Postal service

The biggest barrier is that the U.S. Postal service is mentioned in the U.S. constitution and to do away with it as a government agency would leave a strange gap in the constitution... an authorization for a government service that is not actually run by the government. See Article I, section 8, clause 7 - in the lists of things that Congress was initially empowered to do: "To establish Post Offices and post Roads"
 
Royal Mail is now owned by an unknown Czech.
But maybe Daniel Kretinsky knows more about software than Paula Vennells ever did?

Brilliant, Royal Mail has now joined with water, gas, electricity, train companies and the M6 Toll Motorway, as all foreign owned.
The only way is down with this Labour government. Who are just continuing the Tory incompetence but far worse than we ever imagined.
You'd have thought they'd have used their 14 years in opposition to come up with brilliant ideas but no, not a chance. Only fag packet ideas.

Roll on the Reform Party, sooner the better.
 
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The problem with privatization is the same as with outsourcing. You are eating your seed corn for short term gain.

Privatization for resources which are required for the function of government seem to me to be something that should never be outsourced -eg, armed forces (especially pay), postal services and central banks. Others which are just money making enterprises I have no problems with - they are just another example of outsourcing. The UK post office was established as the Royal Mail in the time of Henry VIII and has several times bee outsourced to private companies BUT the crown has always retained the primacy of ownership and can, and has, been taken back into central control.

And the trouble with outsourcing is that the presumption is that someone else will do it cheaper (forget doing it better!). This is only at best short term gain and I cannot think of a single example which has ever worked in the long run.
 
Totally agree @DickyP

It's always difficult to get the balance. Labour nationalised the railways and the mines after the war. Claiming that the country would benefit by using the profits to improve the lives of everyone.

Problem was that during the war the government did totally control them and capital spending was around zero due to the war effort. After the war they had been starved of so much investment that they needed massive injections of cash, which simply wasn't available. Not only that, nationalised industries become departments vying for cash against all of the others. Of course, there is also little incentive for staff to improve, or initiate change. Which is why throwing more and more at the NHS has been seen again and again, to have no benefit whatsoever. Same with the police. It always money that is the problem but when they have it nothing changes.

After the war ministers at the time had hundreds of new steam engines built, that ended up scrapped, maybe within ten years. All at a time when everyone else was switching to oil or electricity. There are those who claim that Aberfan was caused by the refusal by the government to pay for a new tip in the preceding months due to budget restrictions.

Having said that, before the Tories privatised the railways in the 1990s, we had arguably the best in Europe. They removed the people who had any knowledge and replaced them with many who didn't. It was done to 'make them competitive'. As two or three companies couldn't run on the same lines I fail to understand the logic. Their competition was road transport and 'planes, not railways. A disaster, just as Ed Moribund's GB Energy will obviously prove to be. Maths and business are clearly a total mystery to him in his socialist Disney Land World .
 
Cotswold said:
Totally agree @DickyP

It's always difficult to get the balance. Labour nationalised the railways and the mines after the war. Claiming that the country would benefit by using the profits to improve the lives of everyone.

Problem was that during the war the government did totally control them and capital spending was around zero due to the war effort. After the war they had been starved of so much investment that they needed massive injections of cash, which simply wasn't available. Not only that, nationalised industries become departments vying for cash against all of the others. Of course, there is also little incentive for staff to improve, or initiate change. Which is why throwing more and more at the NHS has been seen again and again, to have no benefit whatsoever. Same with the police. It always money that is the problem but when they have it nothing changes.

After the war ministers at the time had hundreds of new steam engines built, that ended up scrapped, maybe within ten years. All at a time when everyone else was switching to oil or electricity. There are those who claim that Aberfan was caused by the refusal by the government to pay for a new tip in the preceding months due to budget restrictions.

Having said that, before the Tories privatised the railways in the 1990s, we had arguably the best in Europe. They removed the people who had any knowledge and replaced them with many who didn't. It was done to 'make them competitive'. As two or three companies couldn't run on the same lines I fail to understand the logic. Their competition was road transport and 'planes, not railways. A disaster, just as Ed Moribund's GB Energy will obviously prove to be. Maths and business are clearly a total mystery to him in his socialist Disney Land World .
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Very rose tinted view of the Railways pre-privatisation - to everyday users they appeared to be run by the unions for the benefit of the unions. Service was abysmal, customer care something you looked up in a dictionary, punctuality non-existent and when closures happened there was no such thing as a replacement bus services. I remember standing on Swindon station on my way to my 25th anniversary dinner for my Sandhurst intake when they announced the train was cancelled and that was it! No compensation or refunds! At least for the similar cancellations in the interim we have been given bus services and help to get to other stations.

