The Partisan is happy to republish the first edition of New Day at USPS, a shop paper for United States Postal Service workers which is part of the New Labor Organizing Committee.
Postal workers are facing an all-sided attack. Under constant efforts to privatize the post office to increase profits, since 1999, we have seen over 250,000 jobs lost, and despite nominal increases in wages, inflation has far outpaced these gains, leaving USPS workers with significantly less in our pockets compared to decades ago. In 2021, multimillionaire former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy launched the “Delivering for America” plan, which seeks to maximize profits through automation, post office and plant closures, and ousting 50,000 more postal workers under the secret aim of preparing the way for privatization. David Steiner, the new Trump-appointed Postmaster General, claims to oppose privatization, yet owns over $8 million in FedEx stock and has done nothing to stop the Delivering for America plan, revealing where his interests lie.
Our two most powerful tools, union organization and the ability to strike, have been stripped from us. The dominance of craft unionism, which divides workers into separate unions based on their specific crafts, arbitrarily separates postal workers into four main unions: the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU), part of the Laborers’ Union; the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), primarily representing clerks; the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC); and the National Rural Letter Carriers Association (NRLCA). This division creates barriers to unity among postal workers in our struggle against USPS. Furthermore, federal workers are legally prohibited from striking, removing our primary bargaining power. This is a restriction that the leadership of the four major postal unions has accepted and enforced. This is because the leadership of our unions has been bought off and legally integrated into the state, making them unwilling to fight for what postal workers deserve.
Right now, the NPMHU is engaging in contract negotiations with USPS, the union leadership has ignored rank and file input, and it’s only communication is through periodic “updates” to it’s members through statements that fail to specify what exactly it is they are “fighting” for. Backroom dealings keep members in the dark, allowing failures to be concealed and accountability avoided. This self-serving tactic protects bureaucrats who have more in common with management than rank-and-file workers.
We have seen this tactic time and time again, most recently with the contract negotiations undertaken by the APWU, NRLCA and the NALC before where vague updates lead to sham contracts with little to no increase in the real wage of the workers, a failure to put a stop to two-tier employment and the exploitation of “non-career” employees, “diet” COLAs, and deals that push the tired “it’ll put us in a better position for next time” mantra. Three years is too long for postal workers to wait for change.
Even when the membership has stood up and rejected the deal, we have seen just how far they are willing to go to crush those efforts, as they did in the NALC contract vote. When, after 70% of members rejected the sellout contract, an “impartial” federal arbitrator was brought in to impose a management-friendly deal on city carriers, which NALC leaders then endorsed happily. Learning lessons from this during the APWU contract vote, some members claimed they failed to even receive their ballot in time. The shady tactics of the union negotiators and the blatant subversion of a democratic process clearly show how, by breaking up the bargaining power of the workers into crafts, as well as the removal of the workers’ principal weapon in the fight, the strike, weakens the power of all of us to stand together for what we have all worked for and have earned.
We have a proud history of taking the fight into our own hands against the post office, government, and sellout leadership. In 1970, over 200,000 of us struck despite the law and union leadership telling us no. That spirit continued with several more wildcat strikes throughout the decade. Today, however, that militant energy must be rebuilt; over the past year of contract negotiations, our union leaders have shown no willingness to fight for our interests or even think of the possibility of taking action. New Day at USPS aims to be a paper that analyzes the issues impacting us and fights for what postal workers need: a rank and file shopfloor organization, one single union of all USPS workers, and ultimately to do what the current union leaders won’t do: make preparations for eventual collective action to defeat Delivering for America, right to strike laws be damned.
