No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

There are forms of work which are unamen­able to tech­no­lo­gical change. The ques­tion of tech­no­logy repla­cing labour is an ongo­ing story in the study of work (see Braver­man on deskilling, or Sen­nett on the loss of craft skills). Some accounts of ser­vice work sug­gest that these are the least ‘vul­ner­able’ to replace­ment, although research­ers at Sait­ama Uni­ver­sity is devel­op­ing robots to provide elder care (Kobay­ashi et al, 2009). Against this tale of decline and ali­en­a­tion might be a story which cel­eb­rates tech­no­lo­gical replace­ment of manual effort. The wash­ing machine and the vacuum, for example, may pro­duce More Work for Mother (Schwartz Cowan, 1989), but they do save me the drudgery of dolly tub and pos­ser that my Grandma dealt with, to my intense pleas­ure. This entry is on a theme of unre­place­able labour, and I refer to the postman.

pho­to­graphy by Lynne Pettinger

The idea of post — some­thing that comes dir­ectly to your doormat for 39p that someone else pays — is pretty amaz­ing. We used to get milk and eggs on the door­step, maybe dust­ers and clean­ing equip­ment cour­tesy of the trav­el­ling sales­man. Now though, its only the post that arrives like this. It is a daily tri­umph that the post comes to me dir­ect (even as I get mostly bills, mar­ket­ing and let­ters to fam­il­ies who have long since moved out of my house).

The postman’s job is unre­place­able, but it is affected by tech­no­lo­gies. The bicycle and the deliv­ery van; the rub­ber band, the sack and the street stor­age boxes; the uni­form and the let­ter box in my front door are all parts of this. And that is without think­ing about the tech­no­lo­gies of col­lec­tion, sort­ing and move­ment. The fun­da­mental job of the post­man, though, is to move from door to door, up my street and down yours. It requires body work and an engage­ment with the mater­ial cul­tures of people’s homes and their private and pub­lic mes­sages. There is no way of not hav­ing a post­man if the post is to be delivered. So thank you post­man. I think you have a romantic job.

Though boom­ing inter­net shop­ping might keep some post­men in work, even as Royal Mail loses the con­tract to deliver Amazon par­cels, his job isn’t quite as romantic as once it was. Gone are the days of daily let­ters or post­cards, and even bills are now delivered online. That seems like a loss to me, I like get­ting and send­ing post­cards. So please send me a let­ter. Send me the pil­low you dream on. Send in the clowns. Send me birth­day cards, sym­pathy cars, a post­card from your hol­i­day and a thank you for din­ner. Let the post­man make me happy.

Ref­er­ences

1. Braver­man, H. (1974) Labor and Mono­poly Cap­ital; the Degrad­a­tion of Work in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury. New York, Monthly Review Press.
2. Kobay­ashi, Y., Kuno, Y., Niwa, H., Akiya, N., Okada, M. Yamazaki, K. and Yamazaki, A. (2009) ‘Assisted-Care Robot Ini­ti­ation of Com­mu­nic­a­tion in Mul­ti­party Set­tings’. Chi 2009 con­fer­ence, Boston MA.
3. Schwartz Cowan, R. (1989) More Work for Mother: the Iron­ies of House­hold Tech­no­logy from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. Lon­don: Free Association.
4. Sen­nett, R. (2008) The Crafts­man. Lon­don : Allen Lane.