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Postmaster General Louis DeJoy says the Postal Service may need to reduce its employee headcount by 50,000 positions, as the agency looks to consolidate its network of facilities that process mail.
DeJoy, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, said he plans to consolidate 500 facilities that USPS processes and moves mail through down to about 65 or 75 regional hubs.
DeJoy said he’s “committed to a stable workforce,” and is working with postal...
READ MORE Postmaster General Louis DeJoy says the Postal Service may need to reduce its employee headcount by 50,000 positions, as the agency looks to consolidate its network of facilities that process mail.
DeJoy, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday , said he plans to consolidate 500 facilities that USPS processes and moves mail through down to about 65 or 75 regional hubs.
DeJoy said he’s “committed to a stable workforce,” and is working with postal unions on this effort, but will easily manage any headcount reduction through normal attrition, which results from employees retiring or leaving the agency. “Right now, to get to break-even, I think we may need to get 50,000 people out of the organization.
But that’s OK, because over [the next 10 years] 200,000 people leave the organization for retirement.
So we’re going to be a hiring organization,” DeJoy said. “We need to be good at retention, we need to be good at recruiting people, and we’re doing a lot of different activity around there.” DeJoy told reporters following the event that the Sort and Delivery Centers that USPS is creating to consolidate operations will be a mix of new construction and renovations to existing plants. “We’ll take equipment out, we’ll rearrange it into a logical sequence within the plants.
We basically do seven different functions , package destinating processing, package originating processing, destinating mail processing , and we will configure them appropriately once we get into the region,” DeJoy said.
Among the facilities that face consolidation, DeJoy said USPS will close 150 annexes , about 40 of which USPS opened to support a surge of packages during the peak holiday season at the end of last year. “We’re going to shed those, and this is going to take four years or so to really happen,” DeJoy said.
DeJoy said the USPS Sort and Delivery Centers will have enough space, docks and mail processing equipment to operate more efficiently than its current infrastructure.
He said USPS will construct new Sort and Delivery Centers in Atlanta, Indianapolis and Charlotte, but will also convert some existing facilities. “We’re actually opening all our closed plants.
We have like 1,000 plants that are just sitting around, and we’re converting and putting a lot of money into it, and making them launch delivery units and package processing operations,” he told reporters.
Meanwhile, a reconciliation deal announced Wednesday evening by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen.