The Fight To Save The U.S. Postal Service

RACHEL MARTIN, host: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Guy Raz is away. I'm Rachel Martin.

We'd like to start today by introducing you to Tom Gamble.

TOM GAMBLE: I'm a mail carrier with the U.S. Postal Service on my 24th year. My route is in Middletown, Ohio. It's just a little over 26 miles, but it takes about four and a half hours to sort it and about four hours to deliver it. The biggest reward, I think, is probably the relationships you develop with your customers.

Some of the older people and the retired people definitely on a first-name basis. In very isolated areas, sometimes in the course of a week, the mail carrier might be the only person customers will see. There's countless stories of carriers that have been looking out for some of their older customers, some of the ones they know are frail and saved the lives of customers because their mail started to build up in the mailbox.

We kind of keep an eye on the neighborhoods. We know who the kids are, where they should be, where they shouldn't be. Unfortunately, as things have progressed here with the Postal Service, there's more and more pressure to do things in less and less time, so we have a little less time to communicate with our customers.

MARTIN: That's today's cover story, checks in the mail: fixing the U.S. Postal System.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: More than half a million people work for the U.S. Postal Service. It's the seventh largest employer in the world. And like a lot of businesses, this one is being transformed by the Internet. Just in the last four years, for instance, mail volume is down 20 percent. So the Postal Service is struggling to reinvent itself, but change isn't easy. Thousands of post offices may have to be shut down.

The Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, went to Congress recently to ask for help. This week, postal workers rallied against possible closures.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST RALLY)

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: We don't want a bailout. We want to get the mail out.

MARTIN: Donahoe's plan, which President Obama has endorsed, could mean layoffs, closures and an end to Saturday delivery. Fifty years ago, the Postal Service had a very different kind of problem.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing) They got more mail than ever before.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing) It's wrapped in bags, stacked on shelves.

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing) There's hardly room for anything. There's been a mail explosion.

MARTIN: Back in the 1960s, the Postal Service was pushing a new idea, zip codes as a way to organize delivery of all that mail. Today, the new ideas to save the post office don't really fit in a jingle.

In Congress, Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, wants the service to be under tighter controls. Issa would create a control board that could re-negotiate union contracts. And he blames the leaders of the Postal Service for its problem.

They have gone the wrong way. They have gone from having no debt to having 15 billion in debt, which was their debt limit, and 5.5 billion that they can't pay that's due in a few days. That tells us, as a businessman, that no matter what they say, they have more than a small cash flow problem.

Senator Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, agrees there is a problem. But the solution he is proposing is very different.

Senator TOM CARPER: Part of what we need to do is to enable the Postal Service to take the steps that are appropriate is they right-size their enterprise for the 21st century, much like the auto industry did in this country a couple of years ago.

MARTIN: You talk about how the Postal Service actually does something a little different and sets aside payments for health care benefits for retirees. How has that made things complicated for the Postal Service?

CARPER: Well, the Postal Service's complication doesn't have to set aside money for the health care benefits for their future retirees, almost no state or local government does that. Very few (unintelligible) private companies do that. Under the 2006 legislation, the Postal Service has to set aside each year a lot of money, $5 to $6 billion to have at the ready when their folks retire and need health care benefits.

And we've said for sometime that there is a possibility that Postal Service has overpaid money into two pension plans. And to the extent that that actually turns out to be the case, the money could be drawn down from one of the overpayments - one of the overpayments repaid and that money used over a period of five or six years to prepay health, the retiree benefits for pensioners.

MARTIN: And should the post service be out to make a profit? I mean, that's what corporations do. That's what happens in the private industry.

CARPER: What would be, I think, desirable is for the Postal Service, over time, to be able to do at least to break-even the operation, which would mean in some years, with an up economy, more business. But unfortunately, if we put the Postal Service on auto-pilot, (unintelligible) the Postal Services online to run up deficits for about another $225 billion over the next ten years. Again, their line of credit is only $15 billion, so they cannot continue to do business as usual.

MARTIN: That's Democratic Senator Tom Carper. He joined us from New Castle, Delaware. Senator, thanks so much for taking the time.

CARPER: Great to be with you today.

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