Editorial: Congress must deliver help, reform to post office

If the U.S. Postal Service were a private corporation, it would be bankrupt.

Responsible executives would go to court with a reorganization plan that would shut down offices, lay off workers, jettison unprofitable operations and focus on what it does best that no one else will do at prices no one else can match.

But as a quasi-governmental business, they can do almost none of these things without the consent of Congress and/or that of the four postal unions. An arbitrator awarded union members no-layoff protection in 1978. They have declined to bargain away that extraordinary shield in subsequent contract talks. Realistically, who would?

Still, attrition has removed 235,000 employees from the Postal Service payroll since 1999.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahue told a U.S. Senate committee Tuesday officials believed a contract negotiated earlier this year might give them the flexibility to match reductions in head count to the ever-slowing volume of mail – a 20 percent drop in four years. But the decline in volume since then has been double their projections.

The Postal Service cannot get to a target workforce of 425,000 by 2015 without congressional action that would eliminate no-layoff protections while preserving other procedural protections.

To be clear, this is not all on the postal workers. The Postal Service has thousands of leases for space officials say is no longer needed. The list includes 3,600 post offices targeted for closure – 39 in Washington and 23 in Idaho. The business is also on the hook for 24,000 square feet in downtown Spokane, at a cost of $490,000 annually.

About 1,000 of those leases are with current or former postal workers. Hmmm.

The Postal Service has hired an outside firm to renegotiate leases. The association representing property owners is already sending up red flags.

Congress has been warned repeatedly of the Postal Service’s mounting difficulties, but snoozed until Donahue announced a potential $10 billion loss for this fiscal year. Members have rejected even the simplest of solutions; eliminating Saturday mail deliveries would save $3 billion a year.

Now, with the likelihood the Postal Service will miss a scheduled $5.5 billion payment into its retiree health fund at the end of the month, Congress and the White House are paying attention. Those payments are part of the problem; the Postal Service is required to pre-fund future retiree health care benefits obligations much sooner than other federal plan participants.

But the Postal Service organization is structured for the pre-Internet age and will not succeed until reforms recognize the obvious. If the preservation of rural mail delivery is a sticking point, as it is for many in Congress, then appropriate the money to pay for it.

Delay much longer, and the Postal Service will have to hand-deliver its own bankruptcy filing.