Postal Workers Are Putting Off Retirement

Talk of early-retirement incentives for U.S. Postal Service employees may have temporarily backfired: Career employees of the U.S. Postal Service have apparently been retiring in record-low numbers. The number of full-time employees shrank by only 1.6 percent in the past year, according to a statistical report USPS released Friday.

That’s a minuscule net attrition rate in an organization that is hardly hiring any new full-time employees, where half the employees are 50 or older, and where nearly half the employees are eligible to retire.

The net loss of only 8,141 full-timers between June 2011 and June 2012 is a far