Millions of workers are served well by its current structure, as are all Americans.

My local post office is in crisis. Claiming that the U.S. Postal Service is in danger of financial collapse, the Postmaster General is proposing to close thousands of post offices and postal facilities, reduce services like Saturday delivery, lay off more workers, change benefit programs, and end protection against layoffs. In addition, current legislation in the House of Representatives (H.R. 2309) would create a "solvency authority" with power to unilaterally cut wages, change benefits, and end layoff protections. At the same time, it would create a board charged with delivering $2 billion worth of post office and facility closures in two years. Both efforts seriously erode the collective bargaining process that gives workers a voice on the job.

Maybe you agree with these measures. Have you grumbled that you had to stand in line at the post office -- inefficient? The wrong mail got delivered to your house -- incompetent? You're not protected from lay-offs, so why should government workers be protected -- wasted tax dollars? You don't need Saturday delivery -- money saved?

But have you looked at how the entire system actually works?

In 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) convention delegates that union members need to tell their stories and educate the public about their problems. Well, I recently went to the convention of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and heard Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, and Jane Broendel, secretary-treasurer of the National Association of Letter Carriers, explain clearly and succinctly why the Postal Service is not failing, why we should respect the people who go to work there every day, and how we can help make all of them more successful, contributing to a stronger economy. Here is what I learned.

The United States Postal Service:

1. Receives no taxpayer dollars
2. Is funded by the products and services it sells
3. Working with its unions, has already reduced its workforce by 110,000 employees, improved efficiency, and introduced new products and services
4. Handles more than 40 percent of the world's mail more efficiently and at lower cost than other services
5. Despite the growth of the digital world, continues to support a $1 trillion mailing industry with more than 8 million jobs
6. Has a workforce that is made up of 40 percent women, 40 percent minorities, and 22 percent veterans, many disabled

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There is a crisis, but it is not because the Postal Service is inefficient and its workers overpaid. It is because the Postal Service:

7. Is the only federal agency or private company required to pre-fund retiree health benefits for 75 years
8. Is therefore required to pay $5.5 billion annually to the Treasury, an amount not required of any other agency or company

Without these unique requirements, it would have earned a surplus of over $600 million during the last four years. In addition, the USPS:

9. Has over-paid its obligations to the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) by an estimated $50 billion (and this money should be returned)
10. Has overfunded the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) by approximately $6.9 billion (and would be profitable if these funds were returned)

H.R. 1351, the "United States Postal Service Pension Obligation Recalculation and Restoration Act of 2011," would begin to solve part of the problem by requiring the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to transfer the billions of dollars in overpayments to the retirement funds to the retiree health benefits account.

Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union and a Vietnam veteran, told Congress, "As postal workers, we have been able to fulfill the American dream of holding a job that pays a living wage and provides health insurance for families with a dignified retirement when we can no longer work."

My sister-in-law is a letter carrier in southern California. With over 20 years service on her route, in addition to delivering the mail she knows the elderly and the sick and checks when mail is left in the box. She asks about birthdays and anniversaries. For some, hers is the only friendly face they see all week, a link to the wider world. In my small community of Moss Beach, many people gather at the post office to pick up their mail, meet neighbors, and learn what is going on in the neighborhood. The postal service is more than a job and more than products and services. It has been part of our history and our communities for over 200 years.

If you want more information about what is happening today, ask your letter carrier when he or she delivers your mail or stop and see your post master when you go into town. You can join the Save America's Postal Service Rallies on September 27. As Eleanor Roosevelt told the union delegates, "We can't just talk. We have got to act."

Brigid O'Farrell's most recent book is She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker. She is an Independent Scholar living in Moss Beach, CA.

If the U.S. wants to tackle climate change and stay competitive in the global economy, it needs to stop playing by the old rules and start making new ones.

The looming global warming catastrophe could be worse, in the long term, than any war, social collapse, or single famine in human history. We need to scale up renewable technologies as quickly as possible -- by any means necessary. And that is exactly what the Chinese are doing. According to Steven Lacey at Climate Progress, while world solar cell manufacturing capacity was only 100 MW in 2000, it is now 50,000 MW –- and China by itself accounts for 57 percent. But this puts Americans, including Lacey and other environmentalists, in a peculiar position. On the one hand, we desperately want more solar and other renewable technologies. But on the other hand, by scaling up so fast, the Chinese might wipe out the American solar panel industry. Instead of trying to stop the Chinese from doing what they are doing, the U.S. needs to learn from them.

