U.S. Postal Service Says 5 Percent of Workers Sign Up to Leave

About 5 percent of the U.S. Postal Service’s 525,000-employee workforce tentatively accepted an offer to leave as the agency tries to cut costs.

About 26,000 postal workers indicated they will take the service’s offer of $15,000 apiece to retire early and an additional 352 are resigning, Mark Saunders, a Postal Service spokesman, said today in an e-mail.

The service, which lost $15.9 billion last year, is trying to cut costs so it can keep paying its employees and deliver mail.