Dakota Beacon

Cybercast News Service writer Fred Lucas reports that:

The U.S. Postal Service’s business model is not sustainable, and union-backed generous employee benefits along with collective bargaining contracts are a big part of the problem…

The biggest reason?

As mail volume has plummeted by 17 percent – or by 36 billion pieces – in the past three years, collective bargaining contracts have forced the Postal Service to keep full-time employees with full health and retirement benefits and preclude outsourcing of services.

With business way down, what does a responsible business operator do? The question is irrelevant in the present case. The federal government bureaucracy abhors responsible thinkers, and the union bosses who are driving the bureaucracies out of business don't give a rat's behind about anything except filling union bosses' pockets with "what's coming to them."

Some specifics:

The postal service lost $12 billion from 2007 through 2009 despite cutting 84,000 employees and raising rates. It is reaching a $15 billion borrowing limit with the U.S. Treasury Department and continues to have unfunded pension and retiree health obligations of about $90 billion, [a Government Accountability Office] report said.

The unions still won't budge.

The story doesn't just apply when the U.S. government is the employer. How about GM, Chrysler, and the UAW? How about public education and the teachers' unions? In the case of GM, Chrysler, and public education, we have inflexible, corrupt, dictatorial unions refusing to take rational positions. In the face of disintegrated profits, the UAW keeps screaming, "Screw the company. We want 'what's coming to us'." In the case of the teachers' unions, the largest of which are the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, in reaction to non-improving academic performance the unions scream, "Screw the kids and the taxpayers. To hell with teacher performance accountability. Just gives us our 'just due'."

GM and Chrysler cannot survive under the profit-killing UAW-imposed business model. Public schools cannot improve kids' academic performance under teachers' unions' inflexible policies and compensation demands as well as rampant school district corruption, incompetence, and inefficiency. As for government unions, the USPS should go belly up. Then the entire state of California, now insolvent under the weight of public sector union pension demands, should dissolve and be taken over by responsible people who keep the state's destroyers out of government. Other states should follow suit.

Will the going-out-of-business scenario materialize? Needs to happen, but it won't. You know, the whole "too big to fail" bunk.

Unions need to go the way of the dinosaur. Unions already behave like some sort of prehistoric creature that went extinct because, let's see, it either couldn't compete or so abused the natural resources required for its survival that the natural resources ran out. Survival of the fittest, I say.

© 2010 Chuck Rogér