If the workers at McDonalds sucks and same with their hamburger - I can walk to a better, perhaps more expensive burger joint down the street and get better food and service.
If my post office gives me poor service where else can I go to mail a letter?
Maybe you are correct that lower wages would lead to poorer service in government agencies BUT people will be most upset because they will have no other ALTERNATIVE. THAT is why the private sector services should be privatized. The free market would solve all of these problems.
Fairness in Conversation Act, I work at the Postal Service as a letter carrier, as a union member in the public sector.
That said, time and time again, there are temps working at the USPS that are continually arrested for stealing mail and throwing out mail. It happens ALL the time, that's why our union fights so hard to hire part-time flexible career employees (PTFs) at $14/hr instead of the temps (TEs) at $10/hr. There is an incentive for the PTFs to provide better service because they know at some point they will become full-time regular (FTR) career employees instead of the TEs who know that they'll be gone in a year or two. If you know that you don't have a career position you feel that there isn't a lot to lose by stealing DVDs, CDs, checks, etc. I'll admit that every once and a while there is a stupid full-timer that fucks up and does something like steal, but for most the thought of stealing mail and losing a good paying job isn't worth it.
Also, the service from the TEs is lousy, you can almost always tell when you've had someone other than your regular mailman deliver your mail because odds are you'll get someone elses letters or magazines. Temps don't care.
Now, I know I'll probably get attacked either for my stance on unions or for my employment so I knew the risk when I typed this post so feel free to ask questions or blast me, I can take it. That said, the Postal Service is the highest ranked government service according surveys and you can google that if you would like to verify. If you want to ask me why the USPS is going bankrupt it's because of too many high priced managers/postmasters and their stupid spending at the top level. My Post Office just spent $750,000 putting up a fence around our whole Post Office and another $250,000 laying down a new parking lot. We have a ratio of 1 supervisor per 15 workers where I believe the private sector has 1 per 25. I really wish Congress would come in and audit the spending of the Postal Service and they'll see that the problem is in the upper level.
About my union, we are a optional union where you can work as a letter carrier without joining the union. You still get the same benefits from the contract that the union workers get and they are treated the same by the other letter carriers with the exception of the die-hard union-loving liberals who treat them like crap but there aren't that many of the them left at my Post Office. Actually, out of the 150 carriers at my PO about 60 of them lean to the right with about 10 of those being Ron Paul Republicans.
We get paid less than the UPS carriers which is private sector but we get paid more than FedEx carriers. I'm sure this is due to UPS being unionized and FedEx not.
Back to the topic at hand, my sister-in-law is a teacher and she makes $45k a year with benefits, which is fairly decent but my questions for Scott Walker is, "what do you feel teachers should be paid? $10K/year, $20k/year? What salary should teachers accept to help Wisconsin eliminate their deficit? And is it the workers that caused the deficit or was it wasteful spending on the part of the state government?" I'm sure they could find other ways to eliminate the deficit.
- ML