As Trump looks to privatize USPS, its workers fight for a contract

This week, we’re taking a more national focus, and checking in with the National Association of Letter Carriers, who have been embroiled in a years-long contract negotiation with the US Postal Service.

In our episode today, I’m sitting down with Melissa Rakestraw, member of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 825 in Chicago, IL, to discuss the state of negotiations with our nation’s letter carriers, the unprecedented rejection of the recent Tentative Agreement and what happens next, and what would happen if the US Postal Service was privatized.

As a short editorial note before we begin, the interest arbitration process between USPS and the Letter Carriers began on March 17th, with Dennis R. Nolan set as the neutral arbitrator. This episode was recorded at the end of February, before those dates had been set.

Postal workers are also set to hit the streets this weekend–“Fight Like Hell!” rallies are scheduled for March 23 across the country to protest the proposed privatization of the US Postal Service.

Additional links/info:

• March 13, 2025: NALC statement on DeJoy’s agreement with DOGE
• “Fight like hell! Say ‘Hell No!’ to a privatized USPS!” – Find a Rally Near You
• Joe Demanuelle-Hall: “Federal Workers Organize Against Billionaire Power Grab”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

---

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mel Buer:

I got work. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Er and I’m your host for the month of March. Continue to stay tuned this month as we share the mic with workers from all over this country and discuss pressing issues central to today’s labor movement. In these last two weeks, we’ve spoken with workers at multiple unions in Southern California who are working diligently on breaking Deadlocks in their own negotiations. If you haven’t checked those out, you can find those episodes@therealnews.com under our podcast page. This week we’re taking a more national focus and checking in with the National Association of Letter Carriers who have themselves been embroiled in a year’s long contract negotiation with United States Postal Service.

In our episode today, I’m sitting down with Melissa Rakestraw, member of the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 8 2 5 in Chicago, Illinois, and we’re discussing the state of negotiations with our nation’s letter carriers, the unprecedented rejection of the recent tentative agreement and what happens next and what would happen if the US Postal Service was privatized. As a short editorial note before we begin, this episode was recorded at the end of February before interest arbitration dates had been set. Those interest arbitration dates began on March 17th with Dennis R. Nolan set as the neutral arbitrator in this situation with me today to discuss their current negotiations and the threat of a privatized postal service is Melissa Rastro, member of the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 8 2 5 in Chicago, Illinois. Thanks for coming on, Melissa.

Melissa Rakestraw:

Thanks a lot. I appreciate you having me.

Mel Buer:

I’m glad you’re here. I’d like to kick off this conversation first by giving our listeners a chance to get to know a bit more about you, your work, your organizing, and your union. So what is na? The Association of Letter Carriers, right? National Association of Letter Carriers and who do they represent? How many members do you have, that kind of stuff.

Melissa Rakestraw:

Right. So the NALC is a national association of letter carriers. We’ve existed since the 1890s. We didn’t have collective bargaining rights with the post office until after the great postal strike of 1970 largest wildcat strike in US history. And at that point too, that’s when they moved the post office out of the cabinet and into its own organization. The NALC. I personally have carried mail since 1995. I’m a letter carrier. The last two years I’ve been a full-time officer for my local branch 8 25. We have a lot of offices that we represent all throughout Chicago suburbs. We also represent some smaller offices throughout the state of Illinois. We represent around 1800 active letter carriers and we have around 3000 members total in our branch. So I’m also on the executive council for the Illinois State Association of Letter Carriers. We represent all letter carriers throughout the state of Illinois in our region within the NALC, there’s 15 regions and we’re one of 15.

Mel Buer:

How many members nationally do you have whereabouts?

Melissa Rakestraw:

Yeah, I think it’s around 200,000 in that range. It varies. It might be 189,000, but it does vary. And then around 60% of that would be active carriers because we have a large pool of retirees

Mel Buer:

And these are the folks who are outside of the mail handling post office who are delivering your mail to on route to your house every day.

Melissa Rakestraw:

So yeah, we’re the people that everybody sees as their mailman, the person in the truck in funny little truck where we drive on the wrong side and we’re coming to your doorstep hopefully every day to deliver your mail Monday through Saturday and we are one of the most beloved group of workers out there. Most people love their mailman. We call ourselves letter carriers, but I don’t have any problem with the term mailman myself again and again in pollings you see that the American public is very happy with their letter carrier and their mail service. Over the last few years we’ve seen some of that get deteriorated because of a postmaster general who was slowing down service and increasing rates. But letter carriers are out there every day watching kids grow up, checking on elderly residents who greet them at their mailbox every day. I’ve worked with people who have saved people from burning homes who have donated kidneys to their customers on their route. We are embedded in our communities. We aren’t just out there to do a job. We are out there to look out for the people who live on our routes.

