Solutions sought for Postal Service
<p class="p1">The U.S. Postal Service has long been one of the most vital services provided by the federal government, but it is also long been plagued by fiscal problems.</p><p class="p3">To find workable reforms for the Postal Service, President Trump established a task force to evaluate the agency’s operations.</p><p class="p3">There are many commonsense reforms the task force can consider, including “locality pay” — a suggestion from Citizens Against Government Waste.</p><p class="p3">“A locality pay system addresses differences in geographic location when determining wages. This system creates a wage scale that corresponds to costs of living in different areas of the country,” reads a CAGW blog post.</p><p class="p3">“This system creates a wage scale that corresponds to costs of living in different areas of the country. For instance, someone making $50,000 in Manhattan, Kan., would have to be compensated $130,790 in Manhattan, New York to maintain the same lifestyle.”</p><p class="p3">CAGW says that inability “to offer locality pay presents serious efficiency issues for the USPS,” reads the blog post.</p><p class="p3">“In cities, postal workers are incentivized to take non-postal jobs that pay substantially more, and USPS employees located outside cities are deterred from applying for metropolitan positions, since moving to a more expensive location makes no sense without a corresponding wage increase.”</p><p class="p3">The critics of locality pay for the USPS say, the blog post reads, that “negotiating salaries and benefits for a global organization that services 47 percent of the world’s mail and employs over half a million people would be too onerous.”</p><p class="p3">CAGW’s blog post says that “private companies like UPS, Kroger, and AT&T have all successfully implemented locality pay while negotiating with their unions. …</p><p class="p3">“Instituting a locality pay system for the USPS is not a revolutionary idea. It is a tried and true system that has worked both in the public and private sectors, emphasizing efficiency over bureaucracy and waste.” </p><p class="p3">Considering the massive scale of the operation of the U.S. Postal Service, locality pay sounds like a good idea and certainly deserves serious consideration.</p>