Charles Mapa, President
The following is a portion of the Testimony from Charles Mapa, President of the National League of Postmasters Before the Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service & the District of Columbia Of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the United States House of Representatives May 8,2008
Chairman Davis, Ranking Member Marchant, members of the subcommittee, good afternoon. My name is Charles W. Mapa and I am President of the National League of Postmasters. I would like to thank the subcommittee for inviting us to testify during your 2008 oversight hearings on the Postal Service. We are pleased to appear before you today. Founded in 1887, the National League of Postmasters is a management association representing the interests of tens of thousands of Postmasters across the United States. Although we represent Postmasters from all across the country—from the very smallest to the very largest post offices—rural postmasters are a sizable portion of our membership, and we believe that we can speak for rural America with a certain amount of experience and expertise. The League speaks for thousands of retired Postmasters as well. This morning, Mr. Chairman, I will address three topics: the overall state of the Postal Service; the overall state of Postmasters today; and the importance of post offices and the Postal Service to rural America, including the critical obligation to provide universal service. This last point is a particularly salient point in light of the study of the Universal Service Mandate that is being conducted by the Postal Regulatory Commission.
I. State of the Postal Service
The Postal Service has been working for some years now to increase its efficiencies and trim costs. The League is fully supportive of those efforts. Postmaster General Jack Potter should be commended for recognizing—years ago—that if the Postal Service is to remain a strong and healthy national institution, it must embrace new technology and more efficient ways of doing business. We need to ferret out innovative ideas that can help us improve service and lower costs. PMG Potter has worked wonders reducing the debt of the Postal Service and transforming it into a much more efficient entity than it was a mere decade ago. We applaud those efforts and stand ready, willing and able to help in any way we can.
Intelligent Mail Barcode
The success of the IMB is critical to the Postal Service, Postmasters, and the nation’s postal patrons, and I hope that its implementation goes well. I know that there have been serious rumblings from mailers about the costs and speed of the IMB implementation, and we trust the Postal Service and the Postal Regulatory Commission will provide sufficient incentives for mailers to move to the new system. Unless and until there is universal acceptance and adoption of the IMB, the new system will not reach the potential that we and the Postal Service desire for it. It is a critical matter, and thus so are the incentives.
We see that the Postal Service has already started to encourage the changeover to the IMB with the recent Bank of America NSA, and that it plans to create further incentives for the use of the IMB next year when it changes rates. We have heard some rumbling of individual challenges to such notions on the basis that they are not work-sharing discounts. We dismiss such grumbling as simply ill-conceived protestations against change. The creation of economic incentives for the rapid use and conversion to the IMB is a perfect example of the Postal Service new rate-setting flexibility in action and exactly the type of activity that the PAEA contemplates.
II. State of Postmasters
In the past we have come before this Committee to express our concern about the workload that is being thrust upon Postmasters, and how 60- and 70- hour work weeks are becoming all too common. Unless I have missed something, a five-day work week is still the law of the land and the norm for all businesses. I know of no other industry where top management is trying to turn back the clock on the five-day work week, and we wish the Postal Service would stop trying to do so. In a somewhat related vein, one of the major issues in the postal area today is that of contracting out. While this is not an issue upon which the League has taken an official position, we do have certain strong philosophical concerns about the matter. Putting aside the question of possible union busting—which is not a good thing to do—there is a very real public policy question of whether we want to end up creating another class of postal-related personnel that receive little training, low pay, no medical insurance, and no benefits. What will that do to our society? How many more uninsured people would that throw into the mix? What will this do to the postal system? Also, what will this do to the image or the reality of the postal letter carriers? While it is hard enough as it is in our modern system to measure up to that famous motto “Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from their appointed rounds,” a massive shift to contracting out would make that simply impossible. As the League has said before and as we reiterate now, the issue of contracting out is a very important issue that must be worked out between the Postal Service and the unions. Until and unless the unions and the Postal Service agree on some reasonable solution to this issue, the problem is not going to go away. It has already brought down morale in the field to a noticeable degree, and it will potentially bring it down even farther. Both the Postal Service and the unions need to work together to come to some common understanding on this issue, for the long term and for the good of everyone.
Respectfully,
Charley Mapa
President, National League of Postmasters