Mel Buer:

I mean, I just certainly in my lifetime have had numerous friendships with letter carriers on the various routes that I’ve lived on, and so I definitely see that. One thing that I would like to kind of draw in our listeners’ attention to is you’ve been in the midst of bargaining a national contract for quite some time, a couple of years at this point, and just recently members voted to reject a tentative agreement with the postal service. For the benefit of our listeners, can you give us a bit of an overview about these negotiations, what’s been going on, what’s at stake and what the demands are for where members across the country, and then maybe we can kind of discuss why this tentative agreement was rejected.

Melissa Rakestraw:

Sure. So right before covid hit, we negotiated a contract and it was set to expire in May of 2023. Throughout covid letter carriers kept working every day. We made sure our customers got all the things that they needed to order online because they couldn’t go to stores. We delivered testing kits for covid, we delivered everything. We kept the economy running in a lot of senses. We were told we were essential workers. We were not paid hazard pay, we were not paid anything extra. We were told by our national leadership that we would get our pay and we would get what we deserve for being so crucial to the US public. When our contract expired, our contract expired in May of 2023. Our national president has pretty much full control over bargaining. He doesn’t have to include any of the rest of the elected officers, so he runs it.

He was negotiating with the postal service throughout the summer. He was giving us updates at different wrap sessions saying that he was planning on seeing seven to 9% salary increases for us year wage wise, our wages were the worst of any. If you look up wages with the rate of inflation, the letter carrier or postal workers’ wages suffered the worst in comparison to inflation over the last five years. So even though we actually have cost of living allowance adjustments, we don’t get full call. So our national president was telling us he’s trying to get seven to 9% increases and people expected that We’re seeing UPS, which we feel is comparable to us, same industry. They don’t actually have to walk house to house like we do, and their top of scale is $49 an hour. Right now our top of scale is under $37 an hour.

So it’s a huge gap and the law actually says that the postal service is supposed to pay us wages that are comparable to the private sector. We are nowhere near that, nowhere close to it. It takes 13 years for letter carrier to get to the top of the pay scale, which is interminably too long. We’ve had problems staffing post offices ever since Covid because the starting pay and the conditions are too low, the conditions are terrible, people are abused by management, they have low wages and we can’t keep people. And so we’re having very high expectations out of this contract to get considerable pay increases and to address poor working conditions, management’s refusal to comply with the contract, violating the same things over and over, forced mandatory overtime all across the country. Here in Chicago, the post office has paid out millions of dollars to the local NALC branch for not complying with contract settlements.

Now it is ludicrous if you think that them just failing to abide by the agreements they’ve already signed, that alone is costing them millions of dollars. Nobody in management does anything about it. We wanted some resolutions through our contract to force management to comply with our settlements, to give carriers the right to say, when I’m done with my shift, I can go home. You can’t keep me here. 12, 13, 14, 15 hours. You’re seeing people forced to work 16 hours. And it’s so dangerous because our jobs are mainly on the street all day. You’re dealing with traffic, you’re dealing with so many unknown things. We’ve seen crimes against letter carriers skyrocket at one point every day in Chicago, there were numerous robberies of letter carriers out on their route. We’re like sitting ducks out there and nobody’s doing anything to help us. So we had such high expectations of this contract.

We finally were handed tentative agreement in October of 2024, well past 500 days, and it was 1.3% increase per year. A pitance and insult, quite frankly, no protections around the mandatory overtime for people who don’t want to work overtime, no protections in regards to enforcing our contract and management compliance with our contract. And we actually had giveaways where we were agreeing to lower our fixed office time. We have certain things we have to do every morning and they give us credit for that amount of time and they were trying to take back some of that time arbitrarily.

