Shri Green Testimony on Five Day Delivery- 05.19.10

Click here to view the PDF version of this testimony.

Good morning, Chairman Goldway and distinguished members of the
Commission.

My name is Shri Green and I serve as the Cotton Belt Area Vice President
for the National Association of Postal Supervisors. I live and work here in the
Memphis area for the U.S. Postal Service and serve as a Network Operations
Analyst, helping to route mail via surface and air transportation. My
responsibilities as a NAPS Area Vice President for NAPS involve leading and
representing the thousands of postal supervisors who live and work in
Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma. I appear before you today in my capacity
as a NAPS official. The views I express are my personal views and those of the
National Association of Postal Supervisors, not the U.S. Postal Service.

Thank you for holding this public hearing in Memphis to examine from a
field-level perspective the service implications of reducing mail delivery from six
days a week to five. I appreciate your diligence in holding hearings like this one
as a part of a thorough review of the Postal Service’s plan. Here in the Memphis
area, the Postal Service accomplishes nearly 350,000 daily deliveries by city and
rural letter carriers, through 13 stations and branches and eight finance units.

I bring a very skeptical view to the notion of reducing mail delivery from six
days a week to five. My skepticism revolves around several concerns. Foremost
among them is the impact that a reduction in delivery will have on the quality of
the Postal Service brand and its reputation for high-quality service. By reducing
the number of days of delivery, we will diminish the value of mail itself. There will
undoubtedly be an erosion of confidence in the Postal Service’s ability to provide
the services the public relies on. Mailers ultimately will mail less, only
compounding the problem. This, I fear, will have a cyclical and downward impact
upon overall mail volume trends and harm the financial stability of the Postal
Service.

While I appreciate the need for the Postal Service to find cost savings, I
also know that the Postal Service’s financial shortfalls in recent years have been
principally due to the unrealistic schedule of down payments the Congress has
required the Postal Service to make for future postal retiree health benefits.
Without these payments, the Postal Service would be in a much more stable
financial condition, not requiring a move as drastic as five-day delivery. The
Congress must live up to its obligation to realign the Postal Service’s retiree
health benefit payment schedule to realistic levels – and credit to the Postal
Service its pension overpayment for pre-1971-hired employees. Until the
Congress takes these actions, I believe it is premature and unwise for the Postal
Service to initiate five-day delivery. The Postmaster General even acknowledged
in his recent Congressional testimony that if the prefunding and pension issues
were satisfactorily resolved by Congress, the Postal Service would not be
required to move to five-day delivery for at least another five years. Thus, five-
day delivery should be the last resort by the Postal Service, not the first.

I recognize that the elimination of six-day delivery is not a new concept. It
has been proposed many times and was the subject of considerable
congressional review thirty years ago – and continuously rejected. I also
recognize that some public opinion polls suggest that a majority of Americans
today are willing to give up Saturday delivery. But those polls are questionable
because they asked the public to express their preference between a variety of
postal cutbacks, including raising stamp prices and closing post offices, in
contrast to eliminating a day of delivery. Asking a question this way can creates
a biased result.

Even if you accept the polls for what they are, I suggest you look at them
another way – since they tell us that as many as one-third of all Americans still
favor the retention of Saturday delivery. One-third of the American population is
a significant and critical part of the Postal Service’s customer base. Few service
companies would pursue a major change that is not supported by one-third of its customer base.
Our customers depend on the Postal Service to provide services
they use and pay for, and if we don’t, they will find someone else who will. That
will only erode our customer base in the years ahead.
I want to emphasize that I am fully conscious that the Postal Service
needs to live within its means. My work as a network operations analyst for the
Postal Service requires finding the best, most cost-productive configurations of
routes – both on land and in the air – for transporting mail to its delivery
destination. My job continually involves finding ways to generate efficiencies and
cost-savings.

But I am concerned that the savings that five-day delivery will purportedly
yield will ultimately lead not to gains but to losses, not only in financial terms but
in jobs as well. Our local economy, where unemployment is currently at 10.6
percent, cannot afford further job losses and pain. The elimination of a delivery
day is sure to cause the elimination or relocation of numerous letter carrier and
supervisor positions in Memphis. Within the past year, the Postal Service
already reassigned 120 rank-and-file employees to locations outside Memphis.
These changes rippled through the supervisory ranks as well. The elimination of
a delivery day is sure to cause even greater dislocation at a time when we should
be fostering job growth, not cutting back, in Memphis.
I urge the Commission to carefully scrutinize the Postal Service’s five-day
delivery proposal. Ultimately I believe you will find that the savings yielded will
not be as significant as the Postal Service projects, that mail service will
deteriorate, and that our local and national economy will be harmed.

Thank you for listening to my views.