Privitization of the Royal Mail Service…winners and losers
Via the ?Real News: Privitization of the Royal Mail Service Interview of John Weeks,( a professor emeritus of the University of London and author of the forthcoming book The Economics of the 1%: How Mainstream Economics Serves the Rich, Obscures Reality and Distorts Policy).
Brings to mind this process: Grim outlook of US post office buildings:
Currently, at least 12 post offices have been sold or put on the block in Northern California. A public hearing on a contested proposal to sell Berkeley’s main post office is scheduled for later this month.
Along with the move to five-day mail delivery, selling post office buildings is part of the Postal Service plan to save $20 billion over the next three years. More than 600 buildings have been “earmarked for disposal” nationwide, at a savings of $2.1 billion, according to the Postal Service’s 2012 report to Congress.
“Selling larger facilities is a means of getting cash flow and reducing our expenses,” explained James Wigdel, a Postal Service spokesman in San Francisco.In charge of selling the facilities for the Postal Service is CB Richard Ellis Group, one of the world’s largest real estate companies, chaired by San Francisco financier Dick Blum. CBRE, which has worked with the post office since 1997, was awarded the exclusive contract to market Postal Service facilities in 2011. Blum is married to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a relationship some critics of the post office have duly noted.
“Historically, USPS has worked with multiple real estate service providers. The new contract enables USPS to consolidate these activities with one service provider,” CBRE said in a statement at the time.
Kind of an uncomfortable confirmation that basically the USPS is only used to deliver packages and corporate junk mail now. You can close postal offices because there are frequently a bunch of them together and one of them is underutilized.
Where I grew up there are two small towns near one another, and they have three postal counters between them at offices on the same main road. Of course they’re going to close two of them, why wouldn’t you? The inconvenience of driving an extra mile to drop off your whatever doesn’t really justify keeping them open. Meanwhile, all three postal zones have been delivery served by the same post office for over a decade now (only one sorting and depot facility).
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was also further consolidation of the sorting depots. UPS and FedEx will typically have one of them or maybe two in a large metro area, and then they have their retail counters are their (respectively) Mailboxes Etc/UPS Store, and FedEx Kinkos locations. USPS wants to do the same thing.
If you’ve ever been to a USPS “counter” at a convenience store though…I’d rather drive ten miles.
In my town seven delivery routes have consolidated to five, and buildings reduced to one (we had to lobby for instead of on the outskirts, why it chnged in the first place I do not know)….
then again, is this a fire sale to reduce the federal deficit or pump up private profits?
Right after the big crash our junk mail seemed to vanish. For a while, we were getting two or three catalogs and a bunch of letters every day. Suddenly, we’d go weeks before getting another catalog. That was the crash, not the internet. Last year, 2012, we started getting a few more catalogs again, Now, in 2013, we’re getting several a week. It isn’t the pre-crash volume, but it is rising. Could the USPS be getting some good news this year?
Much more to this than most people imagine and that includes the value of the postal network.
Postal losses are basically illusory, created by Congressional accounting as much as electronic diversion. First class mail is still critical to millions, unless you simply want to consign them to banks that will extract fees for the privilege of paying a bill. Shrink, lose or privatize the postal network and you create a de facto oligopoly in the handling of many goods.
Much of what’s going on is an attempt eliminate a reasonably paid unionized workforce while also undermining Federal benefit systems. The private sector has driven labor to a least common denominator status. This is about doing the same to public sector labor.