Related Articles
Postal workers: Tell us what you think about the NALC contract by filling out the form below. All submissions will be kept anonymous.
Opposition is growing to a sellout contract for city letter carriers announced last Saturday. The deal with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) includes a provocative 1.3 percent annual wage increase, substandard cost-of-living adjustments and no additional safety or job productions.
Worst of all, it paves the way for the continued “Delivering for America” (DFA) restructuring program designed to slash jobs and ultimately privatize the US Postal Service (USPS). In its first three years, the DFA cost billions of dollars but delivered only job destruction, plummeting service levels, postage cost increases, degrading surveillance of workers, and it led to outright pay theft.
The massive anger comes amid growing opposition across the US to betrayals by the trade union bureaucrats. Boeing workers, on strike for more than a month, rejected a second sellout offer which fell far short of their demands. Railroad conductors at Norfolk Southern and maintenance workers at CSX have rejected a deal with worse pay increases than the contract imposed by Congress two years ago.
At the start of October, East Coast dockworkers launched a three-day strike, which was shut down with a pledge for a 62 percent wage increase, although no contract has formally been announced, and the strike was shut down with a 90-day extension of the old deal. Their struggle is not over, as the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) bureaucrats prepare to help introduce mass automation, paving the way to job destruction. This was the outcome of sellout deals at UPS and the Big Three automakers, where modest wage increases were used as bait for contracts being used to shred tens of thousands of jobs.
City letter carriers in a Philadelphia suburb have staged daily pickets outside a local Sorting and Distribution Center over the past week, while thousands of postal workers upvoted the Philadelphia pickets’ daily posts on Reddit. Tens of thousands have also read the World Socialist Web Site’s coverage of the NALC agreement, and many sent in statements against the deal.
One commenter summed up the mood of many:
“Hearing wages were supposed to go up around 19 percent, way more back pay, a new pay table, and reducing the steps to max salary down to 8 years, this is a huge slap in the face. Being essential workers, [victims of] crimes and even murders, busting my ass 10 hours a day in the heat and cold in trucks where the brakes give out and I almost kill someone—nothing is about safety or for workers. It’s all about money … for the higher ups, paying higher union dues to cover their 20 percent raises. This isn’t a union.”
Another carrier raised the clear choice presented to workers:
“What are we voting for? Starvation level wage-increases? Slap-in-the-face COLAs? The permanent codification of Dejoy’s Delivering For America agenda into the new Collective Bargaining Agreement? The choices offered are akin to ‘pick your punishment’ so I have no choice but to vote No, and I will be urging all city letter carriers to vote No to this horrendous ‘agreement.’”
Workers are tired of hearing from the union apparatus that “USPS is broke,” and this is the best deal that could be negotiated. One veteran carrier brought up the tactics the union bureaucrats will use to divide and deceive members leading up to the vote: “They will take six weeks to print and mail the ballots. The union bureaucrats have already started to message that ‘pay isn’t everything’, trying to champion tiny concessions as major wins. Then you’ll see the USPS earnings report drop a few weeks before the vote, claiming that USPS recorded record deficits again. This is money wasted on [Delivering for America] to destroy the post office.”
Another major change being overshadowed by the contract dispute is the introduction of a new healthcare program on January 1, 2025, after the previous healthcare program was gutted in 2022 by the Postal Service Reform Act.
One retired carrier echoed the frustration of workers, who fear massive rate hikes with the new program:
“[The union bureaucrats] are keeping info to a minimum. I’ve attended a few of the zoom seminars which are VERY frequent but … they only say ‘rates not available until 1st week of November.’ All info released seems to be confusing and contradictory. Are the elections supposed to serve as a diversion to answering these questions?”
Postal workers must reject the contract by a huge margin, but a resounding “no” vote will not halt the destruction and privatization of the post office nor lead to a better offer. Instead, the NALC and USPS administrators will respond to a “no” vote by moving to arbitration, robbing workers of the right to vote on the next deal.
A new leadership must be built out of trusted members of the rank and file which gives workers the ability to organize against both the post office and the sellout union officials. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee was founded to build such an alternative leadership. It has links to other workers facing the same attacks all over the world, including at Boeing, UPS and in the post offices of four other countries.
In its founding statement last year, the Committee declared: “Postal workers need to be clear that this is a political fight against both corporate-controlled parties over the allocation of society’s resources. Any program of demands that begins with the premise that workers have to continue working until they literally drop dead on the job is a non-starter.”
Source link
