The U.S. Postal Service faces serious challenges with mail volume dropping due to the recession, but mostly due to increased usage of e-mail as well as Internet banking and bill paying. And while charged with maintaining universal service across the United States, the Postal Service lacks the necessary flexibility to adjust to changing market conditions.

Politics is part of the problem, but union contracts also are creating a burden for the Postal Service similar to that faced by Detroit's Big Three automakers in recent years.

The Postal Service announced in early August that it lost $2.4 billion in fiscal 2008, and expects a loss of $7 billion for 2009. Congress has mandated that the Postal Service be self-sustaining; it is expected to bring in revenue to cover its costs, just like a regular business. But the Postal Service also faces issues that private business does not face.

The latest survival plan includes a request to Congress to eliminate one day of delivery, dropping to five days from six, and for closing some of the Postal Service's 34,000 facilities.

Closing a post office is traumatic for the local community. The people of Harmony know this firsthand after their post office was closed this summer and services, including boxes, were shifted to nearby Zelienople.

But a plan to close a post office causes an uproar and pleadings to elected officials in Congress to intervene. Still, closures of smaller post offices, such as Harmony's, should happen in thousands of small communities across the country. A recent article in the New York Times noted that 2,000 post offices serve fewer than 100 customers.

Clearly, there are too many post offices. But because salaries account for 80 percent of postal costs, closing smaller post offices will barely put a dent in the Postal Service's losses. Still, it must be done for reasonable mail delivery to survive.

And with modern technologies and a drastic drop in mail volume, there also are too many employees in the Postal Service, which reportedly is the second-largest employer in the country.

Mail volume peaked at 210 billion pieces in 2006, but expected to drop to 175 billion in 2009. Despite the 17 percent drop in volume, the Postal Service is locked into employment contracts with no layoff provisions. Postmaster General John Potter has, in recent years, reduced the payroll to 650,000 from 800,000 through attrition. Like the troubled automakers, he should reduce payroll further. But he can't.

Quoted in the Times article, Potter said, "If you are asking me to run it like a business, give me the same tools that someone would have in the private sector." That's a completely reasonable approach, except that his business is quasi-governmental with Congress acting as the unhelpful board of directors.

Another major challenge facing Potter is unheard of in the private sector. Congress recently mandated that the Postal Service make advance payments to the health benefit fund for future employees. That payment, not to cover current employees but future employees, amounts to about $5 billion a year. In addition to asking Congress for permission to drop Saturday delivery, Potter also is asking to have this benefit prepayment waived.

The Postal Service faces serious problems, and minor tweaks like closing a few hundred small post offices or dropping Saturday delivery, which could save $3 billion a year, will not return the agency to profitability. As one commentator noted of the Postal Service, "Its short-term situation is bleak, its long-term situation is really bleak."

Potter is correct in arguing that if the Postal Service is expected to operate like a business, then it should be allowed to make changes like a business. When Detroit's automakers finally faced their financial troubles, they announced large layoffs and plant closures to survive. The Postal Service should be given the ability to make similarly dramatic changes to adjust to the changing market conditions.

Even though such changes cause inconvenience to some customers and hardships to some employees, they must be done if the Postal Serv-ice is to survive.