The National Postal Mail Handlers Union remains fully engaged in the discussions and efforts in Washington, DC to develop and implement a workable solution to the financial crisis in which the United States Postal Service finds itself. At the heart of this financial crisis is a Congressional mandate, adopted as part of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), which requires the Postal Service to pre-fund its Retiree Health Benefits Fund for 75 years into the future, but to accomplish this massive funding mandate in only 10 years – essentially requiring retiree benefits funding for workers who haven’t even been hired yet, and perhaps haven’t even yet been born.
This postal-only mandate (no other federal agency or corporation in America bears this pre-funding burden) costs the USPS $5.5 billion per year. It accounts for 100 percent of the Postal Service’s $20 billion in losses over the past four years. It also accounts for 100 percent of the rise in the Postal Service’s debt in recent years. Without the mandate, the USPS would have been profitable over the past four years, and rather than having to use up its $15 billion line of credit from the U.S. Treasury to cover the pre-funding obligation, the Postal Service would have had significant borrowing authority to ride out the bad economy it now faces. The $47 billion the Postal Service has deposited so far into its retiree health fund over the past four years instead could have been spent on operating costs.
Because Congress has yet to take steps to correct this pre-funding inequity, postal officials act desperately to locate savings as they face the $5.5 billion pre-funding payments due every fall. So they’re proposing a series of drastic cuts: One day it’s to end Saturday delivery, another day to close 3,700 post offices, or fire 120,000 employees, or close 250 mail processing centers. Each has serious downsides for USPS workers, residents and communities and local businesses, for the U.S. economy, and for the very future of the Postal Service. These cuts would exacerbate rather than solve the agency’s problems, by sacrificing its competitive edge and driving away customers.
To make matters worse, in addition to this onerous and unfair RHBP pre-funding mandate, two independent actuaries -- commissioned by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) and the USPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) – have determined that the Postal Service has overfunded its Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) account by $50 billion to $75 billion, and that its Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) account is overfunded by nearly $7 billion dollars.
There are now several bills pending in both the House and Senate that address these and other postal issues. Some of these pending bills include language to facilitate responsible solutions to the USPS financial ills and, sadly, some of these pending bills focus on draconian, partisan, anti-worker, anti-union provisions. NPMHU officers and representatives continue to meet with Senators and Representatives on Capitol Hill, with various leaders within the Obama administration, with various other postal stakeholders who are committed to responsible solutions, and with our allies throughout the union movement to develop strategies on how best to accomplish our goals of preserving a robust, fiscally sound Postal Service and to protect the wages, rights, benefits, and jobs of Mail Handlers and all postal workers.
