The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has 630,000 employees and 34,000 locations. It bills itself as one of America’s largest employers, as if it were Walmart or Amazon. Frankly, it has tens of thousands of workers it does not need and should not have. The USPS is a product of late 20th-century mail and package delivery that currently loses money.
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In the most recently reported quarter, USPS revenue was $19.8 billion. Its net loss was $539 million. The room for improvement should come with a decision to have fewer employees and many fewer offices. It is hard to imagine why the number of locations is so large, particularly because so many are in very small towns, with populations sometimes only in the thousands.
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This is the year of the layoff, both in the United states and in other developed countries. A coming recession (if it is not already here) has caused even the largest public corporations to cut staff. And many of these have billions of dollars on their balance sheets and could go through several years at current staffing levels.
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However, these companies have decided to pursue margins at the cost of people. That is an unfortunate reality. The USPS needs to follow the lead of corporate America and cut staff before it piles up more losses.
USPS Has No Reason to Have 630,000 Employees
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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.
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