I feel like being a postman is a pretty sucky job nowadays (it’s essentially the same time-pressured “throw the parcel at the door” service that FedEx and UPS insist on, but for the government.)
But there’s a lot of potential for it to be a good, rewarding job full of community-building. And it used to be! Postal workers used to provide all sorts of informal, impromptu community services, since they were one of the few people in a town that would visit everyone in town, or in an area of town; and so one of the few people in town who would know literally everybody. Postal workers were asked to check up on people no one had seen in a while; asked to escort people’s children to their relative’s house (which tabloids called “mailing your children”); and many other “little” services that nowadays have no real locus-of-responsibility on which to fall.
Maybe the problem is that there’s more mail to be delivered than there are postal workers to deliver it; and we can’t afford, through our taxes, the number of postal workers that would actually be required to deliver all the mail while also going above-and-beyond in all these other ways.
I wonder whether, in a world with Universal Basic Income, being a postal worker would be seen as a vocation, like being a priest. Not something you do for money; rather, something you do because you like the effect it has on your community, and want to be a part of that effect. I have a feeling that there’d be a lot more stories like this in such a world.
only tangentially now. Royal Mail was privatised some years ago and is now just another courier business. Of course, people don't fully realise that and expect that it will carry out the same service it always has. The 'Universal Service Obligation' which provides that items will be delivered nationwide for the same price is only guaranteed until 2021. The CEO (Rico Back) who lives in Switzerland is a mercenary character so I would expect some changes after then.
A friend used to deliver for usps, it’s way less pressured than UPS/FedEx.
My understanding is they were given a block of paid time to deliver mail for a physical area, but no real expectation on total time taken. So you could get your route done in whatever duration you please and benefit accordingly.
An interesting comparison can be made from my front window: USPS truck parks in front of my house, postman talks on phone for 10-15 mins, finally gets out, walks the residential neighborhood delivering mail all the while talking on phone, eventually returns to truck dicks around and leaves to next waypoint. UPS guy drives up, almost screeching to a halt, hops out, typically jogs up front walk with package, jogs back and takes off. Those guys are under a lot of pressure to deliver.
I know the USPS guy who delivers to work office downtown, he’s super chill and pretty chatty (zero hurry).
IOW, I think being a USPS delivery guy is still a rewarding, community focused job if you have the personality to handle the routine and like to get your steps in. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder, it’s Union, and with seniority you can choose your routes.
At the same time, I get annoyed at people getting so offended over the idea. Why should everyone have to work like the UPS guy? It sounds like the UPS driver's job is unsustainable and will either lead to an accident or injury at some point.
I don't know why everything has to be run down to the wire in the name of minimizing cost and maximizing profit.
> I don't know why everything has to be run down to the wire in the name of minimizing cost and maximizing profit.
There's no real "why" to it. It's not like any individual in a corporation chooses to run the corporation that way. It's rather an emergent effect of how corporations are legally structured (= shareholders electing/firing directors from the board based on quarterly results.) Directors are incentivized to pursue short-term profits during their tenure (such as by overworking employees), to enable them to enjoy the spoils of their positions for as long as possible.
A corporation can be "designed" intentionally to do something other than this (by e.g. choosing to create a benefit corporation; or even just by the founder retaining majority ownership and thus effectively "being" the board) but if you don't explicitly make a choice, being driven by quarterly profitability is what you get.
No - it's a natural product of competition, the pressure of which exists regardless of your legal structure. A sole proprietor running a courier service will need to differentiate himself relative to the other courier services, and the potential customers of such services place immense value on timeliness. Even if the courier were a non-profit, for it to be selected in favor of a competing service it would need to choose the basis upon which it wanted to compete and excel at it. USPS is sufficient for many things (e.g. 70% junk mail), but it's not a market competitor. Where it matters, there's a need to differentiate to survive. When our business needs something overnighted fast and reliably, it's always a private carrier for a reason that doesn't involve its legal structure.
In some European countries, it used to be a vocation, and there used to be a choice being made for the postman job to be a meaningful one. I know first hand a postman who works longer hours for free because he believes it's his duty to keep performing the whole social aspect of his job. He'll help older, illiterate people send and read mail, and won't pass the opportunity for a daily chat with the people who need it.
When the Belgian postal service was privatized, the productivity of workers doubled (or so I've heard). But I don't think the efficiency of the whole logistics sector benefited from it. Some businesses are natural monopolies, and no optimization and mistreatment of workers are going to make up for turning one dense delivery round performed by a lazy postman into several ones performed by overworked gig economy delivery workers.
I feel like it’s only gotten to be a time pressured, low interaction profession in urban areas where economics is against community. It might still be a great job in smaller towns.
It's the other way around, economically speaking. The expensive routes that lose the postal service money are the rural ones. If they only delivered within and between cities, they be okay. (And if one political party wasn't bent on their destruction they'd also be okay. Obviously I'm speaking about the US postal system here.)
Agreed, and anecdotally, we live in a very large US city and know our postman and our UPS delivery guy. It's been extremely helpful on more than one occasion, he even personally texted me when I wasn't home to say he could come by later. I always love chatting with them on the stoop.
I think this depends a lot on the area. In a minor city, the post is likely to be the same guy delivering letters every day for a few blocks. I guess you can get used to it and it's not too terrible a job.
All the letters (tax, benefits, work, bank, bills) across thousands of households and a few businesses must be sustaining a permanent job. There is still a ton of physical mails despite the adoption of emails.
However package delivery, by opposition to letters, is always a terrible job by nature.
We’re easily 70% junk mail at our house. I don’t know if junk mail is what underwrites the whole endeavor or if netted out the service would be far more efficient if that were eliminated (e.g. prices hiked to restrict 70% of gross tonnage moved).
In 2017, the French postal service ("La Poste") formalized this and made it a paid service to check up on elderly people ("Veiller sur mes parents"). Relatedly, La Poste was privatized in 2014.
There were some protests as it used to be done for free (so implicitely pro bono / sponsored by the state) for decades.
Pretty much all new communities (within like the last 10 years) where I am get the centralized “community mail boxes”. Pretty hard to get to know your carrier that way.
But there’s a lot of potential for it to be a good, rewarding job full of community-building. And it used to be! Postal workers used to provide all sorts of informal, impromptu community services, since they were one of the few people in a town that would visit everyone in town, or in an area of town; and so one of the few people in town who would know literally everybody. Postal workers were asked to check up on people no one had seen in a while; asked to escort people’s children to their relative’s house (which tabloids called “mailing your children”); and many other “little” services that nowadays have no real locus-of-responsibility on which to fall.
Maybe the problem is that there’s more mail to be delivered than there are postal workers to deliver it; and we can’t afford, through our taxes, the number of postal workers that would actually be required to deliver all the mail while also going above-and-beyond in all these other ways.
I wonder whether, in a world with Universal Basic Income, being a postal worker would be seen as a vocation, like being a priest. Not something you do for money; rather, something you do because you like the effect it has on your community, and want to be a part of that effect. I have a feeling that there’d be a lot more stories like this in such a world.