Portside

A wave of anger is cresting at post offices across the country. Letter carriers are looking at the big raises that other union members have won—38 percent over four years at Boeing, 62 percent in six years at the East Coast ports, $7.50 in five years at UPS.

They’re comparing those gains to the tentative agreement their president handed them in October: 1.3 percent a year for three years.

“It doesn’t account for everything we went through with Covid,” said Saqia Talbert, a letter carrier in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “We were massively understaffed, and we were working 70 to 80 hours a week, every week, for two years straight.”

The website FinanceBuzz recently found that postal workers had fallen farther behind inflation than any other job it analyzed, including many jobs that are much less unionized.

The deal covers 200,000 people. The National Association of Letter Carriers is the largest of the four postal unions, which together make up the largest union workforce in the U.S.

If ratified, it will be retroactive to May 2023, when the previous contract expired. Many carriers are salty about the long, secretive bargaining process; the union could have moved to binding arbitration as early as July 2023.

500 DAYS LATER

Instead, NALC President Brian Renfroe negotiated with the Postal Service for more than 500 days. At times he promised the end result would be “historic” and would eliminate the entry-level City Carrier Assistant tier (it doesn’t).

In fact, this agreement would intensify speedup by reducing each carrier’s daily guaranteed office time from 33 minutes to 20, which could lead to eliminating routes.

“I just don’t know what he spent two years doing,” Talbert said. “I just truly do not understand.”

A week after the deal was announced, 700 people joined a vote-no Zoom call organized by the rank-and-file network Build a Fighting NALC, with the support of a loose coalition that includes a popular podcaster and two opposition slates for the union’s 2026 leadership election.

Carriers started meeting in the parking lots of their post offices to take group photos with homemade “vote no” signs. Some brought resolutions to their monthly membership meetings recommending a no vote.

In Naples, Florida, 50 people turned out for a union meeting on a Friday night, only to learn that the branch president would not allow their resolution to be heard—he claimed it was unconstitutional. Nonetheless, one member after another gave stirring testimony on why they’re voting no, among them two letter carriers who are homeless.

A few days later, 25 letter carriers joined a contract rally in front of the main Naples post office. Branch officers boycotted, but carriers from as far as Fort Myers, an hour north, drove down to participate.

“The thing we are trying to do is show that no station is alone,” said Michael Still in Allentown. “This is a true grassroots movement on the workroom floor. It goes before any caucus or ideology.” His branch voted unanimously to recommend a no vote, and sent a vanload of members to D.C. to picket the union’s national headquarters.

FEAR OF WORSE

Renfroe argues the 1.3 percent across-the-board isn’t the whole raise. His deal also retains the existing cost-of-living adjustment formula: a penny per 0.4 point increase in the Consumer Price Index, for those at the top of the pay scale, and less for people lower down. It eliminates three early wage steps and shortens the progression to top pay from 13.5 years to 11.5 years.

He presented his overview of the tentative agreement in four regional “rap sessions” in D.C., Minneapolis, Houston, and San Francisco, mainly for branch officers. The format was grueling: a four-hour presentation from Renfroe, followed by questions.

Officially the national union is not recommending a yes or no, but vote-no activists who attended said these events made a fear-based case for yes. The logic goes: we can’t do any better, given that the Postal Service lost $6 billion last year, and an arbitrator could start from scratch and award us a worse deal. Workers don’t get any vote on whatever the arbitrator delivers.

Alison Stankrauff in Detroit was a strong no when she first saw the tentative agreement, but after hearing her branch leaders outline this argument, she was feeling less certain: “I don’t want to say it influenced me entirely, but it gave me pause,” she said.

But Ernest Gonzales, chief steward at a post office in San Antonio, Texas, isn’t buying the “song and dance” that “basically we’re broke.” He points out the Postal Service artificially showed red ink for years because of a mandate to prefund its retiree medical benefits generations into the future, before Congress finally repealed that in 2022.

“You can get very creative in bookkeeping to find a way to ‘lose money’ if that’s your intention,” said Gonzales, who is on the coordinating committee of Build a Fighting NALC.

In the latest USPS fiscal year report, a line item for an $11 billion “investment” caught his eye. A new fleet of vehicles? No, according to the footnote, USPS was buying one-year treasury bonds. “To add that to the deficiency rating is disingenuous,” he said. “They’re trying to get carriers to accept this based on numbers from USPS that are not exactly telling you the whole truth.”

Besides, why should workers pay the price for management’s questionable investment decisions? “We’re not managers,” Gonzales said. “If you can’t manage this business you shouldn’t be here. Unless they’re going to give us contractual language to hold management accountable when they’re not doing their job, we should not be subsidizing this.”

Jerry Kerner, a letter carrier in Baltimore, had a similar question about Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s $75,000 performance bonus (on top of a $300,000 salary). Just the bonus is “more than most letter carriers make in a year,” he said. “If they’re performing so poorly, and they’re going to record all these losses, why are they paying bonuses to the executives?”

BINDING ARBITRATION

The timeline for the ratification vote hasn’t been announced yet. But if members vote no, the parties must then return to the bargaining table for 15 days. Build a Fighting NALC argues this would be a prime time for more rallies and a public pressure campaign.

From there, the last resort would be binding arbitration with a panel of three arbitrators: one representing the union, one representing the company, and one neutral who would effectively be the decision-maker. Postal strikes are illegal.

Federal law obliges the arbitrator to make sure postal worker pay is comparable to the private sector. One comparison the arbitrator would likely consider is UPS, where drivers reach top pay in four years, not 11—a difference that could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a career.

“I don’t think we should sow any illusions that arbitration is this great thing,” said Tyler Vasseur, of Minneapolis, on the coordinating committee of Build a Fighting NALC. “Ultimately it’s this demobilizing thing. It’s there for a reason: so you don’t strike.

“But at same time, a strong no vote will force both our leadership and the arbitrator to pay attention. And we have to build the infrastructure for a real contract campaign. Our main emphasis should be on building a movement, not just having the best negotiator in there.”

PAYING ATTENTION

Scott Anderson is financial secretary of Branch 79 in Seattle. He said he hasn’t made up his mind how he will vote, but he’s pleased to see so much lively discussion.

“For so many years we’ve only had like 10 percent participation in the vote for our national agreement,” he said. “To me the hope is that they’re not going to just talk about it and be upset about it or like it, either way, but actually going to participate in the democratic life of our union.

“I’m hopeful that people take the energy that they’re feeling on the workroom floor and make their voices heard, and take that energy into getting other people to vote.”

Danielle Smith contributed reporting.

Alexandra Bradbury is the editor of Labor Notes.

Labor Notes is a media and organizing project that has been the voice of union activists who want to put the movement back in the labor movement since 1979.  Through our magazine, website, books, conferences, and workshops, we promote organizing, aggressive strategies to fight concessions, alliances with worker centers, and unions that are run by their members. Labor Notes is also a network of rank-and-file members, local union leaders, and labor activists who know the labor movement is worth fighting for.

A version of this article appeared in Labor Notes issue #549, December 2024. Don't miss an issue, subscribe today.