The environmental community has tended to contradict itself when it comes to rolling out renewable technologies. On the one hand, leaders such as Al Gore and my personal favorite global visionary, Lester Brown, call for a World War II-style mobilization to quickly convert our civilization so that we can avert ecological calamity. But the means advocated, such as putting a price on carbon, are not up to the task. We can't afford to wait to see if the market will do what is necessary.

The Chinese are not putting a price on carbon. In fact, they won't even negotiate a target for how much carbon they will output by 2020 or any other date. But they are doing something much more important: They are showing the world how you scale up a technology with a World War II type of effort. Some call it “cheating,” but if this is cheating, let's have much more. What are the Chinese doing right?

First, China has a five-year plan. In the U.S., corporations have five-year plans, and so does the Department of Defense. But imagine a president giving a State of the Union address announcing such a plan. There would be cries of “socialism!” I say, socialism, shmocialism, whatever works. The longer the time range, the better. Congress is now debating a multi-year transportation bill; the same should be done for the entire energy sector.

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Second, many Chinese “banks," if you want to call them that, make money virtually free, and often don't even get their “loans” back. The government gives companies land –- which, by the way, Lincoln and the Republicans gave to railroads when obstructionist Southern Democrats were out of the way during the Civil War. Where would the U.S. be today if the railroad industry hadn't received a huge boost at the dawn of the industrial era, or if the Internet hadn't received a similar boost 100 years later?

Third, the Chinese import foreign technology and require foreign companies that set up factories in China to train Chinese engineers. Ever since the British tried to prohibit their engineers from traveling at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution so that Britain could maintain its dominance, other countries have been trying obtain -- or, as the originating country calls it, steal -- new technology. In a way this, is all part of a 1,000-year cycle, as the West gained many important technologies like the compass, printing, and gunpowder from the Chinese, who are now borrowing technology back.

Fourth, the Chinese are producing hundreds of thousands of engineers for their expanding manufacturing economy. Forty percent of the engineers in the U.S. are involved with manufacturing, according to a New York Times piece by Louis Uchitelle. Uchitelle reports that the Chinese manufacturing sector has either just grown larger than the American one or will shortly do so. As manufacturing declines here, it becomes much less attractive to have a career as an engineer. In China, on the other hand, being an engineer is a clear way to make it into the good life.

The point is not to idolize China. Far from it -- China is in a race to see whether it can switch to clean technologies before its dirty ones overwhelm its ecosystem and cause its economy to collapse, and its currency is much too low. But nations have always learned from other nations. Sometimes, the “teachers” cry “unfair!” when the “students” don't play by the rules. One hundred years ago, the British complained that the Americans were always copying their inventions.

But innovation is not simply a matter of technology; it is also a matter of policy. If something works, use it, even if it offends conventional wisdom. In fact, particularly if it offends conventional wisdom. That's what happened during the New Deal era of the 1930s, when the old policies were clearly failing and new ones had to be put in place (for instance, instead of tinkering with market rules in order to develop the Tennessee Valley, the TVA rebuilt the whole area). With global warming and other environmental problems, such as the end of cheap oil, threatening civilization, we need policy innovations even more than we need technological ones.

Jon Rynn is the author of the book Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The power to rebuild the American middle class, available from Praeger Press. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and is a Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems.

One of the key tenets of Obama's jobs plan rests on a program that is dubious at best.

In his jobs proposal, President Obama called for a modification of unemployment insurance based on Georgia Works, a proposal the administration refers to as the "most innovative reform to the unemployment insurance program in 40 years.” Georgia Works is a program wherein workers on unemployment insurance:

have the opportunity to train with a potential employer for a maximum of 24 hours per week for up to eight weeks. The Georgia Department of Labor (GDOL) provides a stipend and workers compensation coverage to participating job seekers. Employers pay nothing to these trainees. GW$ provides employers the opportunity to train and appraise candidates at no cost. There is no obligation to hire any given trainee...

Congressional conservatives such as Eric Cantor like the program, so there's a good chance it might pass. I actually missed the debate about this from a few weeks ago -- Zaid Jilani at Think Progress has a summary of some pros and cons from the time.

