Apparently, the post office is receiving a 4 billion dollar bail out. Part of the problem:

It’s a practice called “standby time,” and it has existed for years — but postal employees say it was rarely used until this year. Now, postal officials say, the agency is averaging about 45,000 hours of standby time every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million per year.

After I read that I immediately thought to myself, a union has to be involved. Only unions can force concession that result in such prodigious waste. Imagine my surprise:

But a thicket of union rules prevents managers from laying off excess employees; a recent agreement with the unions, in fact, temporarily prevents the Postal Service from even reassigning them to other facilities that could use them.

You want to ruin a self sustaining business? Unionize the work force.

If the federal government can’t even fire employees that have no work to do, honestly how are they going to bring down the cost of health care? Arguing that the federal government can reduce health care cost by taking control is like saying machine guns pained pink taste delicious. In other words, it makes no fucking sense.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.