An interview with union letter carrier Melissa Rakestraw
March 28, 2025
Source: Tempest
Postal workers and supporters rallied in Detroit and around the country in a 2020 day of action, when the first Trump administration attacked the public postal service. A reelected and more aggressive Trump is threatening USPS once again.
Postal workers and supporters rallied in Detroit and around the country in a 2020 day of action, when the first Trump administration attacked the public postal service. A reelected and more aggressive Trump is threatening USPS once again.
Photo: Jim West/jimwestphoto.com
The mail service workers in the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) have been in a battle over their working conditions as well as their customers’ access to the essential public service for many years. The workers went a year and a half after COVID without a contract, only to be presented by the union with a despicable tentative agreement that was voted down by members in February in an unprecedented upset. In addition to the ongoing contract fight, postal workers are at the center of Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to the public sector and federal workers in particular. Tempest’s Natalia Tylim interviewed Melissa Rakestraw, 29-year mail carrier and current full-time officer for Branch 825 of NALC about the challenges and opportunities for the union in the face of social crisis and cuts.
Natalia Tylim: Tell us a little about you. What is your role in the union?
Melissa Rakestraw: My name is Melissa Rakestraw and I’m currently a full-time officer for my local, Branch 825 of the National Association of Letter Carriers. We call ourselves the NALC. I’ve been a full time officer at my branch for the last two years, and I carried mail full-time for 27 and a half years before that. I was a shop steward for over a decade, and I have some other roles in my union too, training stewards and doing arbitration cases. I’m on the executive council of the Illinois State Association of Letter Carriers as well. I’ve been a letter carrier for more than 29 years now.
NT: Your union just voted down the tentative agreement with 70 percent rejecting the contract that was on the table. Can you give us a sense of the key fault lines around this TA for postal workers?
MR: The post office has been very understaffed since COVID started. Our wages haven’t significantly improved. We’ve had a lot of people retire that were eligible and the new people coming in are being paid a very low wage, below $20 an hour without benefits. Postal workers’ wages have been one of the worst of any profession to lag behind inflation. Offices are chronically under-staffed, management is more hostile than ever, we are constantly surveilled, and mandatory overtime has been excessive. We didn’t receive hazard pay during the pandemic even though we were “essential” workers delivering needed goods, medicines, testing kits, voting ballots, PPE [personal protective equipment] and the like during the height of COVID. We were promised by our national leadership, who worked from home and refused to fight for hazard pay for us, that once this round of collective bargaining came around we would be rewarded. Letter carriers’ wage scale tops out below $37 an hour and it takes us over 13 years to get to top of scale. We were ready to fight for considerable improvements in our contract work rules and wages, and we were told by our national president that we should expect a 7-9 percent increase in wages.
Instead, we were handed a deal that said, you’ll get a 1.3 percent raise per year, little protection from mandatory overtime, reductions in our allotted time in the office, and no mechanisms to enforce contract compliance, which all outraged people. There was a vote “No” campaign that took hold across the country with folks connecting online through Zoom meetings and organizing the people in their locals and in their broader area to organize voters to reject the tentative agreement.
We went without a contract for over 500 days before there was a tentative agreement. Our last contract was settled before COVID and didn’t contain significant wage increases. The rank-and-file had really high expectations, especially after seeing the UAW and the Teamsters get huge wins in their contract battles. We consider and compare ourselves to UPS workers. Our jobs are very similar but their top of scale is $49 an hour compared to our $37. Letter carrier jobs are really difficult. People rightly feel that we deserve to receive considerably higher wages, and we got handed a tentative agreement that [only increases our wages by] 1.3% a year. It’s just not enough.
We have carriers living out of their cars at this point, which is unreal. It’s very similar to the conditions that I heard people talk about before they went on strike in 1970, when postal workers were having to receive public assistance to get by, which is very common now as well. We have a lot of single moms who are our newer hires and a lot of them have to get public assistance to try to get by, even though they’re full-time letter carriers. This is supposed to be a career job with benefits and a pension to work towards but people can’t survive off the low starting wages, which is another reason we are so short-staffed.
People were very upset. We waited over a year with no wage increases, no improved working conditions, and then we get 1.3 percent dropped in our laps and treated like we should feel fortunate for it. When we were told during negotiations that the national president was asking for 7-9 percent, some of us were asking why we weren’t demanding 15-20 percent. How on earth could anyone agree to 1.3 percent? It created a real firestorm amongst the membership, which is what motivated them to vote it down. More of our members voted on this tentative agreement than have come out over the last three decades.
Usually turnout is very low. Maybe we’re lucky if we get 20 percent of the workforce to vote on it. So I am encouraged by the fact that so many people felt compelled to vote on this agreement.
NT: You were saying to me before that in your 29 years on the job you’ve never seen an activated union like this.
MR: The last time the NALC rejected a tentative agreement was in 1978. USPS was trying to put a limit on our COLAs [cost of living allowance] and eliminate our no-layoff clause. The membership voting “no” sent a clear message, and we were able to retain those benefits.
This is the first time in my career since I started in 1994 that the membership has been so disgruntled with what’s going on, that so many people were motivated to vote “no.” It’s encouraging that people came out in strong numbers to reject this substandard agreement. 63,680 voted to reject and 26,304 voted to accept. This is in contrast to the vote on the last agreement that began in 2019. In that vote, 60,111 voted to ratify and 3,341 voted to reject.
Voting this down with resounding numbers sent a clear message. The national president and his dwindling number of supporters attempted to round up support for this deal. Members were fear-mongered. They were told, “If you vote it down, you might get something worse when it goes to arbitration.” I’m buoyed by the fact that people said I would rather fight and get worse than drop to my knees and accept this indignity. To accept 1.3 percent is a slap in the face, and I will not do it. I will not tell management that this is an okay way to treat me, I would rather rise to my feet and fight than stay on my knees and surrender. I’m buoyed by the fact that people said I would rather fight and get worse than drop to my knees and accept this indignity.
