The United States Post Office: The beginning of the end

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Years ago, I was at odds with the union of the manufacturing company I was working for, so severely that things were getting violent.  At my home, I was at war with the police department for turning in hours of video tape showing irrefutable proof of drug sales by area teenagers only to find out that many of the cops were working with the kids to assist and had turned against me and my family to cover up the activity.  It got so bad at one point that I had to provide body-guard assistance to my children so they could ride their bikes down the sidewalk.  In every sector of my life at that time, things were tough, really, really tough.  The culmination of these events was the primary theme of my 2004 book, The Symposium of Justice.  It looked like I was going to lose my job to a layoff because the union was pushing to eliminate me before the company made me salary, which the company was playing both political sides against each other leaving me out to dry.  It was a very difficult time. 

A family member suggested that I apply for a job at the Post Office, because the Post Office had fantastic benefits, great pay, and job security.  If I worked for the government, I would be “taken” care of and my family would be safe.  I scratched my head, even under all that stress, and contemplated how long the Post Office was going to last paying people the kind of wages they were paying.  The internet was a new thing back then and email was the emerging new rage, I saw trouble for the Post Office. 

In recent years it has been Doc Thompson who has also seen trouble for the Post Office and he has been one of the most vocal advocates of reform.  Doc’s been doing this well before the recent news that the United States Postal Service was considering cutting back it’s service to less days per week, and that they were closing down several Post Offices around Cincinnati.  Listen to Doc talk about the whole Post Office situation on 700 WLW at the link below:

I took another job where they actually made things, because I couldn’t see how the Post Office was going to sustain itself.  The family member tried to get into the Post Office employee pull but was not accepted because they could not claim minority status, and was told as much. 

The Postal Service is a direct victim of the changing times, email, UPS, Fed Ex, and other services have emerged in recent years which have cut into the revenue of the Post Office, and this has been a great aspect of the American business culture.  It’s been great for everyone but the people who have taken jobs with the Post Office.  When you talk to some of them, they would love to see the world stop advancing so they could keep their jobs, because many of them took jobs with the Post Office for the same reason that the family member told me to apply, for the job security and great benefits. 

Virtually every government sector job these days are in a similar boat as the Post Office.  Teachers and the entire Department of Education are finding that technology can do many of the tasks of teaching just as effective as a brick and mortar school, improved medicine is making retirement at 55 and 65 laughable, extending the life spans of the human being closer and closer to 100, and this same improved medicine will also dramatically lower the need for Medicare and health insurance in the future.  As aviation and other aspects of transportation evolve in an improved direction, government employee advocates want to invest in the archaic technology of High Speed Rail, which is on its way out.  The pattern of resistance to the obvious becomes clear to the intelligent viewer. 

Government is simply an entity that wants to live, just like any creature.  The bigger it gets, the more it eats by way of tax money.  But it will also attempt to hold back the kind of technology which made America great to begin with, in an attempt to preserve itself.  This is a natural reaction and can be displayed vividly in the various school levies that are on the November ballot this year.  They are led by government employees who entered that field of endeavor under the pretense of security, and they are slow to learn that the path they’ve chosen is unsustainable, and evolving into something else.  The successful person who works for a government job will evolve and adapt with these changes, because it is the changes themselves which will advance our culture for the better, and those changes will occur regardless of government worker protests. 

The lesson is that sometimes its better to take a job that may not be so attractive at first as the government, tax subsidized job, because at the non-government job, the individual can control their own destiny to a large extent.  It is not good to trade freedom for comfort, and government jobs like the Post Office are perfect examples of this tendency.  There are jobs for people in the other fields, as government stops doing services, entrepreneurs will come up with job replacements because if there is a market need for those services, there will be a creative mind who will provide that service.  What the government worker fears however, is that the public will discover how unimportant those government jobs have always been, and that will be a painful transition, when the American tax payer comes to realize how much they’ve been scammed.  But in the end, the process will make America better and stronger so long as the light at the end of the tunnel is the focus and not the darkness of the immediate surroundings.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

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Published by Rich Hoffman

Author of The Gunfighter's Guide to Business. Professional gunfighter.

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7 thoughts on “The United States Post Office: The beginning of the end”

  1. Anyone who has ever called a governmental agency knows how incompetent most of the employees seem to be. Once I had to get some information from the Social Security Administration. I called the number on the letter that they had sent me.

    After waiting on hold forever the person who answered the phone said that I had the wrong department and that she would transfer me to the proper department. Same thing happened when that line was answered. This happened five times and I ended up on the phone with the first person that I had talked to. I never received a proper answer from any of them. Total time involved was over an hour.

    They don’t care. They have a guaranteed job with great benefits. No one will fire them. More and more of these types have been hired in the past two years. No one in the private sector would hire any of them. Good luck America.

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  3. I would like to add to your last paragraph. If the non-government job that you take is a union job, you still do not control your own destiny. No matter how hard you work, you are still paid based on your seniority and not on your merits. You have no almost no incentive (except personal pride) to work any harder than the slob next to you who is making the same wage you are. The only hope you have is that management notices you and you earn a promotion out of the union ranks.

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