The Postal Service will also continue to squeeze costs out of its workforce, pledging to reach new collective bargaining agreements with employee unions that provide more favorable terms to the agency. It will enhance its pay-for-performance for non-union workers to better reward top employees. In the last decade, USPS has slashed 84,000 career positions in favor of creating lower compensated non-career posts. The agency has also established a new tier of lower-earning career workers. Still, postal management said retirement pensions and retiree health care make up 35% of its personnel costs, which continue to rise faster than inflation. The Postal Service said it must have legislative changes to those cost drivers or identify “other means of financing.” It previously detailed a 10-year business plan to Congress in which it floated dramatic changes to employees’ pay and benefits.

USPS also promised to give employees better technology to carry out their jobs, such as equipping all workers with smart devices, and to improve oversight of worker safety.

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Excerpts from USPS 5-year Business Plan as it pertains to Postal Workforce

Goal 2: Equip, Connect, Engage, and Empower Employees to Best Serve USPS Customers Goal

Description: We will endeavor to enhance the Postal Service’s role as a preferred U S employer, offering stable jobs with more flexible compensation and benefits packages to attract and retain highly qualified employees who are best equipped, connected, engaged, and empowered to serve our customers and to identify and implement new innovative products and services. Our employees are our greatest asset and have a vested interest in a strong Postal Service They are our most passionate and articulate advocates for our customers The core value we deliver to the American people is and will continue to be enabled by our employees Although we envision a smaller number of Postal Service employees, a workforce comprised of healthy, enthusiastic, engaged employees who are better connected to each other and to our customers will continue to be the foundation for bringing this vision to life.

Key Strategies and Initiatives. Our efforts are aimed to enhance the Postal Service’s status as an “employer of choice” that hires the most effective employees, and develops, equips, and empowers them to best serve our customers, and implements programs to keep them safe and healthy Key initiatives include those described in the following paragraphs

Align Employee Leadership, Development, and Incentive Programs to Delivering Excellent Customer Experiences.We will continue to implement a comprehensive process for developing our leadership and employee skills necessary to deliver great customer experiences in this competitive environment and increasingly digital world.This will include efforts to refine training requirements and career paths for employees To better understand the changing training needs and demographics of our workforce, we will develop predictive models and data-driven approaches for assessing our talent pipeline We will evolve our Human Resources (HR) services platform to be a single stop for all HR needs for employees while continuing to modernize and improve HR processes and technologies to drive employee access and platform adoption Finally, we will continue to refine and adapt our employee Pay-for-Performance (PFP) systems to ensure that we incent and reward the best performance Altogether, these efforts will improve leadership and employee readiness to drive the culture changes necessary for long-term success