It’s so inspiring that this sentiment exists that people say I’m willing to risk getting less and fight for more, and that’s a kind of spirit that I think is very hard to dampen in people once it’s aroused and activated.
NT: You mentioned comparing the conditions of postal workers now to the 1970s when there was a successful wildcat strike. What do you think are some of the ways that the postal service has changed since then? And what are the ways in which the work is either harder or easier compared to then?
MR: So, one of the things now would be the constant supervision of employees through electronic means. Having a scanner device on us that constantly tracks us every second of the day. Even if you stop for a couple of minutes somewhere throughout your day, you’re having managers ask you why the next day. They get notifications from their bosses telling them who to interrogate. They want to know what you were doing. They also have devices in the vehicles that are tracking whether or not the seatbelt is engaged, if you brake too hard, how fast you’re going, throughout the whole day. We face communities that are littered with Ring doorbells. So we’re now working in an environment where we are constantly surveilled, which creates issues for people, actually working more unsafely because they feel like they have to rush and speed up, which results in more accidents.
We’ve seen a huge increase in accidents throughout our area. So the general conditions of being monitored are unlike ever before. Even when I started in the 90s, it wasn’t like that. Occasionally, your supervisor would come out on the street and see what you were doing, but now it comes even from above our supervisors. People in district offices are monitoring probably hundreds of carriers at a time to see what’s going on district wide. They’re trying to create speed-ups, and management is more hostile than ever because they’re being pressured to speed us up and reduce the overtime being used.
Management has created a very hostile workroom floor where carriers are constantly harangued to “get to the street.” It used to be that carriers spent a lot more time in the office sorting mail, so you had a real camaraderie among people where they might be together three or four hours every morning, talking and discussing things among the carriers who ran that workroom floor. Now, with automated mail sorting, carriers are being rushed out of the office within an hour or maybe less, so you don’t have as much time to make those bonds with your coworkers where that fraternity develops. Now there’s more policing of the workroom floor by management to make sure that people aren’t having conversations–you are harangued to get out of there. And of course, everybody wants to get out because once you’re out on your own, you don’t have that supervisor breathing down your back at least.
So the surveillance and speed-ups are huge.
Surveys show that letter carriers are very popular public employees. The majority of our customers love their mailman, but you see more people who get upset and more hostile about any mistakes. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy instituted a plan that has slowed down first-class mail and prioritizes the delivery of parcels at the expense of everything else. He’s consolidated processing and delivery centers, creating huge mail backups across the country. Our customers confront us and want to know, where is my check at? Where is this bill at? And if I don’t have it on me, they’re going to be upset with me. There’s mail sitting in offices all across the country that’s not getting sorted because local management’s been told to let the letters sit and send out the parcels. We have a lot of offices that are still short-staffed post-COVID and they haven’t been able to get back to proper staffing levels because the wages are so low for starting workers.
For a lot of workers, this job isn’t a career anymore. It’s something to do until something better comes along. When I started and even before that, I think post-1970, people looked at this as a career. You’re working toward the pension. You’re working for the big picture, right? And all of that has been eroded,which then means you lose some of that trust in your community. If people are used to seeing that same carrier every day for 10 or 20 years, but now they’re seeing someone different every day, and some days they get mail, some days they don’t. Some days their mail comes at two in the afternoon, sometimes it’s nine-o-clock at night. People lose faith in the service. We have more forced overtime now than we have in the decades past because of the short-staffing, which deteriorates the workforce and morale. This leaves a lot of people feeling defeated and thinking, well, this is just the way it is, and I’m going to leave and try to find something better.
So those are just some of the things that I think have changed. This is where things now stand, post-wildcat strike, post-1970s, post-Reagan attacking federal workers, and now what we’ve seen neoliberalism do to decimate the public sector on the whole in the last 30-plus years.
NT: Obviously, Trump is now talking bluntly about the need to privatize the agency. You’re pointing at the fact that it didn’t start with Trump, but can you explain what you think the battleground around defending this as a public service now looks like? How has Trump accelerated this process that was already in motion?
MR: In 2018, Trump had Steven Mnuchin in the Treasury Department commission a report on privatizing the postal service, titled, “United States Postal Service: A Sustainable Path Forward.” Of course, it was not, in fact, a sustainable path forward. It was a guide to dismantling the public service. It talks about eliminating the collective bargaining agreements and the pension benefits as well as selling off access to mailboxes to the highest bidders in the private sector. When the 2020 election rolled around, Trump had a big problem with the post office because so many people were going to be voting by mail. Part of delegitimizing the results of the election required him to delegitimize the post office and say that the post office couldn’t be trusted to deliver and collect ballots. The Washington Post reported last week that Trump now wants to fire the Board of Governors who preside over the independently run agency and move the Post Office into the Department of Commerce. In live interviews the following day, when asked about moving the Post Office into the Commerce Department, Trump said, “We are thinking about doing that. A merger of sorts.” Merging the Post Office into Commerce would be a way of putting it under direct control of the President and his orders. It would eliminate the independent authority of the institution. As it stands now, the Post Office is run by a Board of Governors and a Postmaster General. It is funded by the revenue it generates, not taxpayer dollars. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 created the United States Postal Service as an independent agency. Before that it was the U.S. Post Office Department in the cabinet.
Before the leaks came out of the administration about the proposed “merger,” current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced that he would be stepping down. He was the former head of XPO Logistics, the trucking firm with significant postal contracts and the head of Republican fundraising at one point. He was appointed by Trump early in his first term. DeJoy is still in office because they generally serve seven year terms. DeJoy’s attempts towards privatization have looked more like degrading services so that people won’t want to use the mail for first class mail, for bills, for checks, that kind of thing. They would seek a private company where they can expect on-time delivery even if it’s at a significantly higher price, because DeJoy has been shifting to try to make the post office just a last-mile parcel delivery company, and that’s his main thing. He’s even switched from using air cargo for parcels to semi trucks. He’s been allowed to do these things to slow service which in turn causes us to lose consumer confidence.
