Uhm…So no one in New Hampshire uses the post office at all? :dubious:
But…but…you said you have a PO Box and receive Netflix in your mailbox? :eek:
Still confused.
What he’s worth. No more, no less.
So he was making 70,000 about twelve years ago when he retired? So, about $93,000 today adjusted for inflation?
(I used the inflation calculator http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi to get the inflation adjusted number.)
I have employees who work for me who are required to have college degrees and do very specialized technical analysis for web design. They are hard to replace, and even in this economy we can’t find enough of them. We pay them significantly less than 93K. Even people decades into their careers here who manage others might not make that much money.
Then you add in the job security which private sector workers can only dream of and the pension.
Yeah. He was overpaid. Dramatically. He carried a sack of paper around.
Cut their pay until too many of them quit and you can find replacements. Then bump it up a bit and you’ve got it right.
The private sector should decide what people are worth, not some government concept of “fairness”. Government employees get lavish benefits and pensions and unparalleled job security. They should be paid less for the same work as the private sector to account for these things, not more.
The subject being discussed in that post is vehicle registration. It’s even in the part of my post that you quoted, two sentences before the sentence you put in bold which is apparently the only part you read.
The thing that the entire state of NH manages to do without is mailed car registrations. Read the post for comprehension. Don’t just try and take one sentence without context to score a point.
So does that apply all the way up to the CEO or just the selfish scumbags who do the actual work?
I’ll surprise you by granting you that at the executive level government employees tend to be underpaid.
Of course this is often made up for by the experience they get on the job, which is a sort of compensation. Like when a district attorney goes private sector his experience usually nets a good salary or when a politician leaves office there’s good money to be made in lobbying.
I don’t know what the people in charge of the post office get paid, but I bet it’s not a lot.
Anybody have figures on that?
Story on Drudge today:
That article also links to a CNBC story on the truth behind the Post Office’s financial woes:
Given that the entire concept of the Post Office is outdated and it’s doomed to either fail and require a bailout or just be cancelled altogether, it’s obvious that pre-funding the retirement benefits is a prudent move.
That way, when the Post Office ceases to exist at some point, or at very least ceases to require a half a million workers, there will be no huge ongoing unpaid liability for all the bloated pensions.
You should offer higher pay then.
My goodness, if you can’t even see that , which is very basic Capitalism 101 stuff, how can you claim to know anything at all about employee compensation?
The problem is finding people with the skills. We don’t generally lose people over money once we find someone good and start salary negotiations. Also our retention is excellent. If people felt they were underpaid they would quit, and that isn’t happening.
ETA: The other problem is we needed to hire a LOT of people lately. We doubled our staff in a short amount of time. It’s difficult to find so many people. Offering higher salaries wouldn’t have mattered. The salaries we pay are in line with the industry and we pay for performance, meaning you get better raises based on the quality of your work.
No, your employees are underpaid. Dramatically. That’s why you’re having such a hard time finding replacements. I make more than 140k for technical work and I’m right at the median for my level of expertise and experience.
Where are you? The valley? San Fran? NYC? Boston Financial District?
I’m talking about pay for entry level hires. You pay entry level people 140K?
If you think that everyone who has a college degree and a specialized skill set is making $140K you are dreaming, especially in this economy. A lot of college grads can’t buy a job right now. It’s nice that you’re doing well, but don’t think that’s normal.
This thread isn’t going the way you thought it would, is it?
“Hey, we treat our employees like crap and make them feel they’re grateful to even have a job, we pay them 40K or more less than the industry average. WHY CAN’T WE FIND GOOD HELP!?”
San Fran Bay Area, not entry level. 20 years experience. As I said, for my skills, my experience and my industry, and in this area, $140k is quite normal.
In the message I was responding to, you didn’t say that you were talking about entry level employees. But note: **LavenderBlue’**s father wasn’t an entry level employee either. He had 35 years experience.
Say it with me, smart guy, it’s called “on the job training”.
If you can’t invest in smart young people, why would they bother working for you? Are you an inspiring leader?
No, you’re a partisan…well, I won’t say the word, but we’re all thinking it.
If you really think my dad just carried around a sack of paper you have have no idea what a mailperson actually does.
Ugh. This is exactly why I hate conservatives. You have no problem with a CEO making millions even if he fucks up but you whine the mail carrier is completely overpaid.
:rolleyes:
Just because you apparently underpay your workers and do everything you can to take advantage of a horrible job market does not mean every other sector should do the same. The private sector is filled with many useless, greedy, shitty fucking assholes who do nothing but try to pay workers as little money as possible and ask them be grateful for chance at being fucked. We should be watching the private sector like hawks, not emulating their greed.
FYI, your argument that public sector employees should be paid less to compensate for increased benefits ignores the fact that many public sector employees are already underpaid as it is. My husband happens to have a chemical engineering degree from a prestigious university and all sorts of skills. He’s already underpaid compared to his counterparts in the private sector. And yet you’d still begrudge him his pension and medical benefits.
It’s ridiculous. Conservatives are always telling us that you need to pay money to get qualified candidates. Yet somehow this principle is supposed to be irrelevant when deciding who teaches our kids, protects our homes or pulls us out of a burning building.
