(Just ask the cities which have steadily gutted their public transit systems in favor of Uber, only to face serious questions about the sustainability of the ride-share business model.) Working for a profit means working only when it makes a profit. postal worker.īut any private company can shut down, change its services, or discover that its business model isn't as strong as everybody thought. They can deliver a message or parcel faster and seemingly with better customer service than a U.S. In an age of Federal Express, Amazon Prime, drone delivery and e-mail, private services seem to have effectively made old-fashioned mail obsolete. This is the core of the financial problem the USPS faces, and it is why this agency is so critical. The postal service exists to ensure all Americans have access to a cheap, reliable form of communication. Instead they expect government will create the baseline of services necessary for modern life. In a free-market economy like the United States, citizens don't always expect the government to create ambitious or far-reaching services. One of the core functions of government is to set the minimum standards for society. Why We Keep The Post Officeĭespite some snarky hot-takes, keeping the postal service has nothing to do with nostalgia. Unlike a private company, the USPS effectively operates as a government agency and can't simply cut unprofitable routes or charge triple for remote locations. The problem? The postal service's expenses are not elastic. However, the USPS that same year spent more than $74 billion in operating expenses, resulting in a net loss of $3.9 billion.

The USPS took in more than $70 billion in revenue in 2018. It's not that the postal service has a revenue problem - far from it. It is very common for private shipping companies to rely on the postal service to transport packages over long distances, then take over for last-mile distribution services. This includes an enormous amount of mail we ordinarily think of as delivered by private companies such as UPS (No other employer comes even close to Walmart's 2.2 million employees.)Īccording to the postal service's own data, the USPS pays out $1.9 billion in salaries and benefits every two weeks to its staff, who, in turn, handle a whopping 47% of the world's mail. It its the third largest employer, government or private, in the country, behind the armed forces and Walmart It has the second most civilian employees with 634,447 career and non-career employees. The United State Postal Service USPS runs one of the largest organizations in the country. How Many People Does The Post Office Employ?

Article One, Section Eight charges Congress with the power 'to establish Post Offices and Post Roads,' and since 1775 and the Second Continental Congress, it has. The founders believed that this was so important that postal service is one of the few government agencies specifically called for in the Constitution.

Postman salary