WASHINGTON, D.C. Sept. 15 (DPI) – There’s little official about it, but it appears Amazon’s huge 7-day-a-week delivery deal with the US Postal Service has saved the USPS from making drastic service cuts, Washington DC area letter carriers tell DPI.
Just last year Congress, which oversees USPS but allocates no taxpayer funds to it, was contemplating closing thousands of rural post offices, and even reducing the number of delivery days. But the 2013 Amazon deal, which now requires the USPS to deliver packages on Sundays, has stopped talk of such cuts.
Amazon will ship an estimated 309 million packages with the USPS in 2015 – an increase of nearly 50% in two years:
http://www.scdigest.com/experts/Wulfraat_14-11-11A.php?cid=8692
Moreover, along with the Amazon delivery deal, the USPS has succeeded in reducing the cost of its workforce by relying more on lower-paid City Carrier Assistants, who in effect are temporary workers since they can be furloughed when volume declines. The Postal Service has nearly 500,000 employees, but a growing number – as many as one-third – are so-called CCAs.
CCAs are somewhat controversial, and thus don’t get much attention from the mainstream media. As one blogger and former letter described CCAs:
City Carrier Assistants are a new classification of employee within the postal ranks; they are the low-wage, non-career, complement workforce—the “underclass” of the post office. The CCA does 30 percent more work and receives 50 percent less pay than their full-time regular counterparts. They are the mule of the postal service. (Both classification of employee have the exact same job requirements and duties.)
Not that the Postal Service is out of the financial woods: Its pension and retiree health care obligations are astronomical – and the latter remains hugely underfunded.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-may-help-bail-out-u-s-postal-service-with-shipping-deal/
http://www.savethepostoffice.com/we-deliver-amazon-postal-services-new-priority
http://www.alternet.org/labor/real-cost-amazon-sunday