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"         Starting in August, the Post Office will stop offering its services on Saturdays. The move, which saves about $2 billion annually, is a fantastic step towards saving the vital institution that Esquire wrote about in its latest issue.  It is also part of a larger plan by Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe to turn an agency losing $16 billion annually into one that can make a profit of $6 million per day by 2016. From our story: His plan calls for sizing the post office for today. That means cutting 120,000 more jobs, largely through attrition; halving the number of processing centers that relay mail across the country at often breakneck speed; and drastically scaling back the hours of thirteen thousand unprofitable local post offices. He would stop nearly all Saturday mail, and ease the rate at which first-class mail races across the country, because much of the paper we do send doesn&amp;#039;t need to get there tomorrow or on Saturday. Cutting Saturday service will also anger a man named Ron Bloom, who told us, &amp;quot;If you degrade the network and your customers leave and you get into the death spiral, you can&amp;#039;t have [the network] back.&amp;quot; Bloom is from Pittsburgh. He likens what the service is doing to the steel and car industries. &amp;quot;Management can just decide to give up.&amp;quot; After years at an investment banking firm, he managed contract negotiations in both fields, including as a central go-between in the Obama administration&amp;#039;s crucial auto bailout. The letter carriers union brought him (and his old investment bank employer) in to be their hard-nosed fighter. Here&amp;#039;s how he relates his work with the second-largest steel manufacturer in the nation to the USPS: &amp;quot;They fundamentally believed you couldn&amp;#039;t make steel in America and make money. I think the postal-service management believes, in their heart of hearts, that the day of the postal service has come and gone, and their job is to give it a decent burial. And to not hurt people more than they need to and still do a certain amount of what they do. I think they believe that. And if you believe your company is fatally broken...&amp;quot; he trails off. Bloom says that the service&amp;#039;s real annual loss is only about $900 million a year\u2014&amp;quot;That is not a hemorrhage. That&amp;#039;s a bleed.&amp;quot;\u2014and that there are other ways to overcome those deficits. Raising postage across the board. Making letter carriers pay the same rates on their their life insurance as other federal workers (they currently pay nothing). Focusing on the packaging industry (the cut will do the opposite of this; it&amp;#039;ll mean no weekend deliveries from eBay or Amazon). He believes the service&amp;#039;s value is in the breadth of its network. And if Bloom is right, then it&amp;#039;s now on him to quickly negotiate an agreement before August arrives. It&amp;#039;s now on him to save the post office. And maybe not just that. In his words, &amp;quot;Fuck you! This is a great institution and we can grow it!&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a18971/saturday-service-save-post-office/>