US Postal Service Average Pay $60,000

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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US Postal Service Average Pay $60,000

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Based on several studies, the typical U.S. Postal Service (USPS) employee makes approximately $60,000. Most of the service’s 600,000 career employees also get extremely generous benefits upon retirement. Prefunded retirement costs have cost the USPS billions of dollars. New legislation should take away this obligation. Postal worker pay should be contrasted with the real median personal income in the United States of just below $38,000, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The USPS pay rates come from PayScale, Comparably and Post Office Placement. That puts USPS worker compensation at 57% higher than the real median personal income of the working population. Is it any wonder the USPS struggles to make money?

The USPS loss grew by $2 billion in the fiscal year just ended. It blamed higher inflation. Usually, companies handle inflation-based losses with cost cuts, including layoffs. To be firmly in the black, the USPS would need to trim $1 billion in expenses. Revenue growth is not a solution. The fiscal year’s revenue grew only 1.9% to $78.5 billion. Shipping and package revenue dropped and so did international business. Revenue from marketing mail (which includes so-called junk mail) rose. So did revenue from First-Class Mail.

Mail volume declined 1.2% for the year, another sign the USPS needs to cut costs. The need for those 600,000 full-time workers shrinks if unit volume continues to fall.
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There is a fiction that the USPS needs to support over 32,000 locations, many of which are in small towns. It gives no reasonable explanation for this. A spirited defense, with a P&L for each location, would help.
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The USPS also continues to deliver mail six times a week. This is unnecessary, particularly with the rise of email and the presence of UPS and FedEx.
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The USPS is a disservice to America as long as it overpays workers, has too many offices and delivers mail too often.

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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.

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