Postal Worker

A postal worker is one who works for a post office, such as a mail carrier. In the U.S., postal workers are represented by the National Postal Mail Handlers Union - NPMHU, the National Association of Rural Letter Carriers and the American Postal Workers Union, part of the AFL-CIO. In Canada, they are represented by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and in the United Kingdom by the Communication Workers Union.

The US Postal Service employs around 584,000 people. The bulk of these work as:

  • Service Clerks - Sell stamps and postage, help people pickup packages and assist with other services such as passports.
  • Mail Sorters - Physically sort the mail to go to the correct place. As automation has become more common, some of these people now operate the sorting machines.
  • Mail Carriers - Deliver the mail. In densely populated areas this is done on foot. In urban areas the carriers often use a mail truck and in rural areas carriers drive their own vehicles.

Most postal workers in the US make between $36,000 and $43,000 per year.

The phrase was not very often used until a spate of workplace violence incidents by postal workers in the late 1980s made headlines. The incidents also led to the coining of the phrase "going postal".

Read more about Postal Worker:  Notable Postal Workers, Postal Workers in Fiction

Famous quotes containing the words postal and/or worker:

    “This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
    Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
    Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
    The shop at the corner, the girl next door.”
    —W.H. (Wystan Hugh)

    “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
    —Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)