Postal Service Posts $1.9 Billion Loss in Second Quarter
Source: New York Times
The financially troubled Postal Service on Friday posted a net loss of $1.9 billion in the second quarter, which ended March 31, compared with a $1.3 billion loss last quarter, when holiday shopping and heavy spending on political advertising during the 2012 election helped the agency.
Over all, the Postal Service reported operating revenues of $16.3 billion in the second quarter, an increase of $121 million, or 0.7 percent, which it attributed to strong growth in e-commerce deliveries and a small increase in standard mail, also known as junk mail. It is the first increase in revenue for the agency in five years.
But postal officials said the service’s expenses of $18.2 billion, which included continuing debt, offset the modest increase in revenue. Joseph Corbett, the Postal Service’s chief financial officer, said it had nearly $50 billion in debt obligations.
Officials said the Postal Service continues to lose $25 million dollars a day as it waits for Congress to pass legislation to overhaul the postal system.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/us/postal-service-posts-1-9-billion-loss-in-second-quarter.html
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USAF B-2 Stealth Bomber
Unit cost: Approximately $1.157 billion
Entire US Postal System loss = 1 plane
- They piss away trillions on wars for the oil interests but the Post Office has to take it in the neck?
Hey here's an idea, how 'bout giving the Post Office all the Gitmo prisoner money and just let them go back home. That's $900K per, so it ain't nothing to sniff at.....
That's a popular myth, but it's entirely false. No tax dollars fund the USPS at all. The USPS is also required by law to break even; IIRC, it is specifically forbidden from making a profit. It is required, in short, to behave like a business, but cannot make a profit as a business does.
The prefunding of the retiree health benefits, by the way, is the only such requirement in the US for any business entity, public or private. No other business of any kind at all, not one, has this legal requirement. To date, the USPS has prefunded health benefits for retirees who have not yet been born. When is enough, enough?? How does seventy-five billion dollars sound? Is that enough? No? Well, how much, then? A hundred billion? Two? How fucking much, Republicans? HOW FUCKING MUCH IS ENOUGH?
Also, unfortunately, USPS is Constitutionally authorized, not mandated. Congress could allow the USPS to fail and it would be entirely Constitutional.
Sorry, but I had to dispel those myths. Not your fault; plenty of people believe they are true, and it does a great deal of actual harm to what ought to be, by all rights, a very successful enterprise... if people in Congress weren't trying to kill it, because it's a sterling example of government doing something so right nobody can present an argument against it.
They put an Acting Plant Manager in place in my old, slated-for-"consolidation" facility. He came from the postal accounting department (you know what's coming, don't you) and he didn't know, despite the fact that this has been in the APWU contract literally from the beginning, that postal employees who work into the night premium period on their Saturday shifts get Sunday premium for the entire shift.
The. Plant. Manager. Didn't. Know. The plant manager.... who came from Accounting.
His first major change was to move the full-timers in my old building from their 2-10:30pm shift- not great hours, but not terrible, either, and we'd all had those hours or close to them for a long time- to 7:30pm-4AM. This is the worst possible, least-desirable shift in the entire building, across all days, and all shifts. There is no worse schedule in that building, period, and we all had seventeen or more years in that building. "God damned inexcusably disrespectful" is the politest term I can use for that.
In the meeting he had with us, he told us- incredibly, to our faces, with a fucking smile, to boot- that he would be using half-pay temps in the afternoon to "cover the gap" because he needed "more flexibility in scheduling" and needed to "streamline processing operations". Oh really? Never mind that it would cost us the difference in time, in processing the mail. What's four to five hours less time? Who's (ac)counting, really? We didn't really need all those hours to process all those tons- quite literally, I might add, tons- of standard mail every day. Yeah. Right.
Despite the very obviously punitive nature of the reassignment (and by the way, due to the night premiums paid to those employees on the new shift, it actually cost more in payroll, but again, who's (ac)counting), the APWU local of which I was a member, in typically ineffective, clueless, hopelessly helpless fashion, could do nothing to stop it. They never even tried. Had I been the president of the local, we would have been in front of an administrative law judge before you could say "boo", and would have been preparing a concurrent lawsuit in Federal court at the same time, alleging every possible accusation related to union-busting and unfair labor practices (several hundred unresolved grievances PER CRAFT? can we say "complete failure to adequately represent", anyone?) pretty much daily, subpoenaing management personnel so often they couldn't do their jobs (especially Mr. Incompetent Head Honcho), until we got it reversed. My local was never, not one time ever, able to stop this sort of thing, even when they had arbitration awards supposedly ending this or that practice of management. Even when those awards were posted, signed by management, agreed to by all parties in unambiguous language, and posted at the entrance to the workroom floor just to drive the point home.
Greg Chanski, our Acting Plant Mismanager (no I will NOT take down his name, so don't anyone ask, because it isn't happening; if anyone asks me to remove it, I'll edit to include the office phone number where he can be reached out of pure, untinctured, professional spite and derision), did say the union was "working well with management on this issue." That's a direct quote from that particular meeting, by the way. Said with a smile, ala "How about a nice, tall glass of shut the fuck up".
Asshole!
I decided to show him how flexible I could be the day before the new shift started. I resigned without notice and haven't gone back. I kind of regret it, from a financial standpoint- I have nearly nothing left for cash- but I will not work for a smarmy, destructive, clueless, lying, professionally incompetent fucknut like him. I won't let such people play with my life ever again. I will not stand for that kind of smiling workplace abuse, not ever again. There was no excuse for it, this shift change had been tried and failed miserably twice before, to the demonstrable detriment of the employees affected and their families, he expressed exactly zero concern about how we were affected, just like every other manager every other time it happened.... no. Just fucking no. I'm done, and I'm glad I am.
If the USPS is putting incompetent fucking idiots like this asshole in charge everywhere, Republicans won't have time to kill USPS, because the USPS' own middle and upper management will do it for them, and sooner.
Response to alp227 (Original post)
Look, the military has created a niche' for themselves as a rapid-deployment force able to stabilize (and/or acquire) almost any region of the world, if need be. That costs money and we pay for it. The oil and mineral companies and the investment bankers who finance it all, benefit.
The CIA has used it's underworld shady contacts to underwrite the drug trade to the point where we have American troops guarding poppy crops. A crop which another branch of the Army later confiscates. Some always slips through. And the investment bankers who finance it all, benefit.
The Interior Department has become the chief development department of the oil tar sands, mining and fracking people. And the EPA... well, never mind. You get the picture. And the investment bankers who finance it all, benefit.
So. Here we have the poor little ol' Post Office. The doormat of agencies even though they get their own mention in the Constitution. Go figure, huh? Fame just ain't what it used to be. Anyhow, it is apparent they are not maximizing their position. Possession, as they say, is 9/10ths of the law and it is also where the actuarial table people, and the numbers crunching people can assist them most.
It should be obvious to most that an amount of so-called ''illegal'' drugs are being transported through the various USPS portals, but who ends up with it when its found? The DEA. The FBI. Anybody but the Post Office, right? But they had it first! Shit. Screw that!
I'm telling you Post Office, therein lives your leverage. And if these agencies won't pay your ''processing fees'' to hand it over, then auction it off like any other confiscated federal property. Or better, have Wall Street put it all in a bond and sell it on the derivatives market.
- Because when the shit finally hits the fan, it'll be a drop in the bucket.....
