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USPS PRIVATIZATION WOULD COST RURAL AMERICA MORE THAN MAIL  
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Emily Hilliard
February 26, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Rural postal workers don’t just deliver mail. They put out fires,
help elderly people who’ve fallen, and ensure veterans receive
medication during storms. Trump’s proposed USPS privatization
threatens these areas already lacking services. _

, Judy's Front Porch

 

Lorna Atwater, a rural mail carrier from Berea, Kentucky, was driving
her seventy-five-mile route through the Eastern Kentucky foothills
when she noticed the woods behind a customer’s house were on fire.
She called the fire department and the homeowner — who she knew was
the principal of the local high school — and wet down the backyard
with a garden hose until the fire department arrived. Needless to say,
putting out backyard fires was not in her job description.

In the United States, 129,000 rural mail carriers deliver to 50
million
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mailboxes, a number which has steadily grown by about a million each
year. Many rural residents, of whom 19 percent are elderly
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22 percent lack broadband coverage
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on mail delivery to pay bills, receive life-dependent prescription
medications, communicate with loved ones, vote, and for “last
mile” delivery of shipments from FedEx, UPS, and Amazon. Rural mail
carriers operate “post offices on wheels
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meaning they not only deliver letters, periodicals, and packages, but
also offer stamps and money orders and carry change-of-address and
other United States Postal Service (USPS) forms. They are effectively
roving hubs of federal services in rural areas.

In 2021 and 2022, I interviewed
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rural postal workers for “Rural Free Delivery: Mail Carriers in
Central Appalachia,” part of the American Folklife Center’s
Occupational Folklife Project. Through these interviews, which are now
housed at the Library of Congress, I saw how the specific conditions
of rural mail carriers’ jobs enable them to sustain their
communities in ways both within and extending beyond their job
description. If President Donald Trump takes control of the USPS and
makes moves to privatize the agency, as many fear, rural people across
the country will lose not only mail delivery but the crucial community
care that rural postal workers provide.

The rural mail carriers I interviewed told me stories of how their
relationships with their customers and familiarity with the
environment on their routes enabled them to assist in emergency
situations, like the one Lorna Atwater encountered. Others reported
helping corral cattle that had escaped and were in the road, bringing
lost dogs back to their owners, saving the life of a customer who was
choking, being the first on the scene of a traffic accident, or taking
special care to ensure that veterans still received their prescription
medications in inclement weather. Formally the USPS plays a critical
role
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the United States government’s National Response Framework, a
network of government agencies that develops a comprehensive strategic
response plan in the event of national disasters, bioterrorist
attacks, pandemics, or other emergencies — but rural mail carriers
are also key emergency responders in their communities on a more
informal, person-to-person basis every day.

In a city, when a building catches fire or people are injured in a
traffic accident, there are eyes and ears to respond immediately. In
the country, where infrastructure is sparse and the population is less
dense, a rural mail carrier might be the only person an elderly widow
or widower talks to all day. The specific conditions of rural
carriers’ work create consistent interactions with — and intimate
knowledge of — the same people in one place, meaning that rural
carriers function as care workers in their communities, providing
services that could not be replicated by more mechanized or drone
delivery. Kay Foltz, who delivers mail in Appalachian Ohio, said,
“We deliver a lot of things that only get delivered because we know
who’s there.” Rural mail carriers — many of whom work in the
communities where they’ve lived their whole lives — know when a
family is on vacation and their mail needs to be held, if an elderly
person relocated to a retirement home and needs their mail forwarded
to a new address, or where a letter addressed with merely a name and
“Route 1” should be delivered.

In turn, rural carriers feel lucky to have well-paid,
permanent, unionized jobs
[[link removed],(10.3%20percent)%20than%20rural%20areas%20(8.7%20percent).] —
a rare thing today in many of the areas they call home. Atwater says
she initially took the rural carrier position because it paid more
than she would have made as a public-school teacher, even with her
master’s degree in early childhood education. LeAnn Carpenter, who
delivers a rural route outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, said that
the best part of her work was the sense that at the end of the day,
she had done something that mattered — a feeling she did not get in
her previous job at Sam’s Club.

Fifty-seven percent of United States post offices are located in rural
areas, and 88 percent
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the land served by the USPS is rural. Recent reporting
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shown that privatization of the USPS would disproportionately impact
rural communities, as rural delivery, which operates under a Universal
Service Obligation (USO) mandating
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to all Americans, would not be profitable for private corporations and
service and staffing decisions would be determined by market
pressures. Without that mandate, private mail service would become
unaffordable for many rural residents who live in remote areas and
experience higher rates of poverty
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their urban counterparts. But privatization could also mean that all
the other benefits of rural delivery would be lost for both
communities and the people who deliver those routes. These additional
services are not necessarily compensated by the USPS. They are
externalities not factored into the “profitability” of a federal
institution that was always intended to be a public good rather than a
for-profit business. In interview after interview, rural mail carriers
stressed that they put the “service” in the US Postal Service.

Rural delivery is one of the few ways that rural people feel the
positive impact of federal public services in a daily, tangible way.
As Park City, Kentucky, rural carrier Karen Button told me, “We
touch everybody every day, in some way or another.” This does not go
unnoticed by their customers. According to a 2022 report 
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the USPS, 81 percent of rural customers view the Postal Service as
valuable. I saw this reflected in what rural carriers told me — that
when they took care of their customers, their customers took care of
them, showing appreciation with small gifts like farm-fresh eggs or
homemade canned goods, stopping to help fix a carriers’ flat tire,
or leaving a cold bottle of water in the mailbox on a hot day.

By framing federal positions as wasteful office jobs held by
professional bureaucrats in Washington, the Trump administration
obscures the reality that federal jobs, like those of rural mail
carriers, exist in many iterations across the country, providing
essential services as well as stable employment opportunities. In a
time when there are numerous economic and political forces pulling
rural communities apart, federally funded jobs like rural mail
delivery keep them stitched together.

When I first started the interviews for my project on rural postal
workers, I thought that these additional services that rural mail
carriers provide, though beneficial, existed outside of the scope of
their jobs. But what I came to see was that the human elements of
caregiving are in fact part of what makes their work essential to the
remote communities they serve. The USPS, too, touts its mail
carriers’ intimate knowledge of their communities and personal
relationships with customers as vital aspects of the agency’s
function and value. A 2020 white paper
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by the Office of the Inspector General argues that it is the Postal
Service’s “roots in every community, unmatched address
information, and carriers’ extensive knowledge of neighborhoods from
coast to coast” that makes it an essential player in federal
response efforts.

As Kay Foltz said:

People out here, [by mail] is how they still pay their bills.
Everything important to them comes in the mail. I deliver a lot of
medication. So it is important. It’s not just for the mail.
There’s a lot more to it. It really is a service that if people
didn’t have, I think our country would be a lot different.

_Emily Hilliard is a folklorist at Berea College and the former West
Virginia state folklorist and founding director of the West Virginia
Folklife Program. She is the author of Making Our Future: Visionary
Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia._

_Jacobin relies on your donations to publish. Contribute today.
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* USPS
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* privatization
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* Rural America
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