Trump right; Amazon, others must pay more

I agree with Donald Trump.

Trump recently tweeted that the United States Postal Service should charge Amazon more money for package delivery. As a 32-year clerk employee of the USPS,

I can only shout, “Right on!”

The Postal Service should end all of its sweetheart deals with major mailers that offer reduced rates exceeding the cost saved through mailer preparation.

This need seems glaringly obvious when one considers the Service’s recent history of cutting speed, quality and personnel as it attempts to remedy a largely illusionary deficit created by a congressional mandate that forces the USPS to pay its anticipated retiree health expenses 75 years into the future.

Locally and nationally, personnel reductions are making it impossible for clerks and mail handlers to do their jobs, and the USPS has reacted to this by moving employees around like someone with eight eggs trying to fill a dozen-egg container. Rapid schedule alterations leave everyone in a state of mind resembling permanent jet lag, and “What day is this?” becomes a frequently overheard question on the workroom floor.

I would happily soldier on under this shifting schedule if it worked, but it doesn’t. In the end, eight eggs are eight eggs, and they can’t make a dozen eggs’ worth of omelets, so we stretch here and try to make do there and — well, your readers see the results six days a week.

Powerful conservative forces want to privatize the USPS. I hope the changes initiated by postal management to avoid this fate have not accelerated it. CARL IMBODEN, WEST PALM BEACH Editor’s note: Carl Imboden is the legislative director of Palm Beach Area Local 749 of the American Postal Workers Union.