Taxpayers are expected to pay $8.5 million this year for employees at the the United States Postal Service to show up for work, sit in a break room, and do nothing, according to a recent audit. These workers show up to work, knowing that equipment is broke or that (based on past estimates) mail volume will be low, and then sit around receiving taxpayer money for doing nothing. This 'standby' time, which will amount to 341332 hours a year, also allows these employees to put in enough hours to be full-time employees and fully receive benefits and retirement packages that are quite expensive as well.
Assuming that an average work week is 40 hours and that these employees receive two weeks vacation, that works out to 2000 hours of work each year per employee, if the post office stopped its practice of 'standby time' this would allow the post office to lay off 170 workers. The average postal worker makes $50K/year, so the elimination of this practice would save the postal service 8500K/year, or $8.5 million.
These savings do not include benefits and retirement packages for these employees, which I assume would multiply the savings by several times- postal employees make half their salary on retirement and receive generous benefits before and during employment, so the savings from ending the practice of 'standby time' would be in the tens of millions each year and continue forward into the future.
That's not to say that cutting 'standby time' for postal employees is going to make the United Stats Post Office self-sufficient- the post office has been hemorrhaging red ink for years and is projected to lose as much as $7 billion dollars this year alone. But this is to say that taxpayers should not be paying for employees to stand around.
And keep in mind that if the post office is paying hundreds of workers to 'sit around', it likely has thousands of workers who are doing 'make-work' and who are working at less than full capacity. Oh, I don't mean that postal employees are lazy, I just mean that the structure and culture of their business does not fully maximize the effort and abilities of every worker and likely means that this independent agency is running way below peak efficiency and could save taxpayers billions of dollars a year by becoming a hard working institution of public service.
Postal employees should work and work hard and be paid for their time working- they should not be paid to sit around and do nothing. Contact your Congressman and demand that the Post Office stop its 'paid standby time' practice.
h/p Washington Post
UPDATE: I see from a story today that the US Postal Service is on the edge of default due to its own actions and management. Imagine if the United States government ran critical aspects of our economy, such as healthcare, in the same fashion that they ran investment banks like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, trains like Amtrack, or the mail like in the Postal Service:
The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances.
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