I'm fascinated by the terms under which people might justify this as a good program or would say it is a failed program. Its ideology works well for people who are concerned that our workforce lacks the training for 21st century jobs: it allows workers to brush up their skills at no wages so they'll be prepared to take on a job at the end. But even a quick glance at the underlying data shows that, instead of a program to jump-start education and training for skilled jobs, it looks like the Georgia Department of Labor is running a low-skills temp agency out of its UI fund for the benefit of employers.

Do the Numbers Fail?

How would you use the data to justify taking this program to a large, national scale? There are three hypotheses I can imagine being in play, and all of them turn out to have major problems.

The first hypothesis is that people who go through the program get hired for jobs. Now the comparison to be made isn't between getting hired and not getting hired; the comparison should be between those who do the program versus those who just keep on looking without using the program. Turns out that is problematic. As Jesse Rothstein told Arthur Delaney:

From its 2003 launch to the end of 2010, some 30,866 trainees entered the program, according to data provided to HuffPost by the Georgia Department of Labor. Of that total, 5,089 workers -- 16.4 percent -- were hired by the company that trained them during or at the end of the training period. (The department says that among workers who completed the full eight-week training, the employment rate is 24 percent.)...

Census Bureau data show that in 2007 and 2008, 15 percent of Georgians who'd been out of work for six months or longer found work within one month of a survey, according to Jesse Rothstein, an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2009 and 2010, the number fell to 10 percent.

So the transition from unemployment to employment looks to be very similar between those who do the program and those who don't, with the big difference being that those who do the program spend upwards of 24 hours a week working for free. Around 70% of Georgia Works participants are women. In so much as the workers in this program will have low skills and thus low resources (more on this in a second), it is likely much of their "leisure" time is spent on child care, uncompensated work in the household, or economizing household purchasing power -- there probably isn't much superfluous time to just give away to employers.

Hypothesis two, the most important one, is that these jobs require unique skills and the potential workforce doesn't have the right ones. Thus a special training period is necessary. What kind of jobs would these be? They would require more education than normal low-skill jobs. They would be jobs that are difficult to be productive in right away. They would involve new technologies, especially in manufacturing, that go beyond the normal workforce. They would cluster in the "some college" category at least.

Eileen Appelbaum of CEPR looked into the jobs data and concluded that for those who

found employment between November 24, 2009 and September 30, 2010 shows two-fifths found jobs doing general clerical work. Hundreds more found jobs as non-professional child care workers, janitors, retail sales persons, restaurant and fast food workers, hotel clerks and maids, or drivers and chauffeurs. In total, 70 percent of the trainees hired after the end of the training program found employment in these or similar low-wage jobs.

I was able to get the same data on successful job hires through the Georgia Works program for the period from November 2009 to October 2010. The total number of successful hires was 7,997, and they are divided up by NCCI code for categories. Here's a chart showing some of the major jobs types that stood out. Sixty percent of Georgia Works hires belong to four broad job categories:

What does this tell us? All of these jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), require a high school diploma or less. They are all jobs that are "de-skilled": the types of jobs someone can go into and out of and be relatively productive at day one. Many of them are high churn, high turnover jobs. Indeed, they seem more characteristic of a temp agency than an institution that is focused on jobs that require skills to accelerate productivity.

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Next I took the top 30 classifications in the data and cross-indexed them based on my reading to education requirements and hourly wage as found in the OOH. The top thirty job classifications represent 80% of the hires of Georgia Works, so it is a representative sample. As you can see, I had trouble finding jobs in the top 40 occupations that required even an associate's degree, much less a college degree. This is the percentage of jobs by education level:

Among the top 30 jobs in Georgia Works, it is more likely that a given job will require less than a high school diploma, or no formal education, than it would require an associate's degree. They are more likely to be jobs like janitors, restaurant servers, and maids than those that require new skills and specific training unique to the new century. Even the high school level includes a lot of jobs -- clerical work, storage warehouses, drivers, retail -- that allude more to temp agencies than high-tech.

A third hypothesis is that workers will make more money if they are hired through this program than through normal job searches. In this hypothesis, giving labor away is a sign of being a non-shirking worker and employers will largely compensate back the lost hours in the post-hire salary.

That's a simple empirical question I don't have the data for. But I did notice this slide in this October 2010 presentation on Georgia Works, A Perspective Toward Job Growth and Training Initiatives in a Recovering Economy:

If, after examining the data closely, you can go around telling employers that they are saving over $20 million dollars -- savings that must come from not paying salaries -- it's hard for me to think that it ultimately nets out back to workers.

