U.S. Postal Service To Lose 50,000 People

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Sep 13, 12:22PM EDT · Published Aug 1, 6:43AM EDT

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U.S. Postal Service To Lose 50,000 People — © jetcityimage / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Management of the U.S. Postal Services, bloated with too many employees to make money, plans to cut or lose 50,000 workers in the next few years. It is about time. Unfortunately, USPS also plans to hire additional workers.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plans were outlined by Route Fifty: “Right now, to get to break even, I think we may need to get 50,000 people out of the organization. But that’s OK, because over the next two years, 200,000 people [will] leave the organization for retirement.”

The USPS has more than 500,000 full-time workers and another 100,000 who are non-career workers.

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DeJoy is the first postmaster general to address the problem in decades.

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The Post Office has refused to deal with the fact that it is much too large for today’s needs. Much of its benefit to the American population has been replaced by email, UPS, and FedEx. It continues to have more than 30,000 Post Office locations. And, it continues to deliver mail six days a week in almost the entire country.

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As electronic mail use continues to rise and UPS and FedEx are joined by Amazon.com in the delivery business, the Postal Service should shrink at an even faster rate than planned.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.