DeJoy’s plans eroded first-class delivery standards. There are some states that only vote by mail, and I don’t think there’s enough focus on the fact that when you attack the post office and first-class mail, you’re attacking voting rights, especially people in more broadly rural states. You’ve seen these states where they have lines forever for people to stand in line to vote, that doesn’t happen in states that vote by mail. It’s so much more convenient to do it by mail, and that option is going to be another area where people lose faith in the mail service.
Even though the post office might not be doing as much last mile for UPS or Amazon because Amazon’s grown their own fleet, they still are going to need the post office to go to the communities they [UPS and Amazon] don’t want to go into, whether it’s rural communities or even in urban communities where there might be a crime threat. Amazon will refuse to go into those communities if they’ve had their delivery drivers get robbed, whereas the post office keeps sending our carriers into those dangerous situations. We’re delivering to those communities as well, and it’s a service that obviously underserved communities rely the most upon. The people who are waiting on some type of assistance through checks that they receive or prescriptions; they need reliable affordable service. We have more and more folks who are ordering things online to be delivered by the post office, because they might not be mobile or they can’t afford a car to travel so they need to have a public service that can get those goods to them in a manner that isn’t going to create an undue financial burden on them. When you attack this public service and this public infrastructure, that’s what you’re attacking, and those are the people who are going to suffer the most. I’m encouraged by the fact that we are trying to take back democratic control of our union and gaining an understanding that when we fight, we can win and now take those fights outside of our union.
NT: You’re already pointing at this, but can you say a little bit more about how you see your contract fight being connected with these public services?
MR: Having this struggle within our union to fight for better conditions can translate outside of our union to the broader attacks we are facing. We will continue to see attempts to dismantle the Postal Service, whether it be changing our pensions so that we have to contribute more and receive less, that our minimum retirement age is moved from 57 up to 62 or 65, and that our pensions, which are currently based upon our three highest consecutive years of pay, will be shifted to being based upon our high five consecutive years of pay. Currently, management is obligated to pay time for union stewards in offices while they are filing grievances. This administration wants that to go away so a huge financial burden would be put back on the local union or the national to pay our stewards, which would effectively destroy our union. It’s a burden we could not bear. It is management violating the contract and then charging us to try to correct it. It just isn’t possible.
I’m encouraged by the fact that we are trying to take back democratic control of our union and gaining an understanding that when we fight, we can win and now take those fights outside of our union, whether it be towards the postmaster general trying to destroy the delivery network and consolidate offices, with the attacks on our very livelihoods and the pensions that we all work so hard for and deserve to collect when we’re eligible to finally retire. It’s encouraging that people have organized themselves within my union, forming caucuses such as Build A Fighting NALC, Concerned Letter Carriers, and the Mike Caref for President campaign. The infrastructure forming within and between these groups is something that we can now use going forward to the fight for the survival of the public’s post office as we know it. The NALC has put out a call to organize national protests on Sunday March 23 to say, “HELL NO to dismantling the Postal Service.” I expect a huge turnout of letter carriers across the country to join these rallies and actions.
NT: And how does the private sector counterpart of Amazon and UPS fit into this?
MR: So I think part of it is the fact that the post office has seen itself as the receiver of the Amazon overflow. We have a new, lower-wage workforce to deliver the extra packages that Amazon can’t handle or doesn’t want.
If Amazon were to be more unionized, it’s not going to allow the Post Office to keep our starting wages so artificially low like they are now. So that has a direct impact across the industry. People are coming in as temporary workers as opposed to someone who wants a career, because that’s what we’ve seen across the market. There’s been this degradation of the profession through Amazon coming in and flooding the market with their gig workers.
Seeing their workers being willing to fight for more and unionize has then led a lot of our new hires at the Post Office to say, well, their conditions are the same as ours, we’re getting around the same wages, but they’re fighting for more. And we have a union. How come we aren’t getting more? And they don’t have to do as much forced overtime as I do. They have more say over their own schedule than I do. Our hourly wages are comparable, but I have a union, so why isn’t my union fighting for more?
That sentiment has, I think, bolstered a lot of the fightback that we’ve seen,whether it be on our tentative agreement or talking about our working conditions. I think all of those things are connected. People are looking outside of our workplace and seeing that if they don’t have a union and they’re fighting for more, shouldn’t our union be fighting for more? And I think part of that is the millennial and younger generations who are in those jobs and are willing to try to unionize whether it’s Starbucks, Amazon, wherever. And in my job we’ve traditionally had an older workforce, but now we’re starting to get a little stronger base of younger workers who see their friends and contemporaries fighting just to unionize and then understanding, well, my conditions aren’t any better and I have a union, so I’m going to fight within my union to get better too.
I’ve been very encouraged to see that while there is a lot of churn in the newer hires in the post office, in addition there is a new layer of younger workers who have come in under these bad conditions and they’ve stuck around for maybe five years or more. They’ve put in the blood sweat and tears to get a foothold here and are willing to fight for more. They don’t want to have to live out of their car or over 50-plus miles from their workplace because they can’t afford to live in or near the community they work in. It’s now really inspiring to see a new layer of folks come in who have a different perspective and want to learn more about it and who have an understanding that we are the ones that have to save ourselves and fighting back is the only way to get there.
I’m kind of in the gap generation. I’m a Gen-Xer and I saw an older generation of radicals who participated in the 1970s strike and who maybe participated in the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. And then we had the Reagan era and saw neoliberalism take hold and business unionism easily take over and replace class struggle unionism. Now I’m going into spaces where these younger workers are sharing links to class struggle unionism, and different Haymarket titles and Labor Notes books about organizing in your own union.
