Mailers' Groups Blast NALC Deal

Three mailers' organizations blasted a labor deal with the National Association of Letter Carriers today as proof that the “spendthrift monopolist” U.S. Postal Service “cannot be counted on to control its costs or prices.”

“Rather than bringing compensation more in line with the private sector – as required by postal law – the tentative agreement with NALC worsens the problem,” said a joint statement from Postcom—The Association for Postal Commerce, MPA—The Association of Magazine Media, and the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers.

In defending the current inflation-based price cap on most postal rates, the statement said, the coalition has presented expert testimony showing "that postal workers are paid nearly twice what the private sector pays for similar work."

“The NALC contract confirms that the Postal Service cannot be trusted to make the tough decisions needed to control its own costs.”

The collective bargaining agreement released May 12 would give career letter carriers three pay raises totaling 4.7% over the 40-month life of the contract in addition to seven cost-of-living adjustments. The three mailers groups indicated that the Postal Service didn’t get anything in return for the generous pay package, such as the ability to save money by filling openings with more low-paid non-career employees.

Keeping the cap on CCAs
“Instead of continuing a shift to lower-cost employees, the agreement converts many City Carrier Assistants (“CCAs”) to career status and preserves existing narrow limits on the total number of CCAs that the Postal Service may employ,” the statement said.

“The NALC deal is only one of a recent series of collective bargaining agreements that widen the postal employee compensation premium rather than narrowing it.” The NALC says the contract would cover 213,000 active employees if the union’s members ratify it.

“It is commendable that USPS provides stable, middle-class employment for a large number of employees, but substantially over-compensating them, and paying for this with above-inflation rate increases for mailers, is inappropriate and jeopardizes the whole enterprise. There are proven ways to rein in excess labor costs without disrupting the lives of existing employees,” the coalition's statement said.

Postal officials are seeking legislative relief from the 10-year-old law that keeps rate increases proportional to changes in the Consumer Price Index. But the coalition, along with other mailers, argues that the cap has forced more financial discipline on the USPS and prevented it from imposing large rate increases that would hurt both mailers and the Postal Service itself.

Related articles:

• Why the Rate Cap Isn't Killing the Postal Service 
• Is the APWU Eating Its Young?
• USPS Cost Cutting Ain't Cuttin' It, Mailers Group Says

Ten Words That Summarize What Happened to Publishing in 2014

OK, fellow publishing fans, you can’t be ready to face this new year without understanding what happened in 2014. Here are the 10 words (yes, “magazine media” and “native advertising” are single words) that summarize the year that just was, along with links that provide further information:

1) Quorum: Demonstrating its indifference to one of the nation’s largest employers, Congress failed to act on fix vacancies on the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors, causing it to lose its quorum. It’s yet another example of USPS’s “Congressional oversight” turning into “Congressional overlooking,” except when there’s a chance to name post offices. And it's another reminder to publishers of magazines and daily newspapers that our primary means of distribution is still at risk.

Leaked Google document showed its preference for web sites
associated with print brands.

2) Penguin: As they watched their search-related web traffic soar, magazine and newspaper publishers came to realize that the evil empire of Google had now turned friendly. With its Penguin and Panda algorithm tweaks and other enhancements, the search giant increasingly referred people to credible web sites anchored by trustworthy print brands. Late in the year, Facebook also jumped onto the We Love Print Brands bandwagon.

3) Magazine media: Magazine people laughed at first at this new moniker for our industry. But now that a few magazines get a majority of their revenue from digital media and almost all have branched out into multiple non-magazine ventures, 2014 was the year the MPA-created term began to stick. We're not just magazine publishers any more, we tell anyone who will listen, but we're still having trouble figuring out exactly how to describe ourselves. That’s in stark contrast with daily newspaper publishers, who know exactly what they are: Screwed, unless they can find a patient billionaire to buy them.

Wholesaler's bankruptcy led to empty magazine racks.

