Can E-Commerce Save USPS?

The U.S. Postal Service should be doing a better job of serving e-commerce retailers and customers, according to the postal workers union — and the union is making that a bargaining issue in its first contract negotiations since 2010.

The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) proposal for longer and more convenient hours for customers to pick up e-commerce packages is joining other recommendations for new post office functions that include postal banking and public notary services. Negotiations on the new contract started on Thursday (Feb. 19).

For the union, more convenient pickup times translates into more jobs for APWU members, who have been largely left out of the USPS’s experiments with same-day, overnight and Sunday deliveries for both e-commerce packages and groceries — at least officially. Those projects have mostly used “non-career employees,” although in practice many of the workers are regular postal workers picking up extra hours.

The union’s new focus on e-commerce also lines up with the thinking of new Postmaster General Megan Brennan, who sees e-commerce deliveries as a big part of the postal service’s future. Holiday e-commerce helped to drive shipping and package volume up 12.8 percent in the last three months of 2014, while first-class mail volumes dropped by 1.1 percent.

Along with e-commerce-related improvements, the union said it will also be pushing for the Postal Service to adopt a proposal made by the USPS’s Office of the Inspector General in January 2014 to expand non-bank financial services offered at local post offices, aimed at unbanked customers. Those could include reloadable prepaid cards with features that encourage people to save money, mobile transactions, new types of domestic and international money transfers, and even small loans that would be offered in partnership with banks, the Inspector General’s report said last year. The Postal Service currently sells money orders, and until 1967 it also offered savings accounts.

But while new e-commerce-related services only have to be approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission, new financial services would have a tougher slog — they would have to be approved by Congress.