officer, which is my idea. and that person would keep the post office as cutting edge of innovation and bringing in new ways to of making money. the over thing we re going to have to do is we are going to have to do some downsizing. but when we downsize, is reto downsize with compassion. keep in mind we have more than 100,000 people that are right now eligible to retire. and what we have to do now is make sure that they have a decent parachute to land. in other words, to give them some incentive money so they can go ahead and retire, and so that we can right size the post office. keep in mind every time, melissa, that the post office tries to do something. right. to correct itself or to make it possible to get new revenue or whatever, the congress comes in and says oh, no, you can t do that. they wanted to close down some post offices that are not being productive. congress says no, that s not you can t do that in my community. right, right. they want to close a plant down, a
cummings. do you have concerns about these planned changes to the postal service? and particularly the impact that it might have on black communities? oh, no doubt about it. you re talking about just this reduction from five days to from six days to five days will cut anywhere from 25 to 30,000 employees. and with regard to asian, african-americans, and hispanics, they comprise about 40% of the postal service employees. so it s logical to believe if they were to lose that 30,000 jobs, easily 40% of them would be african-americans, hispanics, and asian americans. now, there is another thing, melissa, that a lot of people don t realize. and that is over 40% of all postal employees are women. yeah. so you have a lot of women, many of whom are single women head of household, and they depend upon that decent wage, decent working conditions and
another mother is going to get a call about another child whose life was cut short by a gun. joining me now is congressman luis gutierrez of illinois. congressman, thank you for being here. a pleasure to be with you this evening. so clearly chicago has been receiving national attention due to the high rate of gun violence. and there is a way in which that s a good story, because for a long time it was happening with no light shining on it. yes. but the other thing, it s led us to recognize the city actually has very tough gun laws. yes. what needs to be done if you already have the gun laws in place and you still have this sort of murder rate? it s so porous, right? the guns just filter through to the city of chicago. and, you know, the first thing i supported back in 1993, 20 years ago when i first arrived in congress with such fervor was the assault weapons ban. i remember when we extended it. and that was good. but, you know, melissa, on monday, i worked all day today
tomorrow morning, the last piece of this puzzle will be the coastal areas of massachusetts at about 10:00 a.m. that s the high tide cycle when we expect the storm surge to be at its highest. the wave action to be at its highest. well could have waves 10 to 15 feet right near the coast where we have a storm surge of around 3 to 4 feet. it s not going to be any sandy or anything like that that happened on the jersey shore and long island, but we could see homes with water getting in them or possibly weakening their foundations and fall do you think to the sea. we ll watch that tomorrow morning at sunrise. nbc news mobility bill cairns, thank you very much for that update. and as you just heard, bill mentioned that the area that is expected to get hit hardest from this storm is in fact boston, where there are some models that are predicting nearly 3 feet of snow. the weather channel s jim cantore is live for us from boston tonight. jim, what is the latest? yeah, melissa, we are snowin
99.99% of that comes from the sale of stamps and first class mail. and what has happened over the years, melissa, is that the people have now moved more and more towards using the internet. and so therefore since 2008, that income coming into the post office has been reduced by something like about the volume, that is, had been reduced by about 43%. so basically we have now i think and pretty much everybody admits this, we re going to have to do some downsizing because it s just not a good fit right now. we have more employees than we actually need. but there are all kinds of ways to achieve this without necessarily going through drastic measures. what do you think the congress can do at this point in order to kind of forestall the labor force decline that can happen as a result of going from six days to five days a week? you know, one of the things that happened last session, melissa, is that the senate put