USPS will cut 50,000 jobs in coming years

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is planning to shed at least 50,000 jobs over the coming few years. According to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy the reduction in headcount is to overcome financial losses. However, USPS will rely on voluntary turnover to make the required job cuts. Moreover, USPS will continue hiring in the coming years.

Layoffs announcement

Postmaster DeJoy announced the plan for layoffs American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. Although the reduction plan is contrary to company’s trend in recent years. U.S. Postal Services workforce grew steadily over the past few years. In 2021, USPS headcount stood at 517,000 career employees. In addition, its non-career workforce remained at 136,000 which was fairly steady. However, part of this growth was due to DeJoy’s policy which turned thousands of non-career employees in to career ones. Previously, USPS has cut more than 200,000 positions since its peak around the turn of the century. However, the company has managed to stabilize things in the past few years.

“Right now, to get to break-even, I think we may need to get 50,000 people out of the organization. But that’s OK, because over [the next 10 years] 200,000 people leave the organization for retirement. So we’re going to be a hiring organization. We need to be good at retention, we need to be good at recruiting people, and we’re doing a lot of different activity around there.” Postmaster DeJoy said as American Enterprise Institute.

Organizational restructuring at USPS

Moreover, DeJoy also explained that he has planned to close 150 annex plants over the next four years to streamline USPS. In addition, he intends to replace these annex plants with smaller number of more efficient mega-centers. Earlier, DeJoy led an effort to slash tens of thousands of non-union jobs by offering early retirement incentives. Subsequently, he came up with a plan to add 100,000 employees to support the Postal Service’s growing package business.

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