"Rubber rooms" at the US Postal Service

First we heard of the "rubber rooms" in the New York school system. Now we hear that the US Postal Service has its own version of "rubber rooms."

The U.S. Postal Service, struggling with a massive deficit caused by plummeting mail volume, spends more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing.

It’s a practice called “standby time,” and it has existed for years — but postal employees say it was rarely used until this year. Now, postal officials say, the agency is averaging about 45,000 hours of standby time every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million per year.

Tell me again why we want these guys in charge of our health care.

[via Besty's Page]