Postal Workers Brace for Trump’s Wrecking Ball

Is the nation’s biggest union workforce, at the Postal Service, President Trump’s next target?

The Washington Post broke the news February 20 that Trump was on the verge of issuing an executive order to dissolve the independent leadership of USPS and move it into the executive branch under the Department of Commerce, now led by enthusiastic privatizer Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street banker. Trump confirmed the next day that he was “looking at” this option.

The other shoe hasn’t dropped yet. But one immediate threat is that moving USPS into the executive branch could provide a rationale to cancel union contracts. This might expose the Postal Service to the same kind of bloodbath that other federal agencies are enduring at the hands of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

“A postal worker has a union that negotiates with the Postal Service that betters their life,” Mike Bates, president of the Des Moines Postal Workers (APWU) local. “A federal worker is pretty much dictated to, what they are going to get from the government. When I say that, I see the wheels start turning.”

Beyond that, the move would be a big step towards privatizing the Postal Service, a longtime Wall Street aspiration.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a Trump appointee and major foe of postal workers—announced his resignation days before the news broke. The Postal Board of Governors held an emergency meeting and retained its own lawyer to fight Trump’s plan.

The two biggest postal unions, the Letter Carriers (NALC) and APWU, held a joint rally, and APWU President Mark Dimondstein declared that the attack would be “outrageous, unlawful” and “part of the billionaire oligarch coup.”

“These are not idle threats,” said Seattle letter carrier Virgilio Goze, sergeant-at-arms of NALC Branch 79. “Trump might be fickle, but the people around him are not. They’re outright privatizers, and they will do illegal stuff.”

INDEPENDENT STRUCTURE

The Postal Service’s unique independent structure was established by an act of Congress in 1970, just after the Great Postal Strike. Unlike other federal workers, postal workers have full collective bargaining rights—in fact, the NALC and APWU are in the midst of contract fights—and the same rights as private sector workers under the National Labor Relations Act.

The unions seem to realize this is an all-hands-on-deck moment. “You cannot solely rely on the union officials that you’ve elected,” Bates has been telling members of his local. “I’m asking them to do a few things: ‘Hey, when we start making signs for rallies, which we’re planning on doing like soon, we want you to come participate in that. We want you to contact your legislators by phone, email, and mail.’

“We need members who vote Republican to tell the Republican legislators what they expect and to fight for all postal workers, to keep us out of privatization and keep us independent.”

Some workers are enthusiastic that DOGE might crack down on inefficiency at the post office, like do-nothing managers. “But the people around Trump do not think that way,” Goze said. “They’re going to come after our benefits, our wages. Our working conditions are already bad, but they’re going to get worse. They’ll turn us into Amazon—they want us to be timed at everything we do.”

Wall Street is already drooling. Wells Fargo issued a new memo to investors February 27 about the big profits to be made by laying off postal workers, doubling prices (raising them 30 to 140 percent would be “positive” for competitors UPS and FedEx), and selling off post offices (“monetizing the real estate portfolio”). It advocated repealing the costly obligation to serve rural areas as well as urban areas, and splitting apart the business of letters, a money-loser, from packages, a money-maker.

But the privatizers expect a fight. The Wells Fargo memo sums up the challenges: USPS has bipartisan public support, especially in rural areas, “making legislation difficult.” It might be impossible to muster the 60 Senate votes to pass postal privatization as a standalone bill—but perhaps it could be slipped into a bigger budget reconciliation bill requiring only a majority.

And they anticipate “a sizable amount of opposition to any employee changes (potential strike).”

NEW CAUCUS IN LETTER CARRIERS

The new threat comes as a rank-and-file movement has been gathering steam in the NALC. Workers roundly rejected a pitiful tentative agreement with 1.3 percent annual raises in January.

The union went back to the table with management, but most people figured the contract would eventually end up in binding arbitration.

Union leaders had delivered this tentative agreement with great fanfare last fall—after nearly two years of secret bargaining. An increasingly restive membership passed a resolution at the NALC’s national convention last summer demanding transparency and participation in the next contract campaign

Two opposition candidates, one with a slate, have already declared for next year’s NALC presidential race, and shop floor organizers have jelled into a caucus called Build a Fighting NALC (BFN). All these forces teamed up in a loose vote-no coalition.

After the no vote, NALC leaders finally appeared to be feeling the heat. They held the campaign’s first contract rally, with the slogan “Fight Like Hell,” and sent out a survey by text message to find out what members most wanted improved. They even adopted BFN’s call for union branches to join a national day of action on Sunday, March 23.

“Ultimately our fight for our contract is one and the same as our fight for a public postal service,” said Tyler Vasseur, a letter carrier in Minneapolis Branch 9 and a leader in BFN.

RUSH TO ARBITRATION

The union reacted to Trump’s threats by declaring impasse and rushing to expedited arbitration. Leadership hopes that having a signed contract will afford more legal protection from Trump’s attacks than a contract extension would.