It was like the rail cuts - we all know about Beeching but far more lines were closed under the government of Harold Wilson than the Beeching cuts.
 
The Post Office does need a major overhaul. Replacement would probably require an amendment to the Constitution, which I don't see anytime soon.
 
AngelSpeaks said:
The Post Office does need a major overhaul. Replacement would probably require an amendment to the Constitution, which I don't see anytime soon.
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It must be where the term "it takes an act of congress" comes from.

The post office is another example of a subsidized unionized government institution that rarely functions as designed. Much like the department of education.
 
The part of the article that I particularly felt "challenged" by (because I myself had bought into the line somewhat), was this idea that people saying the USPS is 'losing money' makes no sense to say, because it is a government agency like any other one and is not meant to make money in the first place - it's meant to cost money, and that's OK.

I think that the postal service in the US is kind of like gas and taxes. We complain, but we have it better than most of the rest of the world. Go to Mexico and try to fill up your tank, or go to Sweden and look at your take home pay. At the end of the day, the USPS will usually get a letter from NY to the most rural imaginable place in CA for you for a few pennies - they are fairly good. Could they be better? I'm sure they could like every agency. But do we need to stop this soundbite of "they're losing money!" ?? Yes, we do.

And the fact that they're even remotely CLOSE to being self-funded is quite an achievement - actually something probably few agencies can say
 
Isaac said:
the USPS will usually get a letter from NY to the most rural imaginable place in CA for you for a few pennies - they are fairly good.
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While working for the school district I was often confronted by administrators who had time sensitive documents that needed to be either overnighted or next day deliveries with verification. They would insist (because of cost) I use USPS and get tracking and signatures. The minute they left my office I packaged the item in a FedEx container and overnighted it. The last thing I needed was a pissed off admin whining about some important documents lost in the mail. BTW, I also charged their department and they never noticed.
 
Isaac said:
At the end of the day, the USPS will usually get a letter from NY to the most rural imaginable place in CA for you for a few pennies - they are fairly good.
Click to expand...
I have long been an admirer of the US Postal Service ever since I first heard the song 'Return to Sender' by Elvis Presley. Look at the facts - he wants to send a letter to his girlfriend, so he gives it to a postman, who puts it in his sack, early next morning, the letter is returned to him. That means it was delivered (to her) the same day of posting, she got it, posted it back and it was delivered to Elvis less than 24hrs after his posting.
Then he decided to send it 'special D', he tried the postbox method (not the postman) and yet again it was returned to Elvis early next morning.
She had written on it ' no such number, no such zone' so, that means Elvis had the wrong address but not any fault of the excellent postal service.
Absolutely amazing quick service. I wish our Royal Mail was that good.
Col
 
You should be able to trust your government to not abuse employees. Therefore, you don't need unions to interfere and make everyone "equal". Unions bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. They do not encourage excellence. That is why our bureaucracy is so inefficient. I am very anti-union. I have worked in many companies where unions ran the show and no one benefited except the union officials. Unions had a purpose a century ago. They have outlived it. Our civil service should never be unionized. I'm not sure how you can get rid of a union once it has got hold of people but Right to Work laws should make them wither away naturally.

If the Post Office was strictly a cost center, mailing at least a first class letter would be free. Snail mail is no longer as critical as it once was but it is still necessary. The Post Office should be very close to revenue neutral. There is no need for it to make money and technically it shouldn't but it should be able to cover its operating costs plus a little for gradual improvements.

It takes a certain amount of people to actually deliver the mail. As the number of addresses increases each year, this staff grows. Some of it is dependent on volume because the delivery trucks can only carry so much mail at one time so unless you have staging areas where the smaller delivery trucks can be refilled, any truck would have to go back to the mother ship to fill up again so I'm pretty sure the driver drives their route and is then done for the day. Efficiencies have been obtained in the sorting of mail and that takes fewer people per piece than it did when all sorting was manual. All companies that produce bulk mail like your CC companies and electric and gas and phone, etc always deliver their mail to their post office completely sorted. So, the actual sorting is mostly private mail.
 
AccessBlaster said:
While working for the school district I was often confronted by administrators who had time sensitive documents that needed to be either overnighted or next day deliveries with verification. They would insist (because of cost) I use USPS and get tracking and signatures. The minute they left my office I packaged the item in a FedEx container and overnighted it. The last thing I needed was a pissed off admin whining about some important documents lost in the mail. BTW, I also charged their department and they never noticed.
Click to expand...

Well, I do agree on FedEx ... I consider them the gold standard and particularly in comparison to UPS, which is the worst of the worst and loses every package I give them
 
When 80% of the budget goes to payroll and past retirement commitments efficiency goes out the window.
 
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