That’s just hypocritical bullshit.
Current thinking on future directions on technology and commerce doesn’t seem to back you up there:
If more and more acquisition of actual physical goods is going to be handled by home delivery rather than by individuals making shopping trips to local stores,* then postal services will become more relevant to modern life, not less.
Sure, private delivery services like UPS and FedEx will absorb some of this upswing in merchandise home delivery, but as other posters have pointed out, USPS does a lot of things they don’t do and also partly subsidizes them. So I’m highly skeptical of the claim that “the entire concept of the Post Office is outdated”.
Or, putting it another way, he was routinely entrusted with large numbers of important documents and parcels (and, of course, even larger numbers of unimportant ones) that had to be correctly identified and delivered to the proper addresses, often in fairly hazardous circumstances. I don’t see why somebody with several decades of experience in reliably carrying out that important task shouldn’t be entitled to a decent middle-class salary and benefits.
Personally, I like the fact that in this country you can send a letter with a $50 bill in it or a small parcel with expensive goods in it for a low delivery cost, and the delivery employee is sufficiently well-paid and well-treated that he has little motivation to steal it and pretend it got lost.
I’ve lived for months at a time in poorer countries where the postal services are run more or less as Debaser seems to prefer: with wages more appropriate for unskilled workers hauling around sacks of paper than for trusted employees reliably getting important despatches to their destinations. And the consequences are just what you might expect: postal workers routinely scrutinize the contents of the letters and parcels they’re delivering, and steal them if they’re valuable.
I have never understood why anti-union blue-collar-busting conservatives are so slow to recognize the advantages of making service-sector jobs as comfortable and desirable as economically possible, so that they’ll attract reliable, trustworthy, stable workers.
Nope; it’s all “Postal service workers are grossly overpaid for just hauling sacks of paper around!” (Um, excuse me? There in that “sack of paper” is MY MAIL, and I want it responsibly handled by somebody who values his job!)
“Hotel employees unionizing? It’s ridiculous that somebody should get decent pay and benefits just for scrubbing toilets and changing sheets!” (In MY ROOM where I’ve left my jewelry and my clothes and my laptop? Fuck NO I don’t want that to be a shit-wage, high-turnover job where crackheads are willing to work dirt cheap for a few days until they get the chance to steal a hotel guest’s iPhone or a pair of high-end high heels that they can flog to pay for their next fix!)
“Why the hell should grocery store clerks get middle-class wages and paid sick days when a trained chimpanzee could do most of their jobs?” (Uh, because I don’t want the people who are handling MY FOOD to drag themselves to work when they’re seriously ill because they can’t afford to lose a day’s pay, and cough and sneeze all over the vegetables I’m taking home to eat?)
Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with the people who just can’t stand the thought that service-sector workers whose work is intimately connected with our happiness, convenience and health are able to afford a decently satisfying and secure lifestyle? Is it sheer class envy that some of these “proletarians” have better job security and benefits than a lot of us college-educated white-collar “knowledge workers”? Screw that: if we want better job security and benefits then let’s us organize and fight for them, the way the blue-collar workers did and are still doing.
(And by the way, just because a top salary for a postal service mail carrier was $70K twelve years ago and that $70K is equivalent to about $93K in today’s dollars doesn’t mean that top-level mail carriers are actually making $93K today. 90th percentile salary nowadays for mail carriers is about $57K as of 2011.)
- The plural of anecdote is not data, but this is certainly how my personal experience as a consumer is trending. For every time I buy something other than groceries or other basic household supplies at a local store, there are three or four occasions that I order it online and get it in the mail, most often via USPS.
Man. You sound like a fun guy, and a real joy to work for.
Anyway, let’s get some facts up in here. Federal workers get better benefits, yes. They are also older and better educated, partially accounting for the discrepancy in “average pay” that gets thrown about and used as proof that they are dramatically overpaid. When comparing similar jobs, federal employees are generally paid a lower salary but with greater benefits.
As far as postal employees go, there are 200,000 fewer than there were 10 years ago. While I’m no expert in what an appropriate salary for a mail carrier should be (as Debaser clearly is), until it starts topping “best jobs in America” lists and people are knocking down the doors to post offices clamoring for their cushy jobs, I don’t think we can say they are “dramatically overpaid”.
All of this talk about worker value and unions misses the point. The salient point here is that the Post Office ran an annualized deficit of 20 billion dollars the last quarter. That’s a hefty chunk of change, and the situation appears to be getting worse. The Post Office has seen its market change drastically in the last decade and it seems woefully incapable of adapting. Something drastic needs to change for them to return to even a break even state, and I don’t see that happening while it is controlled by the government.
You seem to be missing the point that several earlier posters have made: namely, that the USPS’s financial woes are largely caused by deliberate political sabotage by anti-government conservatives.
The core of the problem is not that the USPS can’t run its business successfully or isn’t adapting to market changes. It’s that Congressional Republicans want to intentionally undermine it to embarrass their political opponents and highlight their ideological animosity toward all non-military government enterprises.