To the Editor:
In 2006, in an attempt to strangle the Postal Service financially, Congress mandated the Service to prefund each employee’s health and retirement benefits, not only through their career, but through retirement. This is costing the Service an extra $5 billion a year.
If you owned a business and had to prepay 40-plus years of health insurance premiums, plus their pension, as soon as you hired someone, would you add an employee or ask your current employees to work some overtime? For the most part the Postal Service has found it less expensive to pay overtime.
Now we come to the current situation. A Trump-appointed Postal Board of Governors, headed by someone who raised almost $500 million for the GOP, picked another major donor to the GOP to be CEO of the Postal Service. He ordered a near-end to overtime, and told managers, if you cannot get the mail out on time, leave it behind. This isn’t just mail-in ballots. It is your letters, medications, checks, packages, and everything else people and businesses depend upon the Service to deliver.
If you want the Postal Service to remain a reliable service tell Congress to protect it today.
Walter Hamilton
Portsmouth, N.H.
Walter:
It is of course nothing less than despicable for Republicans to attempt to destroy an institution—created by the Founding Fathers, whom they claim to venerate—the purpose of which was to bring the nation together. But, since they’re post-Eisenhower Republicans, that’s to be expected.
It’s the Democrats’ acquiescence to this vandalism, dating right back to the passage of the bill in 2006, that drives us to a state of near-apoplexy.
The Editor