25 thoughts on “Video: PMG: We Are Losing $25M Every Day”

  3. The PostOffice should never have been spun off to run like a ” business”, it’ a SERVICE! But thank the Republicans for that, in the 70’s. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a Republican, everything looks like a business.

  4. What about the fact that the post office is a SERVICE, not a BUSINESS! Seems Donohoe and Congress has forgotten this. It can’t be run like a business because it is supposed to be a service to every American as an affordable way to keep the nation in touch. Yes there is the internet, but there is nothing like getting a hand written card or letter from a loved one. I don’t think my right to receive a letter from my mother should be taken away!

  5. The lengthy letter presented above, writen by Ralp Nader, is a perfect example of why the PO is failing. The letter speaks in terms of the past, while the rest of the communications industry has moved to the future. If any of you had a business, big or small, that was failing, woudn’t you do what ever is neccessary to sustain your business? Would you want mulitple unions forcing you to pay, in wages and benefits, your employees more that the market allowed for? Would you want a Board of Governors telling you what you can charge your customers? Would you want them telling you what you can or can not sell?
    The very union reps. you think are helping you are just as corrupt as the mis-managers that are responsible for our demise. They us you dues/COPA contributions to grease the palms of the very Senators and House Reps. that you are all bad-mouthing. They wash each others hand while we sit in the background fusing about whom to assess the blame on.
    God help us.

  6. I don’t believe a word this guy says. Everyone knows that the real problem was what a Republican congress imposed on the postal service 6 yrs ago. 5.5 billion dollars a year for 10 yrs on top of one of the worst recessions. Take away that 5.5 billion dollar liability and the service made money for most those years.
    That tells me the deficit is man made and apparently there is some ulterior motive to try and dismantle the postal service so it can be split up and privatized and sold off to the likes of UPS or FEDEX. Heaven forbid if you live in a rural area though. No service from these profit oriented companies. Which will leave what remains of the postal service to take care of, which means taxpayer support since this service won’t pay for itself in postage alone.
    The postal logic escapes me. Wonder if the PMG would still expect to make his presidential like salary running a 4th rate service or will he have jumped ship and joined one of these current competitors of the USPS?

  7. Mine was just pointing out something? something like Something tells me maybe your not the guy for this service P.R.D.

    Credits….with a much thanks.

    Sincerely,

    Ralph Nader
    P.O. Box 19312
    Washington, D.C. 20036

    Robert Weissman
    President
    Public Citizen
    1600 20th Street NW
    Washington, D.C. 20009

    Linda Sherry
    Director, National Priorities
    Consumer Action
    P.O. Box 70037
    Washington, D.C. 20024

    Judy Lear
    Acting Director
    Gray Panthers
    1319 F Street NW, Suite 302
    Washington, D.C. 20004

    John Richard
    Essential Information
    P.O. Box 19405
    Washington, D.C. 20036

    Carol Miller
    Public Health Activist

  8. When is anyone going to talk about the real problem in the USPS. “INCOMPETENT SUPERVISORS and MANAGERS” who don’t care about giving unnecessary overtime to their friends and have very little respect for CRAFT EMPLOYEES. If they are known to not be able to do the job,they are moved to another section or out of the building,but not losing thier job. Is there anyone who oversees the undesireable supervisors and managers who affects the progress of this great USPS.

  9. MAKE IT MANDATORY THAT IF A SUPERVISOR OR POSTMASTER GOES OUT ON A DETAIL, THEY PAY THEIR OWN WAY AND ONLY GET THEIR SAME SALARY. IF THEY CHOOSE TO GO, THEY CHOOSE TO PAY FOR IT TOO!

  10. Great comment, Dawn! Fed-ex and UPS are most certainly licking their chops waiting to bite into us. Better get another career choice going, people. The new post office won’t want any union people either. Get out of the Union so the new peeps will hire you for their paltry 7.00 an hour! Obama chanted “we need change, we need change” when he was running for president. Only thing is, it is all bad change! Guess Donohoe took it all to heart with continuing on with Jackie boy Potter’s Great Transformation Plan. It’s transformed us into the poor house!

  12. None of you really get the whole picture. Don’t you realize the post office MUST fail? It has to fail in order to become a private business. It works like this… 1st there is a so called “reorganization plan”. This plan is a wolf in sheeps clothing effort to appear to resolve the problems with the PO. The PO takes all the critical hits and says”we’re doing what we can!” but it still MUST fail. Why MUST it fail? It is the only way for our PMG,Donohoe, to claim the PO an unfixable mess. He cries to congress to fix the mess HIS plan has created. Finally Congress throws up their hands and says okay. We have only 2 choices. Either return the PO as part of a government entity-funded by taxpayers, or privatize and let the new company bare the burden. Now, do any of you out there think for one minute that the American taxpayer will want to bear the cost? Of course not! So, to privatization it goes! Now it gets really interesting. Do you all think a private company, lets say like Pitney-Bowes, who already knows postage rates, will keep the cost of a letter to 45 cents! Of course not. It will be comparable to other countries, possibly $5.00 to mail a letter….to certain destinations (because there is no service in all areas) AND only on certain days of the week. All of these “forever stamps” will be as useless as confederate money! Start investigating for yourself. And by the way, look at what companies our PMG has stock in. Looks like the PO is up the creek without a paddle. If PMG Donohoe really wanted to “save the post office”, he would have done it. Read Ralph Nader’s letter. It is another eye opener. The Post Office, as we know it today, will be a thing of the past by 2015. And a last tidbit, the Unions are helping this whole thing also. The APWU, asking for no changes, it helps to escalate the bankruptcy. Congress will act, and we will suffer.

