Obama Proposes Ending Saturday Mail Delivery and Refunding Prepaid Retirement Funds

Wednesday, February 15, 2012
In an attempt to help the ailing U.S. Postal Service (USPS), President Barack Obama has proposed two major proposals as part of his 2013 budget plan.
 
One: Allow the Postal Service to cut back on mail delivery from six days a week to five, starting next year. This most likely would mean ending Saturday mail delivery starting in 2013. In the past, advocates have argued that this would save at least $3 billion a year.
 
Second: Give USPS a $10.9 billion refund over two years on the monies it has set aside for future employee retirements. This plan would boost the agency’s operating budget, while representing a rejection of the 2006 Republican mandate that the Postal Service prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years. The administration does propose increasing employee contributions to retirement funds by 1.2% over a three-year period beginning in 2013.
 
This is not the first time that the Postal Service has tried to eliminate Saturday deliveries. Budget problems led to temporary suspension of Saturday service in some cities in May and June of 1947, and in 1957 Saturday service was stopped…once, because Americans were so outraged that President Dwight Eisenhower quickly increased funding so allow Saturday delivery to resume.
-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff
 
To Learn More:

The End of Saturday Mail Draws Closer (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov) 

Comments

M Wilson 12 years ago
if saturday delivery were to end, who do you think would deliver the mail on a regular carriers vacation day or worse yet, a day when they call in sick. some offices have only one or two substitute carriers and if they only work when the regular carrier is off of work, it would be very hard to keep "substitute" carriers as they would have no pay unless the regular carrier is on vacation (predictable) or calls in sick (unpredictable). now i don't know about you, but if i were a substitute carrier, who would normally work every saturday, i would have to have an income from somewhere in between those times i would have to work at the post office, meaning they would all probably get a different job and when called upon to deliver mail in a pinch, they would be "working" to make a living, so that day may not get delivery also. wouldn't that be even worse on the postal service? just my thoughts, but it really should be seen in that perspective. i couldn't just wait by my phone everyday, hoping it would be the post office calling me to go to work. i would have to get a different job and when they did call, i'd have to say "sorry, i'm at work". think about it a little bit.

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