Newer members of my union are forming study groups with a reading list that includes Teamster Rebellion. It’s part of that developing left perspective of class-struggle unionism. My union has been taking a very conservative approach with a business union model for so long. It’s now really inspiring to see a new layer of folks come in who have a different perspective and want to learn more about it and who have an understanding that we are the ones that have to save ourselves and fighting back is the only way to get there.
NT: Even in my industry I see it too. Older people are willing to accept a lot of things about the way the industry runs, but young people come in and they’re like, what the fuck is this? I’m not doing that. It’s awesome, you know? The young radical refusal to accept.
But then I think we then face this question of how workplace or union organizing can move to a different scale like a socialist independent project. There is a gap there that ultimately we have to solve. Otherwise, it kind of starts and ends with union politics, which we know, obviously, is insufficient to transform the world in itself.
MR: I think some folks maybe have seen through the Bernie movement that they’re not going to take over the Democratic Party. I think if anything, this election has shown us that this is not a vehicle to help working people. I mean, you cannot count on them to do anything for us even when they do get elected. They collaborate with the far right and tolerate the intolerable.
We’re not going to have an independent working class party anytime soon, in my opinion. But, I definitely think those seeds have been sown. There is no faith in the Democratic Party when you see what’s happened in this genocide in Palestine in the last year plus and how they were willing to sacrifice the election to continue to perpetrate a genocide. I think some folks maybe have seen through the Bernie movement that they’re not going to take over the Democratic Party. I think if anything, this election has shown us that this is not a vehicle to help working people. I mean, you cannot count on them to do anything for us even when they do get elected. They collaborate with the far right, and tolerate the intolerable.
NT: What’s next now that the TA has been voted down?
MR: We’ve seen people in my union all across the country organize around a fair, open bargaining platform when our tentative agreement was being negotiated.
We’ve seen locals all across the country organize their own rallies against the crime that’s being perpetrated upon their membership. Many of those locals are fighting on both of those fronts. They’re fighting for protection for our carriers on the street, as well as a better contract and better terms for our working conditions and our wages and everything that goes with that.
This has also cohered people into even fighting for a change in leadership in our national union, even though elections are two years away. I’ve never seen a contested election in my union that had an opposition that really had a chance to take out the entrenched leadership. So, when we’re fighting against all of these things and pressures that are being put on us, we’re starting to make gains and wins. No matter what result we get from our contract fight going into arbitration, we are prepared and inspired to fight. We definitely have the incentive to fight on a broader scale outside of our workplace and that truly is our only alternative.
The Federal government is looking to gut the public sector, looking to gut our pensions, looking to increase how long we have to break our bodies down doing this job. This isn’t a job that most people can do for over 30 years, or into their mid to late 60s, because it’s very physically demanding. We don’t have to accept a lack of democracy and transparency in our own union. We don’t have to accept management harassing us on the workroom floor. We don’t have to accept management trying to move our work locations further away, which increases our unpaid labor every day. We don’t have to accept those things, just like we don’t have to accept having our pensions attacked, having our benefits attacked, having the long term reason we have this job taken out from under us. That goes beyond even our pensions into social security as well.
Right now we have a minimum retirement age of 57 with 30 years of service. You can start collecting your full pension but you can’t collect Social Security until you’re 62, so we get a gap payment to make up for that. That’s one of the things on the table federally they want to take away.
They’re trying to attack us on so many fronts, but I think it’s becoming clear to a lot of people within my union and other unions that we’re going to have to band together to fight back against these attacks, because none of us can do it alone, and nobody’s going to come in and do it for us. We’re going to have to save ourselves. I feel that reality is starting to take hold, whether it be not having faith in our union leadership to save us, or postal management certainly never saving us, it’s clear politicians aren’t going to save us either. We’re going to have to band together to fight back against these attacks, because none of us can do it alone, and nobody’s going to come in and do it for us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.
We have to make those connections with folks in other workplaces. Their struggles are connected to our struggles. We have to connect our struggles to the struggles of those fighting for the people in our communities, whether they’re under attack from ICE or facing attacks on their social security benefits or Medicaid; or whether they’re fighting for our trans siblings to have their rights respected in the workplace and outside of the workplace and fighting to protect the jobs and public services that our working class communities rely upon.
It’s not to underestimate the scale and scope of the challenges we’re facing. However, there is a way forward. That way forward is going to be through solidarity within the federal workforce and our communities around us because these attacks are coming fast and furious, and they aren’t just going to go away.
Melissa Rakestraw is a 29-plus year USPS letter carrier and Vice President of NALC local 825 as well as being a shop steward and arbitration advocate. Melissa serves on the Illinois State Association of Letter Carriers executive board.
The mail service workers in the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) have been in a battle over their working conditions as well as their customers’ access to the essential public service for many years. The workers went a year and a half after COVID without a contract, only to be presented by the union with a despicable tentative agreement that was voted down by members in February in an unprecedented upset. In addition to the ongoing contract fight, postal workers are at the center of Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to the public sector and federal workers in particular. Tempest’s Natalia Tylim interviewed Melissa Rakestraw, 29-year mail carrier and current full-time officer for Branch 825 of NALC about the challenges and opportunities for the union in the face of social crisis and cuts.
Natalia Tylim: Tell us a little about you. What is your role in the union?
Melissa Rakestraw: My name is Melissa Rakestraw and I’m currently a full-time officer for my local, Branch 825 of the National Association of Letter Carriers. We call ourselves the NALC. I’ve been a full time officer at my branch for the last two years, and I carried mail full-time for 27 and a half years before that. I was a shop steward for over a decade, and I have some other roles in my union too, training stewards and doing arbitration cases. I’m on the executive council of the Illinois State Association of Letter Carriers as well. I’ve been a letter carrier for more than 29 years now.
NT: Your union just voted down the tentative agreement with 70 percent rejecting the contract that was on the table. Can you give us a sense of the key fault lines around this TA for postal workers?
