Postal Workers Say “Fight Like Hell!”
Imagine waking up tomorrow to find there are no more highways to get to work or no more weather service to tell you the forecast or no more trash collection to keep our communities clean, at least not without paying a steep price for them. We’ve come to expect the consistency of these public goods and services. And yet, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is a major target of the Trump Administration’s assault on social services and the workers who carry them out.
USPS has proudly upheld universal service since its founding in 1775. That means the Postal Service is obligated to deliver to every address in the country no matter the profitability. In total, the Postal Service ships on average nearly 120 billion pieces of mail and packages each year – a massive undertaking.
In 2019, 1.2 billion prescriptions were mailed through USPS, which has risen dramatically during and since the pandemic. The Veterans Administration especially relies on USPS to ship over 80% of prescriptions to veterans. For older Americans and people in rural areas, the postal service is a lifeline that connects them to the rest of the world. Despite people who claim the internet has replaced mail service, the reality is that you can’t download your medicine or packages – not to mention the 42 million people in the country who lack broadband internet access.
Mark Dimonstein, the President of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), said “The public Postal Service is the low-cost anchor of a $1.2 trillion mail and shipping industry,” with 640,000 workers who touch essentially every business across the country, holding the fabric of the national economy together.
Corporate forces have long plotted ways to dismantle and privatize the Postal Service, despite the popular public support for USPS. The Washington Post has reported that the Trump Administration may soon issue an Executive Order firing the Postal Board of Governors, and placing the United States Postal Service under the control of the Commerce Department. The Commerce Department is led by Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street banker who has often called to privatize postal service in the past.
Placing the currently independent Postal Service under the control of the Executive branch could be the first step to much deeper restructuring. In fact, Trump confirmed the day after this announcement that he is considering privatization in the near future for the United States Postal Service (USPS).
This comes alongside pushing mass layoffs and restructuring across the federal government and cutting funding for key social services and programs through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In response, both major unions representing postal workers have organized national days of action to fight back. Nearly 300,000 postal workers are unionized with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), and over 220,000 are unionized with APWU, in addition to many other postal worker unions.
The attacks on postal workers – the largest single group of unionized workers in the country – serves as a warning sign of what could be coming for other programs. To understand this fight, we need to look at how the stage was actually set for the battle nearly two decades ago.
Manufacturing a Crisis
The advocates of postal service privatization would have you believe that the postal service is “failing” – pointing to the operating losses each year. They essentially treat USPS as a relic of the past and a demonstration of how anything run by the government will fail.
This ideological narrative begins with the flawed idea that government services and public goods must operate at a profit like a business to be “successful,” rather than measuring the success based on the benefit it brings to people and our society. Even if we accept that, the opponents of USPS always dodge the true story of why USPS currently operates at a loss. In reality, the Postal Service used to operate at a profit, before it was set up to fail.
In 2006, the Bush Administration quietly pushed forward the longstanding right-wing agenda to undermine the postal service through the innocuous sounding Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. This piece of legislation passed through Congress with barely any opposition and bipartisan consensus.
The service was restricted in new ways. The Act prevented the service from raising rates or introducing new services, essentially fixing the revenue they could bring in. Simultaneously, the Bush era bill created a massive financial obligation unique to the postal service to pay in advance for the health insurance benefits for retirees on a 50 year schedule, requiring USPS to pay more than $5 billion per year for the first 10 years and still more beyond that.
No other government service or corporation has ever been strapped with this obligation, and the impacts were immediate and devastating. The Postal Service went from turning a profit of $900 million in 2006 to dropping down to $3.8 billion in losses by 2009. By 2012, USPS declared that it would not be able to continue to pay this absurd future obligation or it would be incapable of covering ongoing payroll for current employees and other operating expenses. Pro-privatization forces swarmed at the chance to point out the supposed “failure” of USPS. This would be like chaining an olympic swimmer to cement blocks and say they drowned because they couldn’t swim.
Meanwhile, they hold up private competitors as an example of what the postal service is failing to do. They celebrate companies like UPS, FedEx, and Amazon as shining examples of what the “free market” has to offer. And yet, those same companies all took massive bailouts from the same federal government during the pandemic, while the government refused to provide any form of bailout to USPS despite its continued operation without disruption during a global catastrophe. And of course those companies rely on USPS itself to subsidize their own delivery services by contracting out delivery to the locations across the country for anything that they deem insufficiently profitable.
