How ’bout discounts for everyone?!
Say- maybe Bill Burrus is right- maybe the big bad mailers are getting away with murder. But here’s a suggestion- instead of eliminating those unfair discounts, let’s offer them to everyone! Why shouldn’t Aunt Minnie get the same discount as Capital One? Why not let her mail her birthday cards for 19 cents a piece or whatever? To get the best discounts, all she’d have to do is drop ship her mail at the destination Post Office! And since she probably won’t be sending full walk-sequenced trays, we’d probably have to require that she sort her mail into the right slot in the correct carrier’s case. That would require scheme knowledge, of course, but we can provide her with all the information she needs over the web! Think of the money she’ll save!
Sounds fair to me!
OK, so maybe that won’t work- but neither will going the other way and eliminating workshare discounts. I don’t understand the arguments of people like Bill Burrus, and the readers who posted comments on the BMG story, who claim that big mailers are getting unfair discounts. This may come as a surprise to Bill, but when my electric company sends me my statement, they don’t take up a collection among the shareholders to come up with the postage money. It’s a business expense- the customer pays it- me! So if they can get a few cents off the postage by presorting, it’s to my advantage, too! And the same goes for Aunt Minnie’s subscription to Rolling Stone- take away the discount, and she’s the one who’s going to foot the bill, not Jann Wenner.
So let’s get real about this- the APWU doesn’t like automation discounts because they don’t like automation, not because there’s anything unfair about the discounts. And they don’t like automation for one obvious, and perfectly understandable reason- it costs the APWU members. Notice that I didn’t say it costs jobs- jobs may disappear, but not one person loses his or her job. People who leave aren’t replaced, and in some cases, employees end up having to commute further or work a different shift, but they don’t get laid off. As I pointed out a while back, it’s difficult to work up a lot of sympathy among the general public for people who have ‘jobs for life’, but who may have to work a different shift because of changes in the way mail gets worked. It’s much easier from a PR perspective to rant about evil business tycoons, or the shame of not having a postmark to call your own.
The APWU, and the BMG commenters, are right to argue against unreasonable consolidation proposals, and to try to keep postal work in house. But a scorched earth policy of demonizing the customers who pay their salaries isn’t the way to do it.
