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- <text id=92TT1839>
- <title>
- Aug. 17, 1992: Pink Slips in the Mail
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Aug. 17, 1992 The Balkans: Must It Go On?
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 16
- BUSINESS
- Pink Slips in the Mail
- </hdr><body>
- <p>Carvin' Marvin finds fat aplenty in the Postal Service
- bureaucracy
- </p>
- <p> Marvin T. Runyon may never get his mug on a commemorative
- stamp, but in just one month on the job as Postmaster General,
- he has already had a bigger impact on the Postal Service's
- bottom line than the popular Elvis issue. Last Friday, in a
- dramatic bid to stem 10 straight years of red ink and
- bureaucratic bloat, he announced cuts of about 30,000 managerial
- jobs--including more than half of the top 42 posts--over the
- next three months, and a major restructuring of the way the
- service is run.
- </p>
- <p> Known as "Carvin' Marvin" during his tenure as chairman of
- the Tennessee Valley Authority, Runyon will have his hands full
- trying to remold the way 750,000 employees handle (and
- sometimes mishandle) 540 million pieces of mail each day. When
- legislators set up the Postal Service as a government-sponsored
- corporation in 1971, they naively predicted an end to taxpayer
- subsidies. But the last time the service broke even was in 1982;
- the projected deficit for this year alone is $2 billion.
- </p>
- <p> Runyon hopes to meet his target with incentives for early
- retirement, but some layoffs seem unavoidable. Even so, union
- leaders applauded the fact that Marvin started carvin' from the
- top.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
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