April 18, 1967
Page 9963
AN IMAGINATIVE APPROACH TO POSTAL PROBLEMS
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the postal service has been a popular subject with the Nation's press in recent months. Much of this attention has been encouraged by Postmaster General Lawrence O'Brien.
Just last week, Mr. O'Brien recommended that his job be abolished and that the postal service be made the responsibility of a nonprofit Government corporation. President Johnson has appointed a blue-ribbon commission to review the Postmaster General's suggestion. While I do not wish to prejudge Mr. O'Brien's proposal, it is clear that some new approaches are required. The Postmaster General should be congratulated for his courage in speaking out on what has long been recognized as a perplexing problem of vast dimensions.
Despite the many problems we face in modernizing our postal system, I should like to correct one misconception I have too often heard: that our Nation's postal operations compare unfavorably with similar systems in Western Europe. The facts do not support this conclusion. The hundreds of thousands of dedicated men and women who deliver our mail deserve to have the record set straight.
The American postal worker is the most productive in the world. While our Post Office employs more people than any other postal system, there is no comparison between our mail volume and that of other countries. In fact, the U.S. Post Office Department processes as much mail as the rest of the world combined. To cite just one example, the annual mail volume in Great Britain is approximately 11 billion pieces compared with our current volume of 80 billion.
To deliver its mail, the British postal service employs 200,000 persons. We have 700,000, or three and one-half times as many employees to deliver more than seven times as much mail.
What about postal rates? Here, again, the American postal service performs better. If we measure ability to pay by using hourly wage rates first-class postage is much cheaper in the United States than in other industrial nations. The average American worker earns the price of a first-class letter in 1 minute. The average British worker must work nearly 3 minutes to earn the postage for a first-class letter.
Mail service in the United States can and should be improved. Our able Postmaster General, Larry O'Brien, is the first to agree with that statement. That is why he has made the revolutionary nonprofit corporation proposal. Whatever decision the Presidential Commission reaches, we are fortunate to have this type of imaginative thought applied to our postal problems.