THE LETTER CARRIER AND THE POSTAL SERVICE

Chapter 2 from Mailamn USA, by William C. Doherty.

c. 1960 National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC)

THE LETTER CARRIER AND THE POSTAL SERVICE

IT IS A pity that too few Americans know the facts about their postal system. Here is a tremendous system of communi­cations, the only government function that directly touches every person in the country every day of every week in the year, and yet public knowledge of its size and operation is so slight that it borders on the ridiculous.

This condition of ignorance illustrates a kind of national apathy toward our federal government. Government has grown so big in recent times that the people of this country have all but given up hope of ever comprehending its workings. No longer do people consider government something they own and control; they consider government something that happens to them. They grumble about the things in government that they don't like, but by and large they seem to be content to leave the running of the country to the politicians, and to hope that things will turn out for the best somehow, someday.

We have no divine assurance that things will turn out for the best. We enjoy no special exemption from the lessons of the past. Since the beginning of recorded history it has never been true that liberty has been won or lost in a single day. The progression upward or downward has always been gradual, almost imper­ceptible. Apathy is the element most erosive to the fabric of freedom. If allowed to spread unchecked, it invariably eats away
at the fabric until it is irretrievably ruined.

In the case of the Post Office public ignorance has produced a kind of apathy that has been expensive and extremely deleterious to the service. The American people, generally, cannot be both­ered to learn about their post office. This is so true that I find myself amazed whenever I do happen to come across a lay person who knows anything at all about the postal service.

By and large, the only civilians who do bother to learn the facts of postal life are those whose livelihood depends upon the service and whose incomes are dependent on low postage rates. I do not blame these individuals. It is their business to know cer­tain phases of the Post Office inside and out, and it is their undis­puted right to protect their interests in the Congress. But, of course, it is only natural that their approach to postal problems is somewhat one-sided.

This apathy and lack of knowledge on the part of the public has led to a corresponding apathy and lack of knowledge on the part of the majority of the members of the Congress. As a result, the Post Office Committees in both Houses are very low on the Congressional prestige totem pole, despite the fact that many able and courageous men and women have sat on them.

Few Americans even know the size of their postal system. It is not only the most important business in the world, but it is also among the biggest. It employs more than 525,000 men and women in approximately 36,000 post offices.[1] It has a cash turnover of about twenty-three billion dollars a year. As a mere side­line it operates, as the postal savings system, one of the largest savings banks in the world.

At a conservative estimate, the average letter carrier walks about twelve miles every day delivering the mail to patrons along his route. (Of course, the distance varies according to the size and kind of route involved.) This means that the 125,000 letter carriers in the United States march about one and a half million miles a day, or the equivalent of three round trips to the moon.

During the past year your postal system handled more than sixty billion pieces of mail, or almost three hundred and fifty pieces for every man, woman, and child in the country.[2] This is more than the mail volume of all the other countries of the free world put together; it is more than two-thirds of the mail volume of the entire world. The annual increase in volume of one year over another is often larger than the total mail volume of many European countries.

And the annual "deficit" of the Post Office Department is now around six hundred million dollars.

It is important to remember that the Post Office Establishment does not have the use of the revenues it takes in. These go straight into the United States Treasury. The Post Office Department operates under appropriations voted to it by the Congress. It first makes a budget request which is usually whittled down by the Bureau of the Budget, which feels it has to justify its govern­mental existence by reducing expenditures. When the request goes before the Appropriations Committees of the Congress it is usually cut down much further, since some members of these committees feel they can only justify their political existence by telling their constituents what tremendous sums of money they have saved them. When an appropriations request is larded with excess fat this system works satisfactorily. When it is an honest budget with no fat in it, the subsequent cuts are plainly unreal­istic and, if allowed to stand, can result only in impaired services and inadequate working conditions.

Although I have publicly and violently disagreed with Post­master General Arthur E. Summerfield over many of his policies, I have always respected his courage and his real, if sporadic, desire to effect improvements in the postal service. Parsimoni­ous appropriations have frustrated him in many of his efforts. His own insistence on balancing the postal budget has made many other efforts abortive.

