Washington Post “fact-checker” gives NALC Two Pinocchios and Congressman Gerry Connolly Three Pinocchios on its estimate of jobs lost due to elimination of Saturday delivery.

The U.S. Postal Service’s push to eliminate Saturday delivery for all but parcels has spawned a war over the number of jobs that would be eliminated. Lawmakers such as Connolly cite an estimate of 80,000 that was generated by the National Association of Letter Carriers. The NALC says its number comes from USPS data. But the USPS, in a letter to Congress, claims the figure is really just 25,000 full-time equivalent jobs — and it will be accomplished through attrition, not layoffs.

What’s going on here?

On the face of it, 80,000 jobs seems high, especially considering that more than half of the USPS workforce are letter carriers. Could the plan really eliminate one-quarter of the letter carriers?

The NALC says its 80,000 estimate comes from a 2010 presentation made by the Postal Service about an earlier plan to eliminate Saturday delivery — a plan that, incidentally, did not include any parcel delivery on Saturday. The presentation is embedded below, but the two key data points are: reducing the number of city carrier-technicians by 25,846 and the number of rural carrier associates by 53,240.

Accounting Office, in a 2011 assessment of the 2009 proposal, concluded that the number of rural carriers affected translated into 9,926 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions. Overall, the GAO said, the 2009 plan would have resulted in a reduction of 40,000 FTE positions.

Already, you can see how USPS and the mail-carriers union are talking apples and oranges. Calculating the impact in FTEs is best way to understand the impact of a proposal, especially when many part-time employees are involved. While Connolly’s statement did include the phrase “part-time,” it becomes more misleading when the bulk of the jobs affected are part-time.

How many people would be ‘out of work’ if USPS eliminates Saturday delivery?