And what does this accomplish? It all sets up the narrative that this service has failed as a government operation, and that the only way to continue this service is to hand it over to private interests and run it supposedly more “efficiently.” They see the reality behind their own propaganda clearly, but they need to push this narrative to justify themselves to the public.
The post office is an essential service and brings in roughly $80 billion in revenue each year, which they are hungry to take over for themselves through privatization. This would be devastating to the workforce, who would see massive restructuring that will undoubtedly lead to mass layoffs and cuts to benefits and pay, if not the complete loss of their current union contracts.
Working at the post office isn’t an easy job now, but if private companies take over, conditions at USPS will look more like the conditions companies like Amazon subject their workers to. And further, millions of working people across the country would be left with a less reliable service.
“There’s always work at the post office”
The attacks on the postal service are part of a broader assault by the billionaire class. The billionaire agenda is premised on returning the U.S. to a period before the Civil Rights movement and subsequent liberation struggles in the U.S. against racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism which won major victories. They want to drag us back before the upsurge of the labor movement in the 1930’s which was responsible for securing the right of workers to organize unions and basic social services like social security, unemployment insurance, and more.
The billionaires are dead set on rolling back these people’s victories, and central to their agenda is waging a war on Black America. The cuts to federal spending and mass layoffs across the federal workforce have been justified by a persistent demonization of “DEI” programs – a dog whistle to discredit any sort of program aimed at combating discrimination on the job.
This is an echo of the racist demonization of welfare recipients in the 90’s, framing these programs as wasteful spending that only support Black women who they dubbed “welfare queens.” They twisted the reality that all working people benefited from these programs to try to trick working class white voters into supporting the cuts to programs they may have benefited from themselves. The same trick is being used today. In addition to Black workers, immigrants are being demonized and scapegoated just as much. Immigrants have become a target of both major political parties, as if they are responsible for the housing crisis or deindustrialization across major parts of the country today.
Black workers represent over 1 in 4 postal workers across the country, and constitute a majority at many post offices. The post office has long been seen as a stable source of employment for Black workers who faced exclusion from most jobs due to discrimination. In the early 20th century, these jobs represented some of the most well paid and stable jobs that Black workers could find, with Black postal workers in the top 5% of Black wage earners in 1940. And today postal jobs are still the best paid job of the top ten largest employers of Black workers.
There is a long history of political organizing and militancy among Black postal workers. They played a critical role in building the Civil Rights movement, forming the National Alliance of Postal Employees to fight discrimination on the job. Merging movements together, they brought Civil Rights struggles into the workplace and brought fights for economic justice and union tactics to their communities and the fight for Black freedom. Black employment at the post office continued to rise until USPS was the single largest employer of Black workers by the 1960’s.
Attacks on the Postal Service are a direct attack on what is still one of the largest and most stable Black workforces today. More broadly, the attacks on USPS – which are themselves attacks on Black workers and the legacy and gains of the Civil Rights movement – would deprive all working people of a key public good. Black workers are in the crossfire, but the only way to defend ourselves is by understanding everyone’s stake in this fight and rejecting the demonization of the workforce and the austerity and privatization push against USPS.
Postal Workers Stand Up
The two largest USPS worker unions, NALC and APWU, are preparing their membership and calling for major actions across the country. While these workers’ right to strike is legally restricted, they have struck before when they were backed into a corner. After decades of “collective begging” to Congress with no formal collective bargaining rights, postal workers were operating under miserable and unsafe conditions at low wages. Pushed to the brink, over 200,000 postal workers went out on the largest federal workers strike in U.S. history during the Great Postal Strike of 1970. They shut down everything from the courts to the military draft. Though the strike was against the law and President Nixon was hell bent on breaking the strike, ultimately the workers were victorious, gaining union recognition, safety improvements, and their largest raises in decades.
The postal service is a bellwether for what is to come for the rest of the federal government, and working people across the country who rely on these public goods and services need to join postal workers to fight like hell in order to win.
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Love this!