• USPS efficiently binds the nation together
• U.S. postage is the most affordable in the world
• Americans pay less: postage remains stable
• Taxpayers no longer subsidize the post office
• The USPS is self-sufficient
• The USPS provides high-quality service
• Postal employees have earned their pay and benefits 
• Postal costs have risen less than inflation
• U.S. Postal Service productivity
• The postal business

A letter carrier for more than 30 years, Joe Ruggiero makes a special effort to help the transient population of Pompano Beach, Florida receive its mail.

Postal employment and productivity

 The USPS employs 685,000 career employees and 101,000 non-career staff, making it the second-largest employer in the United States (behind Wal-Mart). The Postal Service employs more workers on U.S. soil than General Motors, Ford and Chrysler combined.

 The Postal Service’s workforce is one of the few groups of federal workers with the right to bargain collectively for wages and conditions. As a result, the Postal Service pays middle-class wages—the average salary of postal employees is approximately $48,000 annually—and provides virtually all its workers health insurance and pension coverage. Wages and benefits are generally comparable to those paid by FedEx and UPS.

 Union membership is voluntary, but more than 80 percent of postal employees are organized, including 92 percent of city letter carriers—the best-organized open shop in America.

 The modern Postal Service delivers 139 percent more mail to 89 percent more delivery points today with just 2.5 percent more work hours than it did in 1971 when it was created.

 Postal labor productivity (output per hour) increased 50.1 percent between 1971, the year the Postal Service was created, and 2000—according to the latest data available from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. (This data takes into account presorting and other work sharing by mailers.) According to USPS, labor productivity rose 1.7 percent in 2007, 0.3 percent in 2006 and 1.1 percent in 2005, raising the total productivity growth since postal reorganization to 50 percent.

Postage and productivity

 The USPS maintains the most affordable postage in the world. A first-class stamp, which costs 41 cents in America, costs 75 cents in Japan, 49 cents in Germany and 71 cents in Britain. While in dollar terms stamps are cheaper in New Zealand, their cost is higher relative to hourly wages of workers there.

 Overall postage rates—as measured by both the Producer Price Index and the Consumer Price Index—have increased less than consumer prices in general since the creation of the USPS in 1971. The stability in postage rates was achieved even as direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies have been eliminated—driving the real cost of mailing letters down 23 percent.

 The price of a stamp (41 cents, up 412 percent since 1971) has increased much less than many other ordinary products and services. For example: a movie ticket ($9, up 432 percent since 1971); natural gas to heat your home ($11.40 per 1,000 cubic feet, up 844 percent since 1971); a copy of Time or Newsweek ($3.95, up 690 percent since 1971).

 Since December 1997, when the BLS started collecting the data, the delivery services component of the Consumer Price Index has increased 59.2% while the postage component of the CPI increased by just 19.2%.

 Postal total factor productivity (TFP, which is output per combined unit of labor, capital and material input) has increased by 19 percent since 1972, averaging 0.5 percent per year. Recent BLS research on similar private sector industries—the transportation, utilities and communications (TUC) industries and service sector in general—found significantly lower annual TFP growth rates than those observed for the USPS.

Letter carrier Edith Scherr is bundled to withstand winter in Fargo, North Dakota.

The postal business

 The Postal Service lies at the center of a trillion-dollar mailing industry, which includes companies that print and publish documents, periodicals and publications, mail order and electronic commerce outlets, and firms that transport mail and packages. Together these mail-related companies produce 8 percent of the gross domestic product and employ 9 million Americans.

 If it were a private company, the Postal Service would rank No. 21 on the Fortune 500 list of American business enterprises, with annual revenues of $75 billion, placing it ahead of many well-known firms such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Procter and Gamble..

 The USPS has one of the most extensive retail networks in America with about 37,000 post offices and outlets. Each day more than 7 million Americans visit a post office and make transactions worth more than $200 million. During the holiday season, the USPS takes in more than a half a billion dollars a day.

 The USPS is financially independent of the rest of the federal government, generating all its own revenues with no subsidies from American taxpayers.

 Taxpayer subsidies to the USPS were phased out between 1971, when they covered 23 percent of costs, and 1983. Today, an appropriation to the Postal Service proportional to that paid in 1971 would cost nearly $16 billion annually. The USPS is authorized to receive compensation of $460 million per year for operating unprofitable post offices, but has not requested or received this “public service” subsidy in more than 18 years. The direct savings to taxpayers: $13 billion through 2007.

 Prior to postal reorganization in 1970, the Treasury paid the cost of health insurance and unfunded pension benefits for retired postal employees. These costs have been transferred to the Postal Service through various laws and a series of Omnibus Budget and Reconciliation Acts (OBRAs) in the 1980s and 1990s, saving the Treasury an additional $85 billion since 1970.

USPS mail volume and delivery network

 The U.S. Postal Service handles more than 40 percent of the world’s mail volume, five times more than the Japanese Post Office, the next largest carrier of letter mail.

 In fiscal year 2007, the USPS sorted and delivered nearly 213 billion pieces of mail, about 703 million pieces a day.

 The USPS delivers more items in one day than Federal Express does in a year and more items in one week than United Parcel Service does in a year.

 The Postal Service delivers to 146 million businesses and households each day, six days per week. UPS delivers to 8 million addresses daily while FedEx serves even fewer.

 The number of delivery points (households and businesses) served by the Postal Service grows by 5,900 every delivery day—some 1.8 million addresses a year.

 Each letter carrier delivers more than 43 tons of mail per year, averaging more than 2,300 letters, cards, magazines and circulars per day on approximately 240,000 city and rural routes.

 The Postal Service processes more than 44 million changes of address each year—as 17 percent of the nation's population moves every year—and forwards mail free of charge. In 2007, 73 million changes of address were completed electronically.

 The USPS operates the largest fleet of commercial vehicles in the country—some 212,000 vans and trucks.