Check's In The Mail

Here is an organization that needs to take bankruptcy. Check's In The Mail Posted 09/08/2010 07:03 PM ET Organized Labor: The U.S. Postal Service expects to lose $7 billion in the current fiscal year and delivers less mail each year. It could use some fiscal austerity. But the postal workers union wants more, more, more. The future of the Postal Service is bleak. Not only is it on a path to lose billions this year, it has lost money in 14 of the last 16 quarters and could drop at least $238 billion over the next decade. While the financial losses have mounted, mail volume has fallen from a peak of 213 billion pieces handled in 2006 to roughly 170 billion this year. Next year the post office expects just 160 billion pieces to pass through its doors, about what it handled two decades ago. It's an archaic institution going the way of the buggy whip industry. The post office administration recognizes that its business model is unsustainable and wants to cut costs by trimming wages and benefits and adding part-time workers. While these responses make sense to the rest of the world, the American Postal Workers Union and its president, William Burrus, are having trouble with reality. The union wants "more control over activities at work, more money, better benefits — we want more," Burrus told Government Executive magazine. "We will try to fashion our proposals to reflect the entitlement to more." Entitlement to more? By what standard does he believe the workers of a failing "business" are entitled to more, let alone a job? Neither jobs nor high and ever-escalating wages are rights. But that's the union mindset: Demand more no matter what difficulties a business, or in this case a government-protected monopoly, is facing. That same mindset believes that no jobs is better than moderate- or low-paying jobs. In just the last year, unions helped kill a mall project worth 2,220 jobs in the Bronx because the developer wouldn't guarantee that all tenants would pay workers at least $10 an hour. They also set a GM plant in Indiana on course to be shut down because members refused to take a pay cut. Unions are also at the root of an unfunded pension liability problem in both the public and private sectors that has begun to roil the economy. Making matters worse is a Democratic Congress that owes unions political favors and a White House that told the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights that labor organizing is a human right in need of expansion in the U.S. Somebody needs to send them all a note warning of the wreckage they're courting. Just don't mail it through the U.S. Postal Service. THE STAFF: If ever a company was crying for Bankruptcy this it is. This just show how out of touch government and unions are with the real world.