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Letter carriers rallied across the United States Sunday against threats by the Trump administration to privatize the US Postal Service. The demonstrations, called by the National Association of Letter Carriers and the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, followed separate demonstrations by the American Postal Workers Union last Thursday.
The demonstrations were somewhat larger than Thursday’s, with hundreds in attendance at individual demonstrations in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities. In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, around 150 people took part in a rally outside a local union hall.
No doubt a factor behind this was opposition by city carriers to the provocative sellout deal pushed by the NALC bureaucracy, which workers rejected by a historic margin. However, NALC is now in binding arbitration to force a deal, almost certain to be little better than the first, without workers even having the right to vote.
While the Trump administration violates laws at will in its drive to slash federal agencies, rip up democratic rights and establish a dictatorship, the union bureaucracy is insisting that workers abide by draconian anti-worker labor laws and limit themselves to writing their congressmen and filing suits and complaints with federal agencies that Trump will simply ignore.
Against this, WSWS reporters distributed copies of the latest statement of the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee, “For a rank-and-file movement to save the Post Office and oppose dictatorship!” The statement stressed that a fight against the Trump government “requires new organizations, rank-and-file committees, to mobilize ourselves independently of Trump’s collaborators in the Democrats and the union tops. We must safeguard our own initiative and begin organizing now rather than waiting for ‘permission’ from the top which will never come.”
Dallas
A fighting mood was expressed by the rank-and-file. “We’re dealing with a corporate takeover,” one Dallas postal worker, who wished to remain anonymous, said. “I think that at this point we need a new party, a party excluding oligarchs, excluding moguls, Democrats and excluding the one percent. A working class party … we need to form a party based upon the proletariat of the working class. ‘Cause that’s the only way that it’s a change going to come. I know that to do nothing, that’s not the answer.”
Alexandria, Virginia
“There would be none of your companies without the working class,” one worker said at the Alexandria, Virginia demonstration. “They feel like that they can get more work for less money and it’s more work for less money and we can’t revert back. Everyone deserves to have a living wage. It doesn’t seem like Congress has a backbone. Everyone’s a yes man to this dictator.”
Asked about Trump’s attack on immigrants, the worker replied:
“I feel like once they start with the immigrants, they’re gonna start with the natural-born citizens. You have to defend one another. You can’t just throw one group of category of people under the bus and think, ‘Oh, it’s not gonna affect me,’ because at some point it will affect us. … I thought the United States, with the First Amendment, we had that right to agree to disagree.”
Nashville, Tennessee
About 50 postal workers rallied in Nashville. One worker pointed to the USPS’ agreement with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to help slash costs. “I had a feeling that something like this would happen with [Louis DeJoy’s] announcement to step down as Postmaster General. He had already been kind of paving the way for something like this considering he had come from a logistics background already and he wants to turn a big profit on the Postal Service [when it is privatized]. And so I think DOGE was the perfect opportunity for him to do that.”
A retired carrier said:
“We were the only company in the entire United States ever mandated by Congress to pre-fund our retirement, okay? So don’t think that they’re not looking at the [billions] that are in that account, just waiting. What they’re going to do, they’re going to do the same thing they’re trying to do with Social Security. They’re going to do exactly the same thing. They’re going to make it look like it’s [the USPS] not even good, it’s not working. It’s busted. So yeah, they’re coming after it. They know it’s there. They want it.”
New York City
In New York City, a postal worker explained to the WSWS: “It’s basically all federal employees, probationary employees. He’s making an all-out assault on everybody that’s working for the federal government. At the end of the day, we’re out here for more than just the Postal Service.”
Trump’s attacks on pro-Palestinian university students like Mahmoud Khalil and Momodou Taal were also raised. “I’ve seen so far they’ve been detained and [they are] expected to be deported. It is a sad state of affairs when you’re fighting for equal rights. And he [Khalil] is an educator. Because he’s educated, [because] he’s educating others as to the strife that millions are suffering under.
A carrier with 25 years of experience told the WSWS:
“I’m here to fight so that they don’t take our rights away. We service the communities. We service the people, the elderly. We’re just a service for everybody. What they’re trying to do to privatize the Postal Service is wrong, you know?
“It’s bad enough that we live in New York City, the cost of the living is so high, and now they want to privatize. If they privatize, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. How are they going to feed their family? If they take this away from us, they’ll take everything else away from us. So I’m here to fight for my future, for my daughter’s future, for all the futures of all the letter carriers that are going to come after me. We have to defend this.”
Another New York postal worker said:
“We sacrificed a lot throughout the years, our families throughout the whole pandemic, and we feel attacked … The privatization is going to be worse for everyone, for workers and for the American public.
“And there’s another 10,000 jobs, you know, on top of the 200,000 jobs they already took through attrition. They don’t replace people that retire. They don’t hire new people or train them well, because it’s not the fault of some carriers. They’re not getting the proper training. So it’s a lot of grievances. It’s meant that we have to do more for less. You’re expected now—with all the technology that’s being brought into the system—you’re accountable, and you’re being tracked every moment of your job. They tell you one minute for this, 10 minutes for that. You know, it can be stressful.”
Another participant in the New York rally said: “This is a moment in our history where we need to come together. We need to fight together. We need to tell our government to stay their hands off of our workers. If we have to [strike], we will. We have done it before. We will do it again. If we need to, we will all come together for one cause and we will do it.”