The rural carrier is the best job in the post office!

I'm not alone in the fact that the position of Rural Carrier is the best job in the Postal Service. If you surveyed postmasters and supervisors who have rural offices in your office, most of them would agree that being a rural is the best choice. This is because if you consider the stress, salary, hours and autonomy of your work, there is no better position.

Stress is an important consideration when deciding to join the post office. Most positions have a lot of work-related stress. The most important source of stress comes from your direct supervisor. Because it is "on the clock", the supervisor tries to get all the work that is possible. When their superiors push them to reduce hours, they are responsible for doing more work in less hours. In many jobs, they are directly behind you and tell you to work faster. It can be very stressful.

Rural carriers, on the other hand, are employees. They get a daily fee for their routes based on their size. It doesn't matter if it takes four or ten hours to travel your route, you get paid the daily assessment. There is no benefit to getting a rural carrier to work faster, so most supervisors just leave them alone to do their own work.

It brings us to the next benefit of being a rural carrier, the hours. Most of them work during their daily assessments. There is a built-in advantage of being a civil servant on a post office near Midtown NYC. When you are done with your route, you can go home. But you get paid for the full daily evaluation of the route. I know carriers on eight-hour routes that hardly ever work more than six hours a day!

Autonomy is another benefit of being a rural carrier. As mentioned earlier, they do not enter and leave. They have the freedom to work at whatever pace they want during the day (assuming they return to mailing ... usually around 5:30 am). If they are needed to be out of service at a certain time (school bus, teacher conference, etc.), they can speed up the pace, work faster and be on time without using the permission that other craft would have done. (if they could get permission). This autonomy is extended to how they do their jobs as well. They have the ability to decide how to send their mail, what to send or take to the street (DPS), and how to deliver. As long as everything is delivered, they must decide for themselves the best way to do it.

Being a USPS employee for seventeen years and doing a variety of jobs (City Carrier, Rural Carrier, Casual Clerk and filler), I think being a Rural Carrier is definitely the best position. For me, having the autonomy to be in control of my own day is the most important thing. I don’t feel the stress of being on the clock. It's also good to have my own sub to fill when I need it. (We are entitled to our own submarine!)