#396: A Curious Craft
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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.