MR: The post office has been very understaffed since COVID started. Our wages haven’t significantly improved. We’ve had a lot of people retire that were eligible and the new people coming in are being paid a very low wage, below $20 an hour without benefits. Postal workers’ wages have been one of the worst of any profession to lag behind inflation. Offices are chronically under-staffed, management is more hostile than ever, we are constantly surveilled, and mandatory overtime has been excessive. We didn’t receive hazard pay during the pandemic even though we were “essential” workers delivering needed goods, medicines, testing kits, voting ballots, PPE [personal protective equipment] and the like during the height of COVID. We were promised by our national leadership, who worked from home and refused to fight for hazard pay for us, that once this round of collective bargaining came around we would be rewarded. Letter carriers’ wage scale tops out below $37 an hour and it takes us over 13 years to get to top of scale. We were ready to fight for considerable improvements in our contract work rules and wages, and we were told by our national president that we should expect a 7-9 percent increase in wages.
Instead, we were handed a deal that said, you’ll get a 1.3 percent raise per year, little protection from mandatory overtime, reductions in our allotted time in the office, and no mechanisms to enforce contract compliance, which all outraged people. There was a vote “No” campaign that took hold across the country with folks connecting online through Zoom meetings and organizing the people in their locals and in their broader area to organize voters to reject the tentative agreement.
We went without a contract for over 500 days before there was a tentative agreement. Our last contract was settled before COVID and didn’t contain significant wage increases. The rank-and-file had really high expectations, especially after seeing the UAW and the Teamsters get huge wins in their contract battles. We consider and compare ourselves to UPS workers. Our jobs are very similar but their top of scale is $49 an hour compared to our $37. Letter carrier jobs are really difficult. People rightly feel that we deserve to receive considerably higher wages, and we got handed a tentative agreement that [only increases our wages by] 1.3% a year. It’s just not enough.
We have carriers living out of their cars at this point, which is unreal. It’s very similar to the conditions that I heard people talk about before they went on strike in 1970, when postal workers were having to receive public assistance to get by, which is very common now as well. We have a lot of single moms who are our newer hires and a lot of them have to get public assistance to try to get by, even though they’re full-time letter carriers. This is supposed to be a career job with benefits and a pension to work towards but people can’t survive off the low starting wages, which is another reason we are so short-staffed.
People were very upset. We waited over a year with no wage increases, no improved working conditions, and then we get 1.3 percent dropped in our laps and treated like we should feel fortunate for it. When we were told during negotiations that the national president was asking for 7-9 percent, some of us were asking why we weren’t demanding 15-20 percent. How on earth could anyone agree to 1.3 percent? It created a real firestorm amongst the membership, which is what motivated them to vote it down. More of our members voted on this tentative agreement than have come out over the last three decades.
Usually turnout is very low. Maybe we’re lucky if we get 20 percent of the workforce to vote on it. So I am encouraged by the fact that so many people felt compelled to vote on this agreement.
NT: You were saying to me before that in your 29 years on the job you’ve never seen an activated union like this.
MR: The last time the NALC rejected a tentative agreement was in 1978. USPS was trying to put a limit on our COLAs [cost of living allowance] and eliminate our no-layoff clause. The membership voting “no” sent a clear message, and we were able to retain those benefits.
This is the first time in my career since I started in 1994 that the membership has been so disgruntled with what’s going on, that so many people were motivated to vote “no.” It’s encouraging that people came out in strong numbers to reject this substandard agreement. 63,680 voted to reject and 26,304 voted to accept. This is in contrast to the vote on the last agreement that began in 2019. In that vote, 60,111 voted to ratify and 3,341 voted to reject.
Voting this down with resounding numbers sent a clear message. The national president and his dwindling number of supporters attempted to round up support for this deal. Members were fear-mongered. They were told, “If you vote it down, you might get something worse when it goes to arbitration.” I’m buoyed by the fact that people said I would rather fight and get worse than drop to my knees and accept this indignity. To accept 1.3 percent is a slap in the face, and I will not do it. I will not tell management that this is an okay way to treat me, I would rather rise to my feet and fight than stay on my knees and surrender. I’m buoyed by the fact that people said I would rather fight and get worse than drop to my knees and accept this indignity.
It’s so inspiring that this sentiment exists that people say I’m willing to risk getting less and fight for more, and that’s a kind of spirit that I think is very hard to dampen in people once it’s aroused and activated.
NT: You mentioned comparing the conditions of postal workers now to the 1970s when there was a successful wildcat strike. What do you think are some of the ways that the postal service has changed since then? And what are the ways in which the work is either harder or easier compared to then?
MR: So, one of the things now would be the constant supervision of employees through electronic means. Having a scanner device on us that constantly tracks us every second of the day. Even if you stop for a couple of minutes somewhere throughout your day, you’re having managers ask you why the next day. They get notifications from their bosses telling them who to interrogate. They want to know what you were doing. They also have devices in the vehicles that are tracking whether or not the seatbelt is engaged, if you brake too hard, how fast you’re going, throughout the whole day. We face communities that are littered with Ring doorbells. So we’re now working in an environment where we are constantly surveilled, which creates issues for people, actually working more unsafely because they feel like they have to rush and speed up, which results in more accidents.
We’ve seen a huge increase in accidents throughout our area. So the general conditions of being monitored are unlike ever before. Even when I started in the 90s, it wasn’t like that. Occasionally, your supervisor would come out on the street and see what you were doing, but now it comes even from above our supervisors. People in district offices are monitoring probably hundreds of carriers at a time to see what’s going on district wide. They’re trying to create speed-ups, and management is more hostile than ever because they’re being pressured to speed us up and reduce the overtime being used.
Management has created a very hostile workroom floor where carriers are constantly harangued to “get to the street.” It used to be that carriers spent a lot more time in the office sorting mail, so you had a real camaraderie among people where they might be together three or four hours every morning, talking and discussing things among the carriers who ran that workroom floor. Now, with automated mail sorting, carriers are being rushed out of the office within an hour or maybe less, so you don’t have as much time to make those bonds with your coworkers where that fraternity develops. Now there’s more policing of the workroom floor by management to make sure that people aren’t having conversations–you are harangued to get out of there. And of course, everybody wants to get out because once you’re out on your own, you don’t have that supervisor breathing down your back at least.
