DeJoy: Why he may lose his job
The U.S. Postal Service faces “unprecedented challenges,” said John Nichols in TheNation .com, including Covid-related worker shortages and plunging demand for first-class mail. “But the biggest threat” is Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, “the Republican mega-donor” who took charge in May 2020, “determined to downsize the Postal Service.” DeJoy has sabotaged the
USPS by removing mail-sorting machines and mail collection boxes and deliberately slowing deliveries; last holiday season saw just 38 percent of nonlocal first-class mail arrive on time. For this holiday season, DeJoy has again slowed delivery times, imposed holiday surcharges of up to $5 a box, and reduced post office hours. Confronted by lawmakers earlier this year, DeJoy offered Trumpian defiance. “Get used to me,” he sneered. Maybe not. President Biden recently nominated two new members to the USPS board of governors, setting the stage for DeJoy’s removal.
“DeJoy isn’t going to win any popularity contests,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, but the USPS needs “tough love” after recording its “15th straight annual loss”—$4.9 billion. He’s trying run the Postal Service “like a business, despite the many political mandates it must cope with,” including six-day delivery. Chief among those burdensome obligations, said Jalen Small and Alex Rouhandeh in Newsweek.com, is a
2006 law requiring USPS to pre-fund its pension program for all future retirees, something no other private or public employer does. That alone accounts for up to 90 percent of USPS losses. DeJoy’s 10-year cost-cutting plan “could reach a positive net income” by 2024, shifting more delivery from air to ground, which will slow delivery of some first-class mail by about two days.
But DeJoy’s cost cutting is often callous or counterproductive, said Mindy Isser in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Last year he ordered sorting machines to be dismantled “while a significant chunk of workers were out due to the coronavirus,” and this year USPS plans to hire 40,000 seasonal temps paid “on average $11 per hour with no benefits.” Under DeJoy, a newly hired letter carrier makes just $19 an hour. “Amazingly,” said the Chicago Sun-Times in an editorial, DeJoy was given a $75,000 performance bonus last fiscal year, on top of his $306,000 salary—the highest ever for a postmaster general. Let’s hope the new board of governors sends DeJoy “packing for good.” Timely mail delivery depends on it.