SUPPORT LABOR NOTES

BECOME A MONTHLY DONOR

Give $10 a month or more and get our "Fight the Boss, Build the Union" T-shirt.

But some carriers are angry that the union has effectively accepted management’s terms on all the non-economic issues in order to secure a deal quicker. They’re skeptical a signed contract will be much protection.

“There’s no reason why, even if we got a contract next week, that Trump wouldn’t come in and try to cancel it or change it, like he’s hinted at,” Vasseur said. “I think it’s kind of a Hail Mary attempt to circumvent these very real attacks.”

“I think we’re being sold out,” said Richie Ray, second vice president of NALC Branch 41 on Staten Island. “I’m not worried about the post office, I’m more worried about the union. Why is our leader not holding management accountable?”

NALC President Brian Renfroe’s administration does not have a large reservoir of member trust to draw on. In January, an apparently leaked management memo made the rounds, purportedly from Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino. It told managers that workers would vote the agreement down, but that union leaders had assured him they wouldn’t challenge provisions to “right size the organization” and alter work rules. Tulino expressed confidence that “we have a union team we can work with” to expand the bottom-tier workforce.

If the memo was authentic, it painted an ugly picture of union leaders more aligned with management than with members. NALC leaders insisted it was a fake.

The APWU is continuing to bargain and working under a contract extension, and its conference of local presidents is meeting online today to discuss local alliances and an action plan “to get legislators on the right side of history,” Bates said.

COSTS UP, SERVICE DOWN

When countries privatize their postal services, the results are awful: higher prices, slower mail, and worse jobs. That’s what researchers from UNI Global Union found in a 2019 study examining 11 cases on six continents.

Would-be privatizers in the U.S. probably wouldn’t go after the whole enchilada immediately. Mail processing plants, which are staffed mainly by APWU and Mail Handlers members, could be an appealing target for investors. Already USPS has been consolidating its plants into increasingly automated mega-centers, following the model of super-automated Amazon sortation centers and UPS hubs.

Other discrete pieces of work vulnerable to outsourcing, like janitorial and trucking, are also APWU’s domain.

The Postal Service still plans to move forward this summer with DeJoy’s “Regional Transportation Optimization” plan, which will slow down the mail by an extra day for most of the country—despite the Postal Regulatory Commission’s plea to reconsider, since the change will do a lot of harm and may not save much money.

Changes to the system can easily start hurting service, said David Yao, vice president of the Seattle APWU local. “The postal service isn’t like a fine-tuned engine. It’s kind of like a stressed-out engine. And if you start knocking out some of the supports then you start having lots of problems. You saw that with DeJoy doing his consolidation. In some places it looked on paper like it would make sense to consolidate eight mail plants into five. But in those places where they did it the results were so bad: 10, 20, 30 percent worse service.”

No private company wants to take on the work that letter carriers do—at least while the legal obligation remains to provide universal service, at universal rates, six days a week to every address in the country. It’s a public service, and fundamentally unprofitable, especially in the far-flung rural areas that depend on USPS the most.

That’s one reason why Amazon and FedEx still reply on the Postal Service to provide a significant share of their “last-mile” deliveries. As Dimondstein put it, “The public Postal Service is the low-cost anchor of a $1.2 trillion mail and shipping industry.”

But if privatizers do peel off the lucrative slices, letter carriers will be left behind on a sinking ship. The Postal Service operates more or less on a break-even basis, with the profitable parts subsidizing the money-losers. Skimming off the cream would upset that balance, and ramp up the pressure to cut costs.

STRIKE?

It’s illegal for U.S. postal workers to strike, though they did it anyway in 1970, with enormous impact. There hasn’t been a national postal strike since, nor have the unions escalated in that direction, though their constitutions still contain provisions for how to call a strike.

BFN is calling for meetings in every branch to discuss escalating collective actions. How quickly can workers activate their co-workers in a workforce that has a robust culture of grievances but little experience of direct action?

And how can workers best mobilize against a foe who is already looking to fire them and eliminate the critical public services they provide?

Looming large over any discussion of illegal federal worker strikes is the memory of President Reagan’s 1981 mass firing of Professional Air Traffic Controllers—during another illegal strike—which cast a chill over the whole labor movement.

“PATCO is always brought up as a sort of gotcha,” Vasseur said. “Yes, there’s a huge potential for this to be our PATCO moment. But I think we can win this time, because what happened was the air traffic controllers were fired and the labor movement backed down. The way to fight back would have been the rest of the public sector and then calling on the private sector to come out in defense of workers, and it would have been a real challenge to Reagan that way.”

“As a true unionist in my blood, withholding labor is always an option,” Bates said. “I’m not scared of it. A general strike of all federal workers and postal workers would show the country what’s going to happen if they dismantle everything.”

“The important thing to me is that the postal unions work hard to support federal employees,” said Yao. “We’re in the same boat. Well, we’re in different boats, but we’re facing the same storm.”

Danielle Smith contributed reporting.