So the surveillance and speed-ups are huge.
Surveys show that letter carriers are very popular public employees. The majority of our customers love their mailman, but you see more people who get upset and more hostile about any mistakes. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy instituted a plan that has slowed down first-class mail and prioritizes the delivery of parcels at the expense of everything else. He’s consolidated processing and delivery centers, creating huge mail backups across the country. Our customers confront us and want to know, where is my check at? Where is this bill at? And if I don’t have it on me, they’re going to be upset with me. There’s mail sitting in offices all across the country that’s not getting sorted because local management’s been told to let the letters sit and send out the parcels. We have a lot of offices that are still short-staffed post-COVID and they haven’t been able to get back to proper staffing levels because the wages are so low for starting workers.
For a lot of workers, this job isn’t a career anymore. It’s something to do until something better comes along. When I started and even before that, I think post-1970, people looked at this as a career. You’re working toward the pension. You’re working for the big picture, right? And all of that has been eroded,which then means you lose some of that trust in your community. If people are used to seeing that same carrier every day for 10 or 20 years, but now they’re seeing someone different every day, and some days they get mail, some days they don’t. Some days their mail comes at two in the afternoon, sometimes it’s nine-o-clock at night. People lose faith in the service. We have more forced overtime now than we have in the decades past because of the short-staffing, which deteriorates the workforce and morale. This leaves a lot of people feeling defeated and thinking, well, this is just the way it is, and I’m going to leave and try to find something better.
So those are just some of the things that I think have changed. This is where things now stand, post-wildcat strike, post-1970s, post-Reagan attacking federal workers, and now what we’ve seen neoliberalism do to decimate the public sector on the whole in the last 30-plus years.
NT: Obviously, Trump is now talking bluntly about the need to privatize the agency. You’re pointing at the fact that it didn’t start with Trump, but can you explain what you think the battleground around defending this as a public service now looks like? How has Trump accelerated this process that was already in motion?
MR: In 2018, Trump had Steven Mnuchin in the Treasury Department commission a report on privatizing the postal service, titled, “United States Postal Service: A Sustainable Path Forward.” Of course, it was not, in fact, a sustainable path forward. It was a guide to dismantling the public service. It talks about eliminating the collective bargaining agreements and the pension benefits as well as selling off access to mailboxes to the highest bidders in the private sector. When the 2020 election rolled around, Trump had a big problem with the post office because so many people were going to be voting by mail. Part of delegitimizing the results of the election required him to delegitimize the post office and say that the post office couldn’t be trusted to deliver and collect ballots. The Washington Post reported last week that Trump now wants to fire the Board of Governors who preside over the independently run agency and move the Post Office into the Department of Commerce. In live interviews the following day, when asked about moving the Post Office into the Commerce Department, Trump said, “We are thinking about doing that. A merger of sorts.” Merging the Post Office into Commerce would be a way of putting it under direct control of the President and his orders. It would eliminate the independent authority of the institution. As it stands now, the Post Office is run by a Board of Governors and a Postmaster General. It is funded by the revenue it generates, not taxpayer dollars. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 created the United States Postal Service as an independent agency. Before that it was the U.S. Post Office Department in the cabinet.
Before the leaks came out of the administration about the proposed “merger,” current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced that he would be stepping down. He was the former head of XPO Logistics, the trucking firm with significant postal contracts and the head of Republican fundraising at one point. He was appointed by Trump early in his first term. DeJoy is still in office because they generally serve seven year terms. DeJoy’s attempts towards privatization have looked more like degrading services so that people won’t want to use the mail for first class mail, for bills, for checks, that kind of thing. They would seek a private company where they can expect on-time delivery even if it’s at a significantly higher price, because DeJoy has been shifting to try to make the post office just a last-mile parcel delivery company, and that’s his main thing. He’s even switched from using air cargo for parcels to semi trucks. He’s been allowed to do these things to slow service which in turn causes us to lose consumer confidence.
DeJoy’s plans eroded first-class delivery standards. There are some states that only vote by mail, and I don’t think there’s enough focus on the fact that when you attack the post office and first-class mail, you’re attacking voting rights, especially people in more broadly rural states. You’ve seen these states where they have lines forever for people to stand in line to vote, that doesn’t happen in states that vote by mail. It’s so much more convenient to do it by mail, and that option is going to be another area where people lose faith in the mail service.
Even though the post office might not be doing as much last mile for UPS or Amazon because Amazon’s grown their own fleet, they still are going to need the post office to go to the communities they [UPS and Amazon] don’t want to go into, whether it’s rural communities or even in urban communities where there might be a crime threat. Amazon will refuse to go into those communities if they’ve had their delivery drivers get robbed, whereas the post office keeps sending our carriers into those dangerous situations. We’re delivering to those communities as well, and it’s a service that obviously underserved communities rely the most upon. The people who are waiting on some type of assistance through checks that they receive or prescriptions; they need reliable affordable service. We have more and more folks who are ordering things online to be delivered by the post office, because they might not be mobile or they can’t afford a car to travel so they need to have a public service that can get those goods to them in a manner that isn’t going to create an undue financial burden on them. When you attack this public service and this public infrastructure, that’s what you’re attacking, and those are the people who are going to suffer the most. I’m encouraged by the fact that we are trying to take back democratic control of our union and gaining an understanding that when we fight, we can win and now take those fights outside of our union.
NT: You’re already pointing at this, but can you say a little bit more about how you see your contract fight being connected with these public services?
