Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

Another postage increase starting today! I think we just had an increase in the beginning of 2006 from 37 to 39 cents. So this makes an 11% increase in less than a year and a half. It is a mandate that the postal service be self-supporting. Of course it is easy to be self-supporting if when you are losing money you can just increase the price without worrying that the consumer will go some place else. Isn't this the reason why we have laws against monopolies? But with government service there is no law against monopolies. Sure the increase in fuel prices must be devasting to the postal service. But this would apply to UPS and Fed-ex as well. The way I understand it is that the cost of labor is much higher with the postal service than UPS and Fed-ex. It seems to me that the government is the only sector that cannot negotiate effectively with the unions. Why? Because it is our money that they are using to pay the workers not their own money. There is an old saying in Chinese that when you work for the government you have an iron rice bowl. It is perfectly true in America today.

I understand that big business is cold. But if you can be easily replaced then you don't have leverage in the private workplace. With the government, however, once you are in you are in good shape. The average postal worker makes over $62,000 which is much higer than a nurse. The number of first class mail has decreased with the increase in e-mail. Generally when there is less demand, the prices goes down. But that is not the case here. Labor costs continues to go up in the postal service. This is typical of government services. The teachers, police, fireman etc unions have done a lot better in negotiations than the unions in the private sectors. Some prison guards in California are making close to $100,000 per year. This is outrageous.

Now that I have angered all government workers who read this blog, I would like to point out that I would not mind too much if they actually do their jobs well. In the case of postal workers, there were couple that my wife has come across at a post office near my office that she found extremely helpful. So certainly some government workers deserve what they are paid. Unfortunately, with the contracts that our so called public servants have given to the unions, the pay in government service is almost never based on merit. Unless we can find a system where if the government service can lose its monopoly due to poor performance, we will pay higher and higher taxes with worse and worse services.