One of the most important of these has been the program of providing new postal facilities all over the nation. In the twenty-year period between 1938 and 1958 Congress failed to appropri­ate as much as a single dime for the construction of new postal facilities. In that period the postal volume doubled. The average post office was about fifty years old and it was bursting at the seams. In several large cities (notably Denver and Seattle) postal employees were sorting the mail out on the street, even in freez­ing weather, because there wasn't any room in the buildings. Postal employees were trying to give the American people twen­tieth-century service out of nineteenth-century post offices—an obvious impossibility.

This tendency on the part of the Congress toward inattention to the physical needs of the postal service was and is extremely short-sighted, since obsolescence feeds upon itself and, when left unchecked, becomes dynamic.

To his credit, General Summerfield has tried to modernize postal facilities, and he has made good use of existing means of leasing postal facilities that have been built by private capital. This program has prevented absolute chaos from enveloping the postal system.

But, despite manifold and manifest improvements, Summer-field's efforts have been only a fleabite compared to the over-all problem. And I am convinced that if the average American knew the conditions under which the mail must be handled in the aver­age post office he would swear off complaining about the inade­quacy of the postal service and would start giving thanks for the dedication and loyalty of the army of postal employees who over­come such obstacles in making the service as good as it is.[3]

Postal employees on the payroll of the richest and most power­ful country in the history of the world are still forced, in many communities, to work under conditions that would be embar­rassing in even the most impoverished areas of the earth.

With the mail volume increasing enormously, not only as far as total pieces are concerned but also in terms of per capita use, the postal service will collapse under its own weight within the next twenty years unless national administrations stop being mes­merized by balanced budgets, and unless the Congress stops treat­ing the Post Office like some unwanted and embarrassing love child. This is a problem that will not walk away if we pretend it isn't there. It has to be faced squarely, and the more we procras­tinate and try to ignore it, the worse it becomes.

The lack of knowledge on the part of the average person concerning his postal service has led to a general misunderstand­ing as to what a letter carrier actually does to earn his pay. This has given an opportunity for postal administrators to attempt to disguise and distort the real duties of a letter carrier whenever pay legislation is discussed, in order to make these duties seem insig­nificant and unimportant. Less than five years ago the Civil Serv­ice Commission, whether through ignorance or malice I know not, went so far as to compare the duties of a letter carrier with those of a Western Union messenger. This insult rankles even now in the mind of every person of even minimal honesty who knows the facts of the postal service.

So, what does a letter carrier do? Let's follow an average car­rier through an average day.

He gets up usually before 5 a.m.[4] It is usually necessary for him to get to the post office by 6 a.m. and, since low postal salaries generally do not allow him and his family to live in quarters close to the downtown area where the post office or the postal station is located, early rising and commuting to and from work represent a way of life with a carrier.

A letter carrier begins his day by sorting, street by street and number by number, the mail that has been distributed to him by the postal clerks. He must also pick up and sign for collect-on-delivery packages and for registered, certified, and custom duty mail destined for his route. He must also pick up the keys to the various boxes along his route.

The carrier is held financially responsible for the loss of all such mail, if a loss does occur.

There are other financial risks involved in a carrier's life. For instance, when he delivers a registered letter, regulations state that he must give it to the person to whom it is addressed or to his "authorized agent." Regulations, however, fail to define ex­plicitly what an authorized agent is, nor do they explain how a letter carrier can distinguish such an authorized agent from an impostor. The carrier is therefore caught on the horns of a dilemma.

If he is overly cautious and refuses to give the registered letter to someone claiming to be an authorized agent the patron might become indignant.

If, on the other hand, he takes a chance and does hand over a registered letter to someone in the addressee's home, he had better be right! He is taking his financial life in his hands. If he's wrong, it's Katy bar the door! The financial loss that is claimed will come out of his pocket.

