*sigh* I get so tired of reading things like this, especially from politicians, or those who want to be politicians and/or conservatives/Republicans.
Whilst perusing National Review Online today, I ran across an article by the gentleman mentioned in this post's title. His article was titled: Make all federal employees fireable. As soon as I saw the title, I knew where this guy was going to go, even if the article wasn't specifically targeted at the USPS.
Sure enough, only four paragraphs in I find this (emphasis mine):
"The spoils system’s most famous advocate was another populist rabble-rouser with a magnificent mane, also sneered at by the elites: Andrew Jackson. Jackson believed that no particular class should dominate government decade after decade, and that government jobs were readily fillable by those in the private sector. For a modern analogy: There’s no reason why a FedEx employee couldn’t replace a bad postal worker".
A few more paragraphs down, Starrett begins another paragraph thusly:
"Most federal employees are presumably competent, but not 99.8 percent. Set aside your personal experience with the Post Office . . ."
Grant Starrett is a lawyer who went to both Vanderbuilt and Stanford. He ran for a congressional seat in Tennessee last year and lost. I would assume he is a fairly intelligent fellow, but he is witheringly ignorant of how the federal government and the USPS interact. Though technically a federal agency, the USPS is a stand alone operation, self funding with it's own regulatory agency overseeing budgets and things like stamp prices and such.
The myth of the non-fireable postal worker is just that . . . a myth. Though there are unions to protect workers and negotiate contracts, and I'm no big fan of unions, the myth that they run the USPS is just that . . . a myth.
There are plenty of things wrong with the Post Office, just like there are plenty of things wrong with FedEx and UPS and Walmart and every other company in this country that employs over a half million workers. And I could go on for days writing about all the things the PO does wrong and why this happens.
Two of the biggest internal problems, just to give you an example, are the facts that no one in management was promoted from craft based on merit, if you want to be a boss, simply fill out the paperwork and viola . . . you're in. In this way, the organization is not promoting its best and brightest to the upper levels of management, so you don't get the best decision making at the local, district and nationwide levels.
The other problem is universal pay rates, which is to say that I, in Florida, work for the same pay rate as a letter carrier in New York, or L.A., or anywhere else the cost of living is double or triple what it is in Florida. What is good money down here is garbage man wages north of the Mason-Dixon line. You get what you pay for. And you combine unattractive wages with management that might not be the best and you get a lot of the problems folks up north keep complaining about. Simply firing people isn't the answer here.
I'd like to think someone running for Congress might be a little more interested in understanding the situation than simply going for the low hanging fruit of bashing an entity that employs half a million American citizens and gives preferential hiring to veterans.
But no, Grant went for the cheap shot. If this is any indication of the depth of his intellectual curiosity about our government and how it functions, it might explain why he lost his bid for a Congressional seat.
And just so I don't seem like a grumpy grouper, here's some unpublished pics of the always sexy and beautiful Elizabeth Marxs in SFW format just to show I'm not always about shameless clickbait:
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