Belts Tightening at Postal Service

The U.S. Postal Service says it eliminated about 23,000 positions in fiscal 2002 and plans to reduce another 12,000 positions by attrition during the current fiscal year. The cuts are part of a plan to reduce expenses by $5 billion through 2006. USPS says it is now down to its staffing levels of 1995 even though it is delivering 21 billion more pieces of mail to 12 million more addresses.