Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

Massachusetts residents, especially those with strong voting records, are seeing their mailboxes besieged by doctored photos of Senator Scott Brown posing by a truck full of cash, Elizabeth Warren angrily guarding a locked door, and a host of other incendiary images, as the Senate campaign enters the homestretch.

With the race now in its final month, the direct mail efforts have expanded as outside groups seek to influence the competitive election with millions of dollars in spending.

The mailbox is one of the few options for many of the political action committees and super PACs because...a system of self-imposed penalties designed to

This week saw USPS writing to 800,000 business mailers who hold a POSTNET permit to encouraging them to start making the transition to IMb. If they don’t make the switch by Jan. 28, 2013, those mailers will no longer be eligible for discounts for business mail prepared to standards for automated processing.

Companies that use a mail service provider are also being advised to check that their mailings will qualify for the automation price.

USPS wants to create 100-percent visibility in its mail stream by 2014, providing mailers with near real-time data on the location of mailpieces within the network

The cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service has reached its $15 billion debt limit as capped by Congress and is barred from borrowing more. The Postal Service hit the cap on Sept. 28, a spokesman confirmed, reinforcing the fact that its cash reserves are running dangerously low.

The agency will have enough money to keep running and pay its employees and contractors for a few months due to the influx of election mail and holiday season mail.

Congress needs to pass legislation to save the Postal Service. However, that's unlikely to happen until after the Nov. 6 election and could possibly be pushed to

Confusion reigns among the 115,000 postal workers who received notices in the past few days about a buyout offer. The confusion could limit the number of APWU-represented career employees who accept the U.S. Postal Service’s $15,000 incentive to retire or quit.

“There is still the misconception among FERS employees of an age penalty in a Voluntary Early Retirement,” [long-time USPS critic Don] Cheney says. “The opposite is true in most cases.”

Also tending to discourage early retirements is the mistaken belief that the IRS charges a 10 percent early-withdrawal penalty for money taken out of a Thrift Savings Plan by early retirees,

The modern political campaign has fully embraced Twitter, Facebook and other social media to reach voters, but President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney are still spending massive sums on a more traditional form of communication: snail mail. The two presidential campaigns have spent nearly twice as much on old-fashioned fliers, get-out-the-vote cards and other forms of direct mail as they have on Internet advertising.

Direct mail is especially crucial for Romney, whose supporters skew older…Romney and the Republican National Committee have spent more than $100 million on mail costs, compared with about $70 million for Obama and the Democrats.

The chances for meaningful postal reform this year are slim if neither political party gets a mandate from Congressional elections – and none if one party wins control of both houses. That’s the consensus of several postal experts who have spoken or written recently about the status of postal legislation.

“If the Republicans get a majority in the Senate and hold their majority in the House, nothing will happen until 2013. If the Democrats hold the Senate majority and the Republicans hold the House, MAYBE something could happen in the lame duck session. If the Dems win the House and Senate,

William Burrus, former president of the agency's largest labor union and long a vocal critic of USPS management, urged fellow APWU members not to hold out for a better offer than the $15,000 incentive announced this week. “If you intend to retire my advice is to ‘take the money and run,’ there is zero possibility that the amount will be increased,” Burrus wrote in his blog.

“My best estimate is that, of the 115,000 APWU represented eligibles, there will be somewhere in the range of 35,000 who will take the money and run.”

The Postal Service and one of its largest unions have agreed to offer retirement incentives to a wide swath of postal employees. Employees who accept the buyout—who must have at least 20 years tenure at 50 years old, or have worked at least 25 years—would leave USPS at the end of January 2013. They would receive $10,000 in May 2013, and then the last $5,000 in May 2014.

The agreement between USPS and APWU comes after months of negotiations, and marks just the latest example of the cash-strapped Postal Service using buyouts to try and cut costs.

The U.S. Postal Service’s plan to reduce its mail-processing network by half has a major flaw, according to a Postal Regulatory Commission opinion released Friday: The plan would tend “to move processing assignments from more productive plants to less productive plants.”

USPS goofed in assuming that consolidating mail sorting into larger plants would improve productivity, according to the PRC’s advisory opinion on the Postal Service’s ambitious Network Rationalization plan. In fact, larger plants historically have tended to process fewer mail pieces per workhour than smaller ones, the PRC’s analysis finds.

In theory, large plants have the advantage of more automation

The USPS’s Network Rationalization Plan, opposed by some postal unions and not-in-my-district Congress members, would cut the number of processing centers nearly in half by 2015—from 461 this year to 232 in 2015. That’s down from 673 in 2006 and 599 in 2009.

The impact would be especially dramatic in certain regions. Several states—including Mississippi, Kansas, and Arizona—would go from having six or more facilities to only one.

It’s not just sparsely populated areas that would lose most of their processing centers. West Virginia, which had 11 centers barely two years ago, would be left with only Charleston.