4) Niche: Every month, it seemed, brought another web site that decided to delve into the magazine business, mostly with highly targeted publications. But the traditional consumer-magazine world of bloated circulation and egos continued shrinking, with stalwarts like Ladies Home Journal shutting down, others reducing their ratebase, and a major magazine newsstand distributor going belly up. A testament to the industry’s increased nichification: The number of U.S. magazines keeps growing, but the nation’s coated-paper industry finished the year with half the capacity it had just 11 years ago.

5) Antitrust: The U.S. Justice Department didn’t bat an eye when Quad/Graphics turned the large-publication printing market into a virtual duopoly by buying out Brown Printing. But it dithered for nearly the full year about the proposed merger of ailing paper makers Verso and NewPage, finally approving the deal on Dec. 31 -- but only after a major divestiture. These, after all, are the same antitrust geniuses who, deciding Amazon’s 90% share of the ebook market wasn’t big enough, went after Apple and major book publishers.

A destroyer of printed books and magazines? Nope.

6) Plateau: Even the enthusiasts who predicted a few years ago that ebooks would soon dominate the book scene finally started admitting in 2014 that ebook sales in the U.S. had reached a plateau, with a market share of less than 25%. Another supposedly disruptive force, digital magazines, also ran out of steam after achieving a much smaller share of the U.S. magazine market. The collapse of digital magazines is being aided by consumers’ shift from tablets to smartphones and abetted by Apple’s incompetence and indifference, as demonstrated by the woeful state of its Newsstand app.

7) Accountability: Advertisers began awakening to the reality that they were being duped by social-media marketing enthusiasts (“Let’s get everyone on Facebook to join the conversation about our toothpaste!”), content-marketing hucksters, and advertising impressions targeted at bots. Kraft even fired most of its advertising agencies, apparently deciding that targeting ads to people who Google “gang rape” is not the best strategy for selling “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product" (Velveeta).

8) Measurement: With the rising emphasis on accountability came a growing interest in measurement. The advertising industry started pushing for new ways to measure how many people see a web ad, and for how long, after realizing that a majority of the advertising “impressions” served by ad networks were never visible to an actual human being. Meanwhile, the MPA moved the goalposts on the measures of magazines’ success, emphasizing growing web audiences and omitting the depressing news about trends in ad pages.

9) FutureMark: The closure of FutureMark Paper, which was the only North American manufacturer that made coated paper containing mostly recycled fiber, provided stark evidence of a troubling development: Publishers, and perhaps the public, seem to have lost interest in using environmentally friendly paper. Or perhaps they are having trouble distinguishing between “green” and “non-green” papers.

10) Native advertising: Pundits, editors, and marketers spent the entire year debating whether native advertising was a savior or sellout for publishers. It would help if the debaters could agree on a definition for what they’re arguing about. Is it native only if it masquerades as editorial content? Does native necessarily involve the co-opting of journalists? What’s clear is that marketers are becoming disillusioned with banner ads but still see the web sites of reputable publishers as attractive venues for engaging the hearts and minds of potential customers.

For further reading: 

• Is Print Really Killing Publishers?

• Who Killed the Magazine App?: 9 Suspects

• Are Printed Magazines Growing or Shrinking? Yes

Thrown Overboard: Publishers Feel Abandoned by the U.S. Postal Service

Until recently, Postal Service executives talked about periodicals as “the anchor in the mailbox.” But lately, says one publishing executive, it seems that “the USPS just tied us to the anchor and threw it overboard.”

With the demise of “Aunt Minnie mail” (personal letters), USPS officials talked about magazines and newspapers as the key to “the mailbox moment” when people excitedly check their mail. But in recent months publishers have grown increasingly nervous about their reliance on a nearly insolvent Postal Service that seems ready to jettison them, including a recent proposal to abolish the Periodicals class altogether.

“What’s a publisher to do when the mailbox is in danger of collapse?” the MPA (AKA The Association of Magazine Media) asks in a description of its Feb. 2 Postal Summit. The brochure  reflects what seems to be the entire magazine industry’s feelings about USPS these days -- and why publishers everywhere are saying, “How the hell do we get more of our subscribers switched over from print to the iPad, or the Nook, or whatever?”