A Failure in Ideology?

Here's a cool thing about neoliberal policy: you can justify any kind of terrible proposal by invoking the idea of a market and throwing more weight on the back of that already overburdened word "choice."

So I could say, "This certainly looks like a way to run a low-skill temp agency giving weeks of free labor to employers, employers who already probably have monopsony power and labor that is effectively deskilled, with taxpayers picking up the tab." A neoliberal would then respond, "Well this program gives people the market dynamism of the choice to be choosing in the market of choice for the market of uncompensated labor, a choice market that synergizes with employer's full choice of market wages," and in our age that would somehow constitute a strong retort. Repeat that enough and the policy fellowships will just start falling into your lap.

But we have to step back and think: What kind of labor contract do we want the government creating, encouraging, and setting boundaries on? I've been discussing how our laws, courts, and institutions create the free-floating notion of a "free" labor contract. For all the talk about "choice," this program nudges people into working for free in what are likely already difficult, exploitative markets. What are already high-churn industries will now have wages depressed even further from taxpayers subsidizing unpaid labor. And the ideas that derive from it -- that the problem with our economy is that workers are lazy and stupid rather than that the fact that there are no  jobs, that employers should get more claims on work for free and that the spirit of indenture should be strengthened in the workplace -- are the ideas that liberals have to fight against in these dark times.

Mike Konczal is a Research Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

The plan isn't perfect, but women's poor employment outlook seems to be on Obama's radar.

There were a lot of rumors about what would be included in President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress yesterday. Would it be mostly tax cuts? Would it extend unemployment benefits? How much will be spent on infrastructure projects?

The last point had me slightly worried. Not because we don't have a huge need to spend vast amounts of money updating our dilapidated infrastructure. Not because we shouldn't be putting construction workers, architects, engineers, and factory workers back to work making it happen.

I was worried because those kinds of jobs are overwhelmingly held by men. And while the "mancession" meme had truth to it when the recession began -- men's unemployment rate was at 11 percent in August of 2009, while women's was 8.3 percent -- and men are still experiencing an unemployment rate of 8.9 percent, women have not been immune to the trend. And now they are sliding backward. Since the recession technically ended, women have lost 281,000 jobs, while men have gained 805,000. The percentage of women who have a job hasn't been this low since 1988.

A large chunk of their job loss has occurred in the public sector. Women lost 343,000 public-sector jobs between June 2009 and June 2011, accounting for 70 percent of the cuts. As Susan Feiner explains, women have been concentrated in this sector because many of the jobs don't challenge gender ideology (care giving roles and direct services are still seen as "feminine" work) and the schedules are often flexible, facilitating the care work that usually falls to them. So the cuts have fallen heavily on women, particularly teachers. As state budgets have been hit by shrinking tax revenues and increased spending on unemployment benefits and other safety net programs, they've slashed payrolls, often in education. About 290,000 school personnel have lost their jobs nationally since September 2008. And women make up about 78% of our pre-K to 12 teachers.

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Obama's jobs plan surprised me by taking direct aim at this phenomenon. It includes $30 billion to prevent up to 280,000 teacher layoffs. It will also help preserve or extend school days and the school year, as well as give support to after-school programs. This is really, really important. Women's unemployment won't be directly addressed by infrastructure spending, but anything to bolster schools will make a difference. It also helps us remain competitive as a country with a well-educated workforce.

But it doesn't give any relief to out of work teachers the way infrastructure spending is expected to put unemployed construction workers back on the job. And women aren't just losing teaching jobs in the public sector. They're losing jobs in the private sector as well, while men are making some small gains, with their layoffs often occurring in secretarial and administrative support roles. There are also other places women's jobs can be boosted, for example by investing in eldercare and childcare and raising the standard of living in poorly paid, low benefit service work. Meanwhile, we as a country need to work on dismantling the gender segregation in our workforce, including helping women into the construction industry and other male-heavy areas that pay well and usually come with good benefits. None of these are issues we can ignore.

But I'm happy to see that women are on Obama's radar, and it is extremely important that we save teachers' jobs. The package isn't perfect from any way you look at it, but it does hold signs that he is at least paying attention to many of the crises we face.

Bryce Covert is Assistant Editor at New Deal 2.0.