US Postal Service

I had a conversation the other day with a mail carrier.

It seems that in addition to his regular work, he is now asked to deliver mail for an extra route.

Exactly why this has happened is not clear to me. It is partially due to illnesses and absences among the other mail carriers.

However, he described one important detail. He was being given two hours work, but with a supervisor's note or official document describing it as an extra 1.5 hours.

In other words, the supervisor is stealing from those whom he supervises.

The guy suggested that the supervisor intended to get the mail carriers moving more quickly,

and that it would be impossible to carry out 2 hours of delivery in 1.5 hours.

On the other hand, there is the case of my mother complaining that the local mail carrier has been dropping mail at the wrong address. Not hard to explain if supervisors are pushing the carriers to work faster.

This smells. It is exactly the same as speeding up an assembly line.

I have to add one comment.

It is easy enough--or natural in the USA--to focus on individuals. That would be a mistake. It is not a question of one bad supervisor. There is a real system here. And until that system is changed, the individual efforts of individual workers or supervisors or bloggers won't make a big difference.

I know people who might say that I am advocating "fatalism" when I say that. But it would not be fatalism unless I said the system is inevitable; and it is not. It exists because a small number of powerful people benefit from it--not because it is in any sense an efficient or just system. On the other hand, there is a powerful ideology or secular religion which confuses people--especially in the USA--and makes it impossible for them to see their actual situation. One component of that system of confusion, that ideology or secular religion, is a focus upon the individual, and a concordant denial of the existence of social forces, or systemic forces. This makes it literally impossible for them to understand their own lives. Where something exists and has effects, they are literally blind to the thing itself or its effects. It is a cruel fate to be blind in that way, but it is a common fate. (I much prefer to live among a cynical people than a blindly optimistic individualist people.)