Sorting Letters, Sorting Lives

Sorting Letters, Sorting Lives offers an examination of a workplace that for many years has employed an extraordinarily diverse workforce: the United States Postal Service. In the post-civil rights era, the Postal Service took a leading role in managing a diverse workforce, seeking to acknowledge and honor the different groups and cultures represented among its workforce. The USPS has constantly been looking for ways to motivate its employees, to create a sense of fairness and belonging, and to minimize interpersonal and inter-group conflicts. Linda Benbow examines the organizational culture and levels of diversity found in an urban United States Postal Service mail processing facility. She shows how employee perceptions of social differences and their interactions with coworkers contribute to their identity and work life within the organization.

Painting detailed portraits of race, social class, and gender in a mail processing facility, Benbow looks at ways employees of diverse backgrounds relate to one another, identifying the issues and occasions that provoke conflict, the ways that participants view one another, and the forces and strategies that mitigate and conciliate conflicts. This richly detailed account of a historically diverse urban post office provides a fascinating look at the dynamics of race and gender in the workplace.