MR: Having this struggle within our union to fight for better conditions can translate outside of our union to the broader attacks we are facing. We will continue to see attempts to dismantle the Postal Service, whether it be changing our pensions so that we have to contribute more and receive less, that our minimum retirement age is moved from 57 up to 62 or 65, and that our pensions, which are currently based upon our three highest consecutive years of pay, will be shifted to being based upon our high five consecutive years of pay. Currently, management is obligated to pay time for union stewards in offices while they are filing grievances. This administration wants that to go away so a huge financial burden would be put back on the local union or the national to pay our stewards, which would effectively destroy our union. It’s a burden we could not bear. It is management violating the contract and then charging us to try to correct it. It just isn’t possible.
I’m encouraged by the fact that we are trying to take back democratic control of our union and gaining an understanding that when we fight, we can win and now take those fights outside of our union, whether it be towards the postmaster general trying to destroy the delivery network and consolidate offices, with the attacks on our very livelihoods and the pensions that we all work so hard for and deserve to collect when we’re eligible to finally retire. It’s encouraging that people have organized themselves within my union, forming caucuses such as Build A Fighting NALC, Concerned Letter Carriers, and the Mike Caref for President campaign. The infrastructure forming within and between these groups is something that we can now use going forward to the fight for the survival of the public’s post office as we know it. The NALC has put out a call to organize national protests on Sunday March 23 to say, “HELL NO to dismantling the Postal Service.” I expect a huge turnout of letter carriers across the country to join these rallies and actions.
NT: And how does the private sector counterpart of Amazon and UPS fit into this?
MR: So I think part of it is the fact that the post office has seen itself as the receiver of the Amazon overflow. We have a new, lower-wage workforce to deliver the extra packages that Amazon can’t handle or doesn’t want.
If Amazon were to be more unionized, it’s not going to allow the Post Office to keep our starting wages so artificially low like they are now. So that has a direct impact across the industry. People are coming in as temporary workers as opposed to someone who wants a career, because that’s what we’ve seen across the market. There’s been this degradation of the profession through Amazon coming in and flooding the market with their gig workers.
Seeing their workers being willing to fight for more and unionize has then led a lot of our new hires at the Post Office to say, well, their conditions are the same as ours, we’re getting around the same wages, but they’re fighting for more. And we have a union. How come we aren’t getting more? And they don’t have to do as much forced overtime as I do. They have more say over their own schedule than I do. Our hourly wages are comparable, but I have a union, so why isn’t my union fighting for more?
That sentiment has, I think, bolstered a lot of the fightback that we’ve seen,whether it be on our tentative agreement or talking about our working conditions. I think all of those things are connected. People are looking outside of our workplace and seeing that if they don’t have a union and they’re fighting for more, shouldn’t our union be fighting for more? And I think part of that is the millennial and younger generations who are in those jobs and are willing to try to unionize whether it’s Starbucks, Amazon, wherever. And in my job we’ve traditionally had an older workforce, but now we’re starting to get a little stronger base of younger workers who see their friends and contemporaries fighting just to unionize and then understanding, well, my conditions aren’t any better and I have a union, so I’m going to fight within my union to get better too.
I’ve been very encouraged to see that while there is a lot of churn in the newer hires in the post office, in addition there is a new layer of younger workers who have come in under these bad conditions and they’ve stuck around for maybe five years or more. They’ve put in the blood sweat and tears to get a foothold here and are willing to fight for more. They don’t want to have to live out of their car or over 50-plus miles from their workplace because they can’t afford to live in or near the community they work in. It’s now really inspiring to see a new layer of folks come in who have a different perspective and want to learn more about it and who have an understanding that we are the ones that have to save ourselves and fighting back is the only way to get there.
I’m kind of in the gap generation. I’m a Gen-Xer and I saw an older generation of radicals who participated in the 1970s strike and who maybe participated in the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. And then we had the Reagan era and saw neoliberalism take hold and business unionism easily take over and replace class struggle unionism. Now I’m going into spaces where these younger workers are sharing links to class struggle unionism, and different Haymarket titles and Labor Notes books about organizing in your own union.
Newer members of my union are forming study groups with a reading list that includes Teamster Rebellion. It’s part of that developing left perspective of class-struggle unionism. My union has been taking a very conservative approach with a business union model for so long. It’s now really inspiring to see a new layer of folks come in who have a different perspective and want to learn more about it and who have an understanding that we are the ones that have to save ourselves and fighting back is the only way to get there.
NT: Even in my industry I see it too. Older people are willing to accept a lot of things about the way the industry runs, but young people come in and they’re like, what the fuck is this? I’m not doing that. It’s awesome, you know? The young radical refusal to accept.
But then I think we then face this question of how workplace or union organizing can move to a different scale like a socialist independent project. There is a gap there that ultimately we have to solve. Otherwise, it kind of starts and ends with union politics, which we know, obviously, is insufficient to transform the world in itself.
MR: I think some folks maybe have seen through the Bernie movement that they’re not going to take over the Democratic Party. I think if anything, this election has shown us that this is not a vehicle to help working people. I mean, you cannot count on them to do anything for us even when they do get elected. They collaborate with the far right and tolerate the intolerable.
We’re not going to have an independent working class party anytime soon, in my opinion. But, I definitely think those seeds have been sown. There is no faith in the Democratic Party when you see what’s happened in this genocide in Palestine in the last year plus and how they were willing to sacrifice the election to continue to perpetrate a genocide. I think some folks maybe have seen through the Bernie movement that they’re not going to take over the Democratic Party. I think if anything, this election has shown us that this is not a vehicle to help working people. I mean, you cannot count on them to do anything for us even when they do get elected. They collaborate with the far right, and tolerate the intolerable.
NT: What’s next now that the TA has been voted down?
MR: We’ve seen people in my union all across the country organize around a fair, open bargaining platform when our tentative agreement was being negotiated.
We’ve seen locals all across the country organize their own rallies against the crime that’s being perpetrated upon their membership. Many of those locals are fighting on both of those fronts. They’re fighting for protection for our carriers on the street, as well as a better contract and better terms for our working conditions and our wages and everything that goes with that.
