New Labour’s greatest intellectual error, on the economy, was to forget the good sense of the labour movement, and presume — showing its fealty to neoclassical economics — that the whirring machine of capitalism would produce the goods which a benevolent government could then seek to redistribute in more acceptable manner. [...]

[...] New Labour ended up taking from the somewhat better off, and giving to the worse off: inequality at the very top of society was left to skyrocket, unchallenged. But they failed, singularly, to address the economy’s structural flaws: its growing dependency on household debt, its yawning balance of payments, its ballooning financial institutions. A failure to tackle these — indeed, on the last, the active encouragement of said ballooning — helped drive the economy full-tilt into the brick wall of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. As a result of this crisis, austerity measures are now busily tearing through those mildly redistributive measures Labour introduced: Education Maintenance Allowance — gone; Sure Start centres — chopped; tax credits — going. The fruits of New Labour’s compromise with high finance lasted no longer than a decade; it was able to defend, partially, some of the historic gains of the labour movement, most notably the NHS, but even those are now, under austerity, open to attack.

Amazon declined to comment for this story, but the USPS issued the following statement: “Dedicated Postal Service employees across the country are committed to delivering for the American public and have fostered the recent package growth through exceptional performance. Growth in our package business partially off-set the significant decline in mail and is essential to help stabilize the finances of the Postal Service and pay for our infrastructure that enables us to fulfill our universal service obligation. Like any prudent business, we do not publicly discuss specifics of our business relationships.”

They [the USPS] do a computer-generated route every Sunday, so you show up, and depending on who has ordered packages, they hand you a paper sheet of turn-by-turn directions of what the computer has generated as the most efficient route. It’s wildly inaccurate most of the time. I generally know some of these towns now, so I look at these directions, and I’m like “Well, that’s not even remotely the most efficient path.” But you just have to use it because you can get in trouble if you go off route.

We have a lot of instances of heat stroke. Every morning, when it’s gonna be hot, the postmaster walks around, reads his little spiel like, “Stay hydrated. If you need to take a break, take a break in shade. Safety’s your responsibility.” But when they yell at you to your face about being faster and faster every single day—when the fuck are you supposed to take a break? So it’s like, “Do you want me to be fast, or do you want me to not get heat stroke?” They just tell you these things so that the blame isn’t on them. No matter what, it’s your fault. You’re either slow, or you’re dead. It’s very dystopian. It’s kind of a nightmare right now.

Something I’ve been thinking about is just like, if the U.S. government gave the Postal Service 0.0001 percent of the military budget we wouldn’t have to depend on Amazon. If we even had like a dime of federal funding, we wouldn’t be breaking our backs all the time. We could take a step back and reorganize the whole way the Postal Service works in a better and more humane way.

The workers themselves are so tired and beaten down that they haven’t been organizing to push for something like that. It’s a constructed funding shortage that Amazon has exploited for its own purposes. This instituted austerity regarding the Postal Service was the perfect opportunity for Amazon to come in and transform what was at least a mildly public institution into a fully private one.