000 jobs by 2015, a labor professor said.

The Postal Service, which this week circulated a proposal to cut 39 percent of its full-time employees, including through mass firings, would need congressional permission and President Barack Obama’s signature on a law to break a labor contract with its largest union.

“It would be tough,” Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a telephone interview. “It would make the federal government the largest contract breaker in the country.”

The Postal Service, based in Washington, is seeking to reduce costs and return to solvency. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said last week that, unless Congress allows the agency to change required payments and operations, he may seek to raise the agency’s $15 billion debt limit. The Postal Service expects to reach that limit in September, he has said.

The plan would be challenging for the Obama administration because of the country’s high unemployment rate, Shaiken said. The jobless rate has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009.

“Politically, it would be very damaging to the administration,” Shaiken said. “This would cause a huge uproar because it would take place in a context where unions have been under attack by state governments.”

Little Choice

The Postal Service is left with little choice other than to propose the job cuts, Chief Human Resources Officer Anthony Vegliante said today in a telephone interview. The Postal Service, which has posted losses for the past eight quarters, needs to reorganize its business and reduce costs, he said.

“This isn’t about just passing expenses on to the customer or passing our problems on to someone else,” he said. “We’re trying to fix it.”

Labor unions yesterday criticized the job-cut proposal and a separate one to pull employees out of federal retirement and health-benefit programs.

“The issues of lay-off protection and health benefits are specifically covered by our contract,” National Association of Letter Carriers President Fredric Rolando said in an e-mailed statement. “The Congress of the United States does not engage in contract negotiations with unions and we do not believe they are about to do so.”

Starting Negotiations

The Postal Service is scheduled to begin negotiations with the letter carriers union and the smaller National Postal Mail Handlers Union next week. In November, it signed a 3 1/2-year agreement with the American Postal Workers Union, which represents the largest number of postal employees.

That agreement only allows mass firings of employees with less than six years of experience, Vegliante said. The Postal Service has about 560,000 full-time employees. About 20,000 have worked less than six years for the service, Vegliante said.

The Postal Service’s average employee age is about 60, and it has about 460,000 retirees, he said.

Senator Thomas Carper, a Delaware Democrat who has proposed legislation that would allow the service to cut delivery to five days a week and more easily close post offices, said the proposal underscores the seriousness of the “financial predicament.”

“I am open to considering any idea that can prevent the Postal Service from going bankrupt,” he said in an e-mailed statement.