This has also cohered people into even fighting for a change in leadership in our national union, even though elections are two years away. I’ve never seen a contested election in my union that had an opposition that really had a chance to take out the entrenched leadership. So, when we’re fighting against all of these things and pressures that are being put on us, we’re starting to make gains and wins. No matter what result we get from our contract fight going into arbitration, we are prepared and inspired to fight. We definitely have the incentive to fight on a broader scale outside of our workplace and that truly is our only alternative.
The Federal government is looking to gut the public sector, looking to gut our pensions, looking to increase how long we have to break our bodies down doing this job. This isn’t a job that most people can do for over 30 years, or into their mid to late 60s, because it’s very physically demanding. We don’t have to accept a lack of democracy and transparency in our own union. We don’t have to accept management harassing us on the workroom floor. We don’t have to accept management trying to move our work locations further away, which increases our unpaid labor every day. We don’t have to accept those things, just like we don’t have to accept having our pensions attacked, having our benefits attacked, having the long term reason we have this job taken out from under us. That goes beyond even our pensions into social security as well.
Right now we have a minimum retirement age of 57 with 30 years of service. You can start collecting your full pension but you can’t collect Social Security until you’re 62, so we get a gap payment to make up for that. That’s one of the things on the table federally they want to take away.
They’re trying to attack us on so many fronts, but I think it’s becoming clear to a lot of people within my union and other unions that we’re going to have to band together to fight back against these attacks, because none of us can do it alone, and nobody’s going to come in and do it for us. We’re going to have to save ourselves. I feel that reality is starting to take hold, whether it be not having faith in our union leadership to save us, or postal management certainly never saving us, it’s clear politicians aren’t going to save us either. We’re going to have to band together to fight back against these attacks, because none of us can do it alone, and nobody’s going to come in and do it for us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.
We have to make those connections with folks in other workplaces. Their struggles are connected to our struggles. We have to connect our struggles to the struggles of those fighting for the people in our communities, whether they’re under attack from ICE or facing attacks on their social security benefits or Medicaid; or whether they’re fighting for our trans siblings to have their rights respected in the workplace and outside of the workplace and fighting to protect the jobs and public services that our working class communities rely upon.
It’s not to underestimate the scale and scope of the challenges we’re facing. However, there is a way forward. That way forward is going to be through solidarity within the federal workforce and our communities around us because these attacks are coming fast and furious, and they aren’t just going to go away.
Melissa Rakestraw is a 29-plus year USPS letter carrier and Vice President of NALC local 825 as well as being a shop steward and arbitration advocate. Melissa serves on the Illinois State Association of Letter Carriers executive board.
Source: Peoples Dispatch
Workers with NALC in Silver Spring, Maryland. Photo: NALC
In its continued attack against social services and workers, the Trump administration has set its sights on the United States Postal Service (USPS). Amid growing threats to the USPS, workers organized with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) staged rallies across the country in defense of their livelihoods and the essential national service.
On March 23, postal workers rallied in Waco, Texas to Rochester, New York, holding signs that read “Fight like hell” and “Hell no to privatization!”
Privatization of the postal service?
On February 21, Trump proposed a merger between the USPS and the Commerce Department. “We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money,” the President said. “We’re thinking about doing that. And it’ll be a form of a merger, but it’ll remain the Postal Service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better.”
Elon Musk, top Trump adviser and world’s richest man, who leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which is leading the charge on federal spending cuts and privatization efforts, reportedly said outright during a conference earlier in March, “I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized. I think we should privatize the Post Office and Amtrak for example… We should privatize everything we possibly can.”
Earlier in March, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told Congress that USPS planned to cut over 10,000 jobs from the postal service, working in coordination with Musk’s DOGE, which has already launched major attacks against federal workers. DeJoy abruptly resigned from his post on March 24.
NALC President Brian L. Renfroe responded to DeJoy’s letter to Congress. “Postmaster General DeJoy laid out some of the ‘big problems’ DOGE could assist with. Some of these are issues we have been actively engaged in and advocating for years. These include USPS’s misallocated pension liabilities, which have cost the agency tens of billions of dollars, and a new investment strategy for USPS’s three retirement funds, which are currently held in Treasury bonds, missing out on hundreds of millions in annual returns.”
According to Renfroe, “these policy changes are needed to improve the Postal Service’s financial viability, and we welcome anyone’s help who can influence Congress and the Administration to finally enact them.”
“If DOGE wants to improve the Postal Service’s finances, the above actions will do just that. Misguided ideas like privatization will not.”
640,000 workers are employed by the USPS directly, while almost eight million people hold jobs attached in some way to the postal service.
People over profits
NALC President Brian L. Renfroe spoke at a rally in Los Angeles about the essential service that postal workers provide to people in the US. Renfroe outlined that plans to privatize the USPS are an attack on “51.5 million people that live in rural areas.”
“A privatized postal service, they’d deliver where it was profitable,” Renfroe said. “But they wouldn’t deliver where it’s not profitable. And we deliver everyday, no matter where someone is, for the same price.”
Privatizing the postal service would have massive effects that would reverberate throughout the US economy and for the millions whose jobs are connected to USPS. A report by Monique Morrissey for the Economic Policy Institute detailed how the postal service is a top employer for Black people and provides one of the best job opportunities available to those without Bachelor’s degrees.
“As is typical of jobs in the public sector, which are positions of trust that often require significant training,” Morrisey writes. “The pay of rank-and-file postal workers is better than the pay of many private-sector jobs that do not require a four-year college (bachelor’s) degree.” Additionally, nearly one in four postal workers is Black, which is double the share of Black people employed in the private sector, which Morrisey writes is “the result of a hard-fought battle by Black activists and unions for employment and pay parity dating back to the early days of the Postal Service.”
The National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRCLA), which represents USPS’s over 130,000 rural letter carriers, is set to join the movement of postal workers against privatization with a rally at Capitol Hill on Tuesday, March 25.
