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Every union "no layoff" provision I've ever seen was a case of the union choosing to forego contracted CoL raises and some various health benefits in exchange for keeping jobs. Typically it will be cost-neutral compared to layoffs and keeping benefits.

The employer wouldn't sign up to it if it was a pure money loser. They're not crazy :)

Also, Obama already suspended Saturday delivery. So not too sure what he has to do with a perceived unwillingness to shut down the post office. (He also cut taxes, stepped up immigration enforcement and didn't close gitmo).

Obama already suspended Saturday delivery.

There was apparently a rogue delivery person four days ago, joyriding in the mail truck and asking me to sign for a delivery.

Sorry, my fault. They're going to end it soon, according to Obama's postmaster general and the legislation to do so is being filed by a democratic senator. http://www.businessinsider.com/say-goodbye-to-saturday-mail-...

Point still stands that "fox news said this about obama" does not correlate at all to what he's thinking or even doing. In fact you can usually assume the opposite.

> They're going to end it soon.

That isn't exactly true. The Postmaster General has been trying to get Saturday delivery canceled for a while now, but congress has not been willing to let it happen.

So, the original contention was that Socialistobama would never, ever, ever consider reduction of service.

The truth is that his appointee is actively pursuing it. Regardless of whether Congress (ironically, mostly rural district republicans in congress) are impeding him as usual.

Sorry I don't think Obama is any more of a socialist than Bush. My only point was that he wouldn't like the idea of getting rid of the union contracts which bankruptcy would allow. A Republican president would likely welcome such a change.

>Socialistobama

That label and the level of discourse it represents are not welcome here. Be civil.

I like Saturday delivery when my package doesn't arrive on Friday. Congress wants their mail. ;)

>>I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand.<<

People don't just need any job they can get. They need a job that will pay bills for a reasonable amount of time in the future. They need to save money to live on during the next job search. Temporary low paid jobs just leave the employee stressed out and barely above water before they need to search again. I don't think many people enjoy looking for work.

This high granularity of employment sounds like a terrible inefficiency. There are jobs that need to be done, but can't be, because they don't justify a full-time or part-time employee. There are people that need to work, but can't because much of the work that needs to be done is in chunks too small to occupy their time.

Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency. We could then transition chronically unemployed but capable workers into these labor exchanges.

> Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency.

I think the problem here is that workers are even less fungible than corporate stocks. The process of separating out the chronically unemployed but capable from the chronically unemployed because of fundamental flaws is quite a job in and of itself.

Hello, I'm a freelancer. I'll do the job you want for 150% of my former salary, yet at a lower price that my boss sold it to you !

I wonder why everyone is not doing that... I cut the middle men, so that means I get to go to dinner with clients, I get to negotiate prices, I got to be friend with the CEO of the startup that employs me.

I always suspected that the salary of a commercial was a high price for a very comfortable job, and I can confirm it !

According to economics, companies exist when workers are able, together, to output more than the sum of their parts. More enough to compensate for the boss overhead, and then some. In fact, it's recommended to go indie if you're medium to strongly competent in a wide range of skills such as marketing, sales, programming and operations... But for most specialized workers, the company provides the collective which makes sure they can package their work together with others and sell it to the client as a final integrated product.

I agree that this is the ideal situation but I think the system has been perverted. A single developer alone will probably bring less money than if he was working in a company, but the money he earns personally increases.

I personally blame a whole generation of people coming out of management school thinking they deserved a higher salary than anyone else when in fact they were doing a job that was equally important (no more, no less) than any worker in the company.

Your work now consists of your former job and being a salesman. That explains why everyone's not doing it.

"Being a salesman" consists in being a nice human and a little bit of an actor. Any self-respecting roleplayer can be one.

It's also because most people just want the comfort and stability of a job.

Someone just submitted this link to Coffee & Power (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971171). I haven't tried it, but this concept seems like a small but good start to solving the labor granularity problem.

Right, because looking for a job takes a lot of time. So the opportunity cost of taking a crappy job might prevent you from ever finding a good job.

If getting a job at wages you are willing to pay means that the person will still not be able to meet any of its monetary obligations it pretty much means that the person is , for all practical purposes, still unemployed. Why work for slave wages if the outcome is the same. Better stay home and not be taken advantage off. How do this people live with no income? Most likely family or government assistance.

Chicken and egg. If the workers can't pay rent the market will correct rent down. It's that it takes too long to correct and someone's bound to be evicted before that happens.

If the landlord can't afford mortgage, how they gonna lower the rent? Run that scenario forward a couple steps and you see the real looming problem.

Landlord is foreclosed, bank sells at a loss, new owner rents at a lower amount. Nobody said it would be pretty.

Ok, so we had a problem the size of a few paychecks, now it's the size of a piece of property. Hey, whatever, right?

But I said a couple steps, keep going, multiply that by a few hundred thousand or a couple million around the country. Can you think of any other problems that might result?

keeping over-priced goods at inflated price using whatever means will never work out in the long term. that applies to real-estate too, which (the real-estate industry) seems to have become the driving economic sector in many countries, which I find funny.

edit: and a note on why it's funny, the value of a property never changes, only the price.

From an individual perspective, you can make money trading real-estate just like trading stocks; from government's perspective, higher GDP is always good; from bank's perspective, as long as property value increases, they will make money from both interest and foreclosures; but from a society perspective, nothing of value was ever created in the process.

Most economists consider deflationary spiral to be a nightmare scenario. See: Great Depression and Japan's lost decade.

I have no good answer to turn the world into a harmless place, but at least part of the cause of Great Depression was measures to pull the economy out of the recession that preceded it.

Nobody is happy when economy stagnates, but keeping the economy going by inflating prices of goods has never worked out in the long term. At some point it will crash, and it will hurt more the higher you go.

> I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology.

Well, other than that whole "email" fad.

What the Post Office needs is an end to the legislation that has caused this mess. The Post Office is the only entity in the entire country that is mandated by public law to pay 100% towards the future cost of a potential retirees benefits. Not of current retires, not of the guy that will retire in a year, but of every single person that maybe someday, even if it's 30 years away, cold retire from the Post Office. This is the payment that they would default on.

Congress is building up the piggybank to be raided. Where would the USPS' retirement fund being parked? In the US Treasury of course.

The only government entity. Every private sector entity needs to fully fund their pension obligations.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR00004:@@@L...;

If it's libertarian in control, Congress won't be there to fix the postal stamp price.

The Post Office is between a rock and a hard place. Congress prevents it from raising price and Congress wants it to massively fund future expenditure. The huge loss is artificial.

For the services it provides, USPS is damn efficient.

>Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.

I think you're missing the point. It means you endorse a system where food pantrys are necessary because there's no way everyone 'makes it'. You're just on the right side of the food line.

Many of the problems with the post office are caused by congress. The set rules that handicap them and expect the post office to run profitably. For instance, if congress hadn't mandated overzealous pre-funding requirements the post office would be solvent.

So how much are you willing and able to pay for someone to take care of your sick relatives? I don't know about you, but often times there is a huge gap between need and demand caused by affordability. Maybe that's why those men are wandering around doing nothing, getting paid by people who have no need for them, instead of working for those who have a need but no funds to pay them.