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a good knowledge of Geography, while innumerable orders and requests have to be remembered to avoid mistakes.
As an instance of enforced overtime, we beg to point out that the clerks of the Branch Offices, who are generally the juniors in the office, are required by the regulations to give four and a half hours daily, viz: morning duty 7:30 to noon, and afternoon duty from noon to 4:30 p.m., whereas now these clerks, when not on duty at the branch offices, are required to attend at the General Office for extra duty for another 5 or 6 hours.
As the result of this policy, probationers of any worth leave the service as soon as they find out the hardships they have to endure on a salary of $20 a month. Our work is gone through hurriedly, we are on our legs nearly all the time, real hours are uncertain, we have no fair holidays on Saturdays, and in fact scarcely any holidays at all, owing to contract packets arriving so frequently on Sundays and holidays. Further, it frequently happens that, after leaving the office, when our day's work is over, we are recalled to handle an incoming mail.
In the large Post Offices in Europe, in order to effectually and expeditiously deal with heavy masses of correspondence received or sent, there are relays told off of the staff to relieve each section after a certain number of hours of work, whereas here, the whole staff has to deal with the whole of the mail, no matter how late into the night, and the morning officers have to attend at 7 a.m. next morning as if nothing of importance had occurred a few hours before.
We must particularly beg to point out that this strain on the constitution of the Post Office clerks of continuous incessant work renders many unfit for duty through sickness, and thus increases the hardship for the others. Meals have to be bolted as opportunity affords, a fruitful cause of sickness, especially in the summer, in this crowded and cramped Post Office, where forty or fifty people jostle each other in a stifling atmosphere. Leave cannot