But there’s a lot of potential for it to be a good, rewarding job full of community-building. And it used to be! Postal workers used to provide all sorts of informal, impromptu community services, since they were one of the few people in a town that would visit everyone in town, or in an area of town; and so one of the few people in town who would know literally everybody. Postal workers were asked to check up on people no one had seen in a while; asked to escort people’s children to their relative’s house (which tabloids called “mailing your children”); and many other “little” services that nowadays have no real locus-of-responsibility on which to fall.
Maybe the problem is that there’s more mail to be delivered than there are postal workers to deliver it; and we can’t afford, through our taxes, the number of postal workers that would actually be required to deliver all the mail while also going above-and-beyond in all these other ways.
I wonder whether, in a world with Universal Basic Income, being a postal worker would be seen as a vocation, like being a priest. Not something you do for money; rather, something you do because you like the effect it has on your community, and want to be a part of that effect. I have a feeling that there’d be a lot more stories like this in such a world.