Japan Postal Services Agency planning to cut 14,000 jobs

The Postal Services Agency on Monday drafted a plan to cut about 14,000 jobs in the mail service in five years’ time, officials said. The figure represents more than 10 percent of 136,000 people currently on the Postal Services Agency’s mail services payroll across the nation. The job-cutting plan is part of the agency’s comprehensive streamlining project involving three areas: mail services, postal savings and insurance services. As the first step in the plan, the agency will cut the number of new graduates joining the ranks in the three areas in April 2002 to about 4,400, about 40 percent fewer than the previous year, marking a postwar record low. The restructuring plan aims to cut tens of billions of yen in labor costs, and turn the postal service into a money-making business. The service is expected to post a deficit of more than 30 billion yen this fiscal year. The Public Management Ministry, which governs the agency, has already started talks with the postal labor union over the job-cutting program. The ministry hopes to win agreement from the union by the end of August, officials said. The program relies on a reduction in hiring as well as general attrition in the overall workforce. In the program, early retirement will be encouraged in return for incentive benefits, officials said. Job-cutting efforts will concentrate on the area of postal service, which has been suffering from greater deficits than the other two areas. The postal service has been in the red since fiscal 1998, when it recorded a 62.5 billion yen deficit in the face of an economic recession and a drastic upsurge in the use of e-mail messaging. The areas of postal savings and insurance services will see only a few hundred jobs vanish each year during the same five-year period. Both areas now retain a combined 107,000 employees. In the same project, the Postal Services Agency is contemplating cutting jobs among middle-ranking managerial posts in its head office and managerial positions in local post offices, according to officials.