When our Constitution was being written in “horse and buggy days,” our Founding Fathers provided for a national postal service.
Well, mail demands expanded as population and commerce grew.
But technology has a way of rewriting the rules, and email correspondence has now vastly reduced traditional mail. About 43 billion fewer pieces of traditional mail will be sent this year than were sent four years ago!
As a result, there sometimes is not enough work to be done by some of the modern Postal Service’s hundreds of thousands of employees.
We want good mail service, and we want it promptly and at reasonable cost. But with volume plunging, the Postal Service is facing multibillion-dollar deficits. And its union work rules deny it the nimbleness to adjust its workforce to meet actual demand for its services.