Another shining example of how Gov't run enterprises are so much more efficient than the Private sector. And this also shows how unions cooperate with management to increase productivity & control costs.
NOT!!
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Unions and federal bureaucracy - a match made in Heaven.
Just wait until we can have that marvelous combination
running the health care industry for the entire nation.
Money for nothing at the Post Office
Betsy's Page
Ed Morrissey links to this story of how we're paying post office workers to sit around and do nothing.
<<< The U.S. Postal Service, struggling with a massive deficit caused by plummeting mail volume, spends more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing.
It’s a practice called “standby time,” and it has existed for years — but postal employees say it was rarely used until this year. Now, postal officials say, the agency is averaging about 45,000 hours of standby time every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million per year.
Mail volume is down 12.6 percent compared with last year, and many postal supervisors simply don’t have enough work to keep all employees busy. But a thicket of union rules prevents managers from laying off excess employees; a recent agreement with the unions, in fact, temporarily prevents the Postal Service from even reassigning them to other facilities that could use them. >>>
Ah, bless those unions keeping a business or government corporation from saving money. It's a long way from the days of the Gilded Age when unions fought for eight or even ten-hour days and safe working conditions. Now they fight to protect people from the normal vicissitudes of business. It's the same approach that just bankrupted General Motors and Chrysler.
The employees don't even like sitting around doing nothing.
<<< They spend their days holed up in rooms — conference rooms, break rooms, occasionally 12-foot-by-8-foot storage closets — that the Postal Service dubs “resource rooms.” Postal employees use more colorful names, like “holding pens” and “blue rooms.”
“It’s just a small, empty room. … It’s awful,” said one mail processing clerk who has spent four weeks on standby time this summer. “Most of us bring books, word puzzles. Sometimes we just sleep.” >>>
But it sure beats being laid off which is what would happen in the real world. With volume decreasing as fewer people mail their communications, we're stuck with the numbers that were hired years ago. The union contracts protect anyone who has been on the job for more than six years. The Post Office is required to pay them for eight hours of work even if there is no work. They're not even allowed to ask the employees to spend the time brushing up on their training manuals - the union complained about that. So they sit around and play cards or watch TV. The only hope is that employees will accept the Post Office's offered bonuses and take early retirement. There are 30,000 employees that the Post Office estimates that need to be cut. Meanwhile, they talk of cutting back delivery on Saturdays. Imagine how many people will need to sit around doing nothing when that happens.
Unions and federal bureaucracy - a match made in Heaven. Just wait until we can have that marvelous combination running the health care industry for the entire nation.
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