Post offices will become a "storefront for government services" like passport photos and notary signatures. (There’s some very ominous talk about doing "fingerprint" and "biometric capture" in the plan.) There’s an expansion of P.O. Boxes in certain areas and a move to street-style addressing, which would allow for package
delivery. I had been hearing rumors that DeJoy might even endorse postal banking in a bid to save his job, but there’s none of that in here. The APWU statement says they will "continue to advocate" for it.
Finally there are some benefits for workers, although cutting hours and consolidating facilities will obviously hurt some of them. There’s a commitment to reduce turnover by 50 percent, and to convert thousands of employees to career status. And there’s a role for Congress, to pass legislation that integrates employees into Medicare and ends the ridiculous pre-funding requirement that has no precedent anywhere in the public or private sector. Those two changes alone fill over one-third of the funding gap, and even more over the long
term.
This could have been worse, but unless there’s a change of heart on the Board of Governors, we’re probably stuck with some iteration of this plan, and with DeJoy, someone who can’t really be trusted to pull off even the most optimistic version of this report.
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