With each passing week, the U.S. Postal Service is becoming as obsolete as telephone polls. The mail delivery service loses billions of dollars a year and mail volume continues to fall. The obvious solution to avoid massive losses and layoffs is to start aggressively lowering labor costs by shrinking the number of postal workers through attrition. But the Washington Times reports that instead of letting the mail delivery and processing services shrink over time, the USPS is HIRING new workers.

Labor costs comprise 75% of annual expenses. It takes an iron will to fix a problem at this scale.

When unionized full-time employees retire, that’s the ideal time to skip filling those positions so the workforce is trimmed to match the steady decline in mail delivery volume, which dropped another 9% last year.

DeJoy [the Postmaster General] chose a different path. He filled the vacancies by converting 125,000 part-time employees into full-time workers. He then went out and hired more part-timers.

That’s a double whammy. Rather than allowing the total number of postal service retirement slots to fade away peacefully, the current plan is to add 30,000 careerists to the employment rolls over three years.

Bankrupt companies don’t normally go on hiring binges – but USPS seems oblivious to economic realities. This means getting ready for a massive taxpayer bailout.

Question: would you buy stock in this company?

Postal Service Net Income/Loss By Year

• 2023: $6.5 billion loss
• 2022: $0.5 billion loss
• 2021: $9.7 billion loss
• 2020: $9.2 billion loss.
• 2019: $8.8 billion loss.
• 2018: $3.9 billion loss.
• 2017: $2.7 billion loss.
• 2016: $5.6 billion loss.
• 2015: $5.1 billion loss.
• 2014: $5.5 billion loss.