Word: postally
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...Postal rates, moreover, have risen and are still rising so rapidly that many users will soon be priced out of the market. Major voices in America's free press, among the nearly 10,000 magazines and hundreds of mail-delivered newspapers, are threatened with extinction. Two questions must now be asked. What went wrong? And more important: What kind of postal service does the U.S. need...
...first question is the easier. Just about everything went wrong. To begin with, the top management, recruited from business, was remarkably unbusinesslike. Elmer Klassen, who was Postmaster General from January 1972 to February 1975, always seemed uncertain about what the Postal Service should be. He let people go, and then, when operations deteriorated, hired others to take their place. The Postal Service, which spends 85% of its budget on labor, now employs 700,000, making it, after the Bell System, the nation's second largest corporate employer...
...raise its wages to the level of private industry and also to win valuable allies against congressional critics, the Postal Service in 1973 gave the seven postal unions an overly generous settlement: an increase that amounted to 23% in wages and benefits over two years. Postal employees now earn considerably more than comparable Government workers; a beginning postal clerk, for example, makes $10,898, while a Government clerk in a roughly similar area starts at $8,500. Most remarkably, if postal workers were paid at the same rate as Government employees, there would be no postal deficit at all this...
Inflation has hit the Postal Service even harder than most other enterprises. Just the increases in fuel prices-the Postal Service is the nation's biggest gasoline user-have added $162 million to its costs since January 1973. The only successful cost cutting that the corporation has managed has been at the expense of service-reducing the number of collections, for example, and putting mailboxes by the curb in new housing developments rather than by the door, so that the homeowner and not the mailman has to do the walking...
Faced with all these problems, Klassen's successor as Postmaster General, Benjamin Franklin Bailar, a former vice president for international relations at American Can Co., gives the promise of providing more efficient administration. He is young (41), analytical and decisive. Even if the Postal Service had had good management from the start, however, it would still be in deep trouble today...