Letter To A New Yorker Writer

 #396: A Curious Craft

............................

Dear Casey Cep,

I thoroughly enjoyed your June 28th article, What I Learned From My Mother And The U.S. Postal Service.  As a rural letter carrier for the past 34 years, it all rings true.  But you could have said more.

The astonishing secret to the rural craft, and something you may have chosen to avoid, is that we're paid a salary based on mail volume, rather than working a set number of hours.  This encourages us to promote the USPS, while seeking out work efficiencies, since we go home when we’re done.  You could call this the gamification of a win-win labor relationship.  

Our union bargains with management, with arbitration often the result.  Recently, an outside expert engineered a system for real-time workload evaluation using automatic mailpiece counts, and a hand-held, GPS-enabled device.  So, fortunately, our unusual system lives on!

Why is this fortunate?  As your mother likely discovered, familiarity with a task, joined with an incentive to seek efficiencies, results in productivity—the kind that early farm life would have cultivated at the time the rural craft was established.  

And why do we want to encourage productivity?  Because, as any economist knows, it's the basis for overall income growth.  Engineer the same gamified efficiency-seeking in other kinds of work, and the grudging 9-to-5 hourly wage, with its slow-it-down attitude, where appropriate, becomes a thing of the past.  Seeing the other crafts in my office, the city carriers, clerks, and maintenance personnel slowly pace themselves to avoid being given even more work, is a revelation, when I’m feeling the poetry of less time spent fall into place.

Very likely a simple measure of work quality is needed to encourage the favors done customers, and the avoidance of mistakes.  This is the stuff of union-management negotiation. And to attract replication, it might make sense for productivity to be shared 50/50 between labor and management.

Earlier, I noted that you likely skipped over our craft’s unique salary-based wage system.  Without deep dive context--that you likely didn’t have room for--that system would perhaps seem overly generous.  That it represents, potentially, a major step forward in how humans work, does however deserve elucidation.

Hawaiian Continuity

 #395: A Native Remake

........................

Many years ago, while finishing up a day's work picking and packing cucumbers, an elderly gentleman who was helping that day assured me that the threatening sky would hold off what looked like a sure downpour until I'd finished.  He was a native Hawaiian, born around 1900, possibly before the islands were seized by American businessmen in the 1890s.  And he was right, the rain did wait.

Another vivid memory I have is my native Hawaiian friend greeting me on New Year's Day.  He seemed to sing his salutation, like a warbling bird, one extended phrase followed by another, and another again.  I remember my chagrin at not knowing how to respond in kind.

Native Hawaiians have a good case to make that their government's overthrow was illegitimate and a great wrong--especially since it was executed by Americans who should have known better.

All this is sorted through in a recent article, What Does America Owe Hawaii?, appearing in The Atlantic's January '25 issue, written by Adrienne LaFrance, herself having grown up on the islands.   Its subtitle is: The Hawaiians Who Want Their Nation Back.

Though it's tempting to revisit the article's highlights, I'll instead point out something that's probably occurred to many readers: native Hawaiian culture is widely admired, and millions of people around the world not only sympathize with, but would dearly like to assist Native Hawaiians in re-establishing their cultural nation.  What's holding things up?

Come up with a plan that would see native culture rejuvenated.  For example:

  * Here's where a first dwelling is to be built.  

  * This family/community/village-to-be has been chosen by our group. 

  * There are many more waiting to get started, each with a proposed plan.

  * Here is what the land, etc., will cost.

  * These criteria are what we use in picking each plan.

  * This is what our first selection will look like, once built.

  * If we find the financing, we will grow this big.

  * Here is what we hope to accomplish in 50 years.

If a visionary plan (the above is a blank canvass) is coupled with fairly well-known fundraisers, the sky's the limit.

Kicking off the fundraising, I'd donate $250 just to see a plan come together.