In addition to all this, the carrier, before he begins his rounds, must cull out of his mail all "nixies," i.e., all letters wrongly addressed, all letters inaccurately handled by post office clerks, mail addressed to people who have moved to other locations, mail for people who have gone on extended vacations and have left a forwarding address, and so on. He has all the relative information marked down in his route book, and he must check his mail against the book and turn in all the "nixies."

He must work against a rigid time schedule to "box" his mail. Then he must set up his relays. That is, he must arrange his mail so it can be distributed by truck to the eight or ten collection and storage boxes along his route. Postal laws and regulations hold that a letter carrier can carry only thirty-five pounds of mail on his back at a time.[5] A letter carrier's load for an entire route can average five hundred pounds, and on days on which the big slick magazines are due for delivery, the total load can be much greater. Therefore, arranging the relays in advance requires intel­ligent planning on the part of the carrier as well as an intimate knowledge of his route.

All this represents a sizable bit of work, and as a general rule, it is accomplished before the carrier starts his daily march along the sidewalks of America.

Once he begins his march he must keep up a rigid and exacting schedule. Regulations stipulate that he must complete eight hours within ten hours of the day, and he gets no overtime unless per­mission has been granted by his supervisor in advance. If the carrier falls behind in his schedule he will immediately fall under suspicion of loitering. Carriers are under constant surveillance by the Inspection Service, and very little quarter is given when they are suspected of even minor violations of postal laws and regulations.

In addition to his regular job, the letter carrier is often asked to perform duties quite extraneous to the postal service but extremely helpful as far as the government and the average citizen are concerned.

Since the mailman knows a great deal about the people along his route he is continually called upon to assist in such enterprises as the taking of the census, the registration of enemy aliens in time of war, the distribution of adjusted service certificates, the recording of all working people under the Social Security Act, and so on. Both the Postal Inspection Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation often depend upon the letter carrier to supply information concerning suspected criminals who might be living on his route.

There is one further thing, an intangible but vital aspect of the letter carrier's service, which is generally overlooked. He is a most important public relations man for Uncle Sam. He is the most intimate and the most human contact the average citizen has with his government. In many cases a citizen's entire attitude toward his government is based upon his relationship with his letter carrier.

When the need arises, and it arises often, letter carriers volun­tarily and on their own time walk their routes to collect money for charitable causes such as the muscular dystrophy campaign and the March of Dimes. They develop a close and unique asso­ciation with those families whom they serve. It is not unusual for this association to extend over three generations. The letter car­rier delivers the birth announcements throughout the neighbor­hood. He delivers the annual birthday greetings, the invitations to parties, the graduation cards and the wedding invitations. He delivers the anniversary cards each year, and finally, the death announcements and cards of condolence. More often than not, he attends the wakes and the funerals of people he has known and served throughout their lives.

Whenever a movement develops in the Congress to increase postal salaries the high echelon of the Post Office Department, who are usually exemplary gentlemen in their way but almost always mesmerized by the desire for balanced budgets and for making the postal service into a public utility rather than a public service, bolster their opposition to raising our salaries by implying that the letter carrier is a mere pack horse and, as such, is probably overpaid as it is.

This is a stratagem that invariably makes me see red, since I know that those who propound it know better. I think, from this sparse account of what a letter carrier actually does to earn his meager pay, the average reader will agree that my resentment against this vile tactic is justifiable.

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[1] In 1900 there were almost 77,000 post offices. However, as the automobile developed and roads improved, the number of rural post offices has been whittled down each year as they were replaced by rural letter-carrier service.

[2] Figures taken from the Postmaster General's Annual Report, 1959.

[3] I refer to conditions particularly in Detroit; Philadelphia; Harrisburg, Penn­sylvania; Portland, Oregon; Houston; Boston; Mobile; and Oakland, California. There are many others.

[4] I am outlining the duties of a typical letter carrier. Naturally there are vari­ations in the routine.

[5] However, there are no scales in the relay boxes and many carriers, in their zeal, are inclined to ignore this limitation.