  13. “Cussing” is very healthy, lets you get it all out…try it sometime, reach deep down and just let it all out!!! Try it when having sex as a starter.

    Maybe just maybe you make us all sick virgin wilda mcdanel, ever thought that one out?

    Chief No Brains Has Spoken.

    PS. Dignity and respect? Right.

  14. You people are so selfish. If you want us people who care about the post office to listen and take stock in what you say. Quit cussing the language is for those with no brains can’t think of better words to use. Grow up and fight back with dignity and respect. Your opinions aren’t worth reading even if you are on the right track. Shape up . You make us all sick not of the post office but of you.

  15. That piece written by First class was actually written by Ralph Nader. It showed up on Postal Reporter

  16. Decertify APWU all together! If you’re tired of ever changing contracts and self preservation on the part of union officials all at the expense of its lemmings, if you’re tired of your dues money going to pay for grand displays of BS which don’t help you, if you’re tired of settling for no raises while your union fights for larger lockers in your facility, if you’re tired of junior employees bumping senior miltary veteran employees all because they are stewards that spend time not working, filing grievances for larger lockers while you are excessed to Timbuctu…then the time has come to oust them! It’s either that or same ole same ole! Go to NLRB.gov to see how to decertify a union only interested in self-preservation!

  17. 1st Class…….I agree. How hard would it be, with a system already in place, to take back the business that was lost. The Train Tracks are already in place! This PMG……well……….I smell a RAT!

  19. 1st cav moron, he wasn’t any of those things by Obama, you stupid f**k. Appointed by the BOG, of which almost all are Idiot Bush appointees.

  20. In our office overtime is given almost everyday. Sometimes it is needed, most times it is not. Mail processing will come in early, then run out of mail 1-2 hours before the shift ends. Why? I come in two hours early to help evening shift. Then find out there are so many of us we often have nothing to do! Now I know why. So the PMG can tell congress the postal service is losing money.

  21. PMG Donehoe……vetted, approved, appointed by President Obammy! enough said!

  22. Dohahoe you dogshit cock sucking motherfucking piece of shit. How about we pimp your ate up ass and when you come up short on the money we beat that ass. You are a scum bag worthless ass hole who should lose his job. You skull fucked shit for brains ignorant son of a bitch. The superdestroyer

  23. Dear Mr. Donahoe,

    “You are actively presiding over the demise of one of our country’s greatest founding institutions. The U.S. Postal Service is an institution that was conceived by Benjamin Franklin and which has succeeded brilliantly over the generations to service, connect, and allow the people of our land to communicate with each other anywhere at a common rate regardless of whether they live in urban, suburban, or rural areas.

    In recent years the cost-cutting and reduction of staff have coupled with the Congressional restrictions on new business opportunities – demanded by corporate interests averse to competition – to place the Postal Service in a cul de sac. Nor can the USPS overcome the draconian requirements to prepay retiree health benefits greatly in advance – an imposition unheard of in either the corporate world or by any other government agency.

    Removing the devastating fiscal effect of these prepayments would take care of 80 percent of the postal service’s deficit. Moreover, the federal government already owes the postal service, according to the U.S. Postal Service’s Inspector General, over $80 billion dollars in overpayments the USPS has made to the Civil Service Retirement System and the Federal Employees Retirement System. You need to recover these overpayments. Yet while you have infrequently mentioned these strangleholds, that is not what you are known for in your direction of this historic institution.

    What you are known for is a repeated demand to cut services and raise rates – a surefire way to destroy the USPS on the installment plan, a strategy that any business executive knows sets an accelerating downward course. You make the case for shutting rural post offices, slashing 150,000 postal employees’ jobs, ending Saturday delivery, and extending delivery dates as if they do not produce a spiral of decline and loss of customers who will not come back. You make the case, using the cliché of “running the postal service like a business,” when you are ruining the service like a self-destructive business all the while forgetting that postal management for decades has cross-subsidized third class, corporate commercial mail with first class mail but now opposes any cross-subsidization of, at a more modest amount, the community rural post offices that you wish to close down after the May 15, 2012 moratorium ends. Your saying that such close-downs will save $200 million a year completely ignores a greater monetary and human cost of residents having to go without or traveling miles to the next post office by millions of rural Americans already strip-mined of other essential services.

    Turning to your gross neglect of a “turn-around” strategy, you have failed in your promise to focus “on selling the business” which you announced you would do when you escalated to your present position. You said it was the USPS’s “job to sell them on the mail.” Although you have received many practical ideas, some within your statutory authority, including nearly two dozen suggestions from Ruth Goldway, chair of the Postal Regulatory Commission, and others from one of the conferences on innovation held in the summer of 2010, inaction has been the only follow-up for the most part. Questions we put to you on this subject have received no replies.

    Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, has mentioned some of the easy revenue ideas – an honest notary service (badly needed in an era of robo-signings), cashing most checks, selling fishing and hunting licenses, wrapping holiday gifts, or accepting wine or beer for delivery. In mentioning these revenue expanders, he also pointed to the need for Congress to free the Postal Service to enter the digital world that is draining away some of its first-class business.

    But we do not hear Mr. Donahoe loud and clear on these matters, especially before Congress. We do not see Mr. Donahoe getting his assistants and encouraging its thousands of postmasters to speak out and stand up for an expanding, innovative, entrepreneurial postal service. Instead, our feedback from the field is that your constant refrain of cutting services and raising rates, together with huge losses of experienced employees, has produced an emerging perilous and costly drop in morale. You must know the operational consequences of that feeling of institutional depression. We do not see the Postmaster General rallying postal employees and gathering postal consumers to pull together for an expansive postal service. You even throw cold water on reviving the U.S. postal savings system, shut down in 1967 under pressure from the banks. At its peak in 1947, the postal savings system had deposits of the equivalent of about $35 billion in today’s dollars. Today there are over 30 million unbanked people who could use such a service provided by a delivery system in 35,000 communities – greater than the number of outlets of McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart combined. When we last suggested this idea, you told us you would look into it. Recently, you dismissed postal savings as not being part of the “core business” of the USPS, after the distinguished Appleseed group, with detailed expertise in the scope of the unbanked, wrote you an unanswered letter on October 14, 2011. (attached)

    There is, in Washington, D.C., a combination of relentless ideological opposition to the USPS’s very existence as a public institution joined by thoughtless upper-income pundits and editorial writers who really do not use the postal service as they clutch their e-mail and text-messaging gadgets. They are both remote from the tens of millions of Americans who rely on the postal service in tangible and intangible ways that these deprecators could rarely understand or imagine. There are reporters, however, who have written compelling features from the field on what would happen were a rural post office closed to the people (many of them elderly) living there.

    Which constituency are you obliging here?

    If you truly wanted to be responsive to postal customers, there is a simple action that you could have taken: publicly requesting Congressional authority to establish a Post Office Consumer Action Group (POCAG). POCAG would be a non-profit group dedicated to representing the interests of postal consumers. Several million people would join, and all that is required would be a simple law directing the Postal Service to send residential postal patrons a letter periodically (perhaps twice per year), which would give them the opportunity to pay a small amount of dues to join and support POCAG. This would not only encourage greater organization and consumer participation in the services the postal service provides, but also in the crucial decisions the Postal Service makes regarding how to best provide those services.

    Private corporations pay huge sums for focus groups that help them make business decisions and be responsive to consumer sentiment. A self supporting, non-profit POCAG could, among other things, function as a ready-made focus group that the USPS could help assemble at a minimal cost. After all, the Postal Service has already delivered postcards to all residences nationwide carrying postal promotional messages from cartoon characters – the periodical POCAG letters would certainly be no more burdensome. If you and your immediate predecessor were concerned about postal customers, POCAG is an idea that would have been implemented by now. Instead, it is telling that this important reform remains missing in any discussion of postal consumers.

    You are not setting a personal example as you push for unjustifiable cuts. In 2011, despite Congressionally manufactured deficits for the USPS and real deprivations, the value of your compensation package was nearly $400,000. This is nearly double what Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made in the same year. Granted you were not spending $675 million in 2011 just to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. And granted you are running the only major institution – whether governmental or corporate – that receives no money from the Federal government (e.g. tax revenue or corporate welfare) and is a major net creditor of Uncle Sam (a status you should tout more). But, together with other Postal Service executives with annual base pay of over $200,000, how can you damage your moral authority to govern by asking so many people inside and outside the USPS to bear the burden of contraction but not yourselves?

    Whether it is in asking consumers to pay more for poorer services, or in slashing postal employee’s jobs and hours, in closing postal facilities and denying the surrounding communities that relied on them, in cutting off citizens throughout the United States who do not have access to the internet from the outside world by closing post offices, or simply proposing cutting services across the board, a leader leads by example, not by exempting himself and his executives from any sacrifices.

    Take a couple hours some weekend and stroll slowly through the National Postal Museum only a few blocks from your office. Absorb how previous leaders of the Post Office overcame enormous barriers and hurdles to build and expand the services in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century – even delivering farmers’ eggs. The internet challenge, if the USPS were to participate and provide services, is modest compared to the mountains that the earlier postal service had to climb.

    Returning from your visit to the Museum, you may wish to ponder our recommendation that you resign and request that President Obama, who needs to visit this Museum as well, nominate someone who can lead, inspire, and expand the Postal Services of this nation in the 21st Century, while achieving efficiencies that advance rather than retard the mission of the USPS. A leader with vision who can revitalize a mismanaged operation and use the feedback suggestions from your own employees solicited through the Voice of the Employee (VOE) survey.

    In a phrase, you are not up to the job!”

    Something tells me maybe your not the guy for this service P.R.D.

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