As the son of a postal employee in the '60s and '70s, I’m pleased to see that working conditions have improved at the PO.
No, seriously, this is nothing new, and has nothing to do with Amazon or online shopping or any other recent change.
When I was a kid, I barely saw my father during the two months leading up to Christmas. Back then, the PO tried not to hire seasonal or temp workers, so the brunt of the Christmas-package workload fell on full-timers, who would work 11 hrs/day, 7 days/wk, for 6-10 weeks in a row.
Some (not all) of the overtime was “voluntary”, but my dad always took it, because the overtime bonuses made it (almost) a living wage.
Many years, Christmas would be the first day off he’d had in two months, and he’d drag himself out of bed just long enough to watch us tykes open our presents, then spend the rest of the day snoring on the sofa.
And then he’d get up and go work another 11-hour-day the next day, and usually for a week or two after.
Eventually, the workers rebelled, and things improved a bit:
That’s actually a very good article, going into some detail about the often-overlooked racial issues at the PO and the influence of the Civil Rights movement on the strike.
As a result of that strike, the US Post Office Department became the US Postal Service, and the workers won the right to engage in collective bargaining (though striking remains illegal).
If you think conditions at the PO are grim now, you should have seen it before collective bargaining. <shudder>.
This is not, BTW, to excuse the PO’s current worker abuse, but to lend a bit of perspective to people who “don’t know if the tendency to overwork the employees [happened] before Amazon”.
Um, yes; yes it did.