It wasn’t just that the monetary amount of 1.3% was so insulting, which it was also the fact that we’re getting work rules that don’t make sense for us either and make our jobs worse and harder and more difficult, which should not be the goal of a collective bargaining situation. So there were a record amount of people who voted in the vote for the tentative agreement. We at least have that right to vote it up or down. It was rejected by two thirds of the people who voted, which was also something that was historic. A tentative agreement hasn’t been voted down in the NALC since the early eighties, and we organized a vote no campaign. It went across the country. There were folks that started kind of a caucus that you call Build a Fighting NALC, that originated up in Minnesota that was talking about open bargaining and letting the membership know exactly what’s going on during bargaining because our national president wasn’t letting us know that there have been other groups too that have formed around these demands for open bargaining so we know what’s being bargained for and we can hold our leadership accountable.

And these same groups that had fought for open bargaining, like Build A Fighting NALC, the Care for President campaign and the concerned letter carriers group all said when we got this tentative agreement, well now this is an insult and we’re going to have to build a vote no campaign, which was very successful and it was a relief to see that the membership said, this is not sufficient. We will not accept this. You have to do better.

Mel Buer:

Right. I want to take a moment to talk about the historic nature of this vote no campaign. As you said, a contract hasn’t been voted down since the eighties, and there have been a number of labor reporters in the last couple of weeks who have really kind of underscored the sort of unprecedented nature of that. Does that sort of speak to the ways in which conditions either under this current postmaster, general Louis Dejo who may be leaving soon or the sort of deterioration of these conditions and what it means to work as a letter carrier, which historically has been a pretty stable career position? Right,

Melissa Rakestraw:

Right. Yeah, absolutely. So when people take a job in the post office, historically it was looked at as a career. It was looked as something that you’re working towards a pension, particularly with letter carriers. After we reach a minimum retirement age of around 57 and we have 30 years in, we can retire. And by that point your body’s been through enough that you really can’t, in a lot of cases work longer than that. We have the highest rate of injury of any federal worker just because of the physical nature of our job. So people’s expectations with this contract coming out of Covid, seeing what’s going on around us with other unions having historic wins with UPS, with UAW and their standup strikes, it was so invigorating to see those victories and what those workers were able to win. And then feeling like, Hey, it’s our turn now and we were made this promise that you are going to be rewarded for sticking with it, for sticking through covid, for putting up with all the mandatory overtime and now is your time.

That’s how letter carriers felt like now is our time. And when we saw this tentative agreement, it felt like it was an insult from management. Number one, they’ve just given themselves raises. And then it was also an insult from our national president that he would think this was an acceptable deal to try to get us to accept. He went around and campaigned for this deal all over the country and had wrap sessions where he would tell people how wonderful it was and when we’re like, no, it’s not wonderful. We’re not stupid. Don’t try to force feed us this nonsense. And he did everything he could to try to get it to be accepted and people still said no. And that’s not been over the last four decades since the early eighties. It’s not been the type of union where leadership was opposed and leadership was seen as not having fought for us for a very long time. Our national president was one of the people that had led the wildcat stripe, then Sobrato out of New York City, and he was a fighter and he won a lot of advances for letter carriers and we maybe slept on that tradition and got to a point where it was just a business unionist approach that the head of our union thought he could sit down with the head of management and they could figure out a deal and it would be fair and it was anything but

Mel Buer:

Right. Well now you’ve reached the tentative agreement has been rejected and the executive council voted unanimously on February 19th not to agree to terms with a postal service that would’ve given you a modified tentative agreement to vote on. So now technically we’ve reached the point where US Postal Service officials have been notified that they are at impasse, which for the benefit of our listeners really means that there is a stalemate that cannot really be sort of adjudicated between the two parties. They need to bring in a third party to kind of talk about this. And so coming up, this is being recorded on February 28th, likely we will hear dates about hearings that will be coming up in the coming weeks and months in what’s called an interest arbitration process. The proposals on both sides will be considered by a three person panel and then hopefully that means that there will be an agreement that can be reached through this arbitration process. My question for you, watching all of this, being a part of this vote no campaign and hearing from membership over the last months and really years, how do you feel about this development? Do you feel like this is moving in a positive direction? Is it something that is frustrating because you wish it hadn’t gotten to this point? How do you feel?

Melissa Rakestraw:

Well, it’s very frustrating because it’s been over 600 days now since our contract expired, and that means no raises for anybody, no cost of living increases, nothing flat, stagnant wages that we’re already behind. So that’s extremely frustrating. The other aspect of it that’s really frustrating is the union could have forced this negotiation to go into interest arbitration in the fall of 2023. Our national president could have said, then listen, you guys are not anywhere near offering us what we deserve. We’re sending it to the interest arbitration panel and we’ll take our chances. We feel like we have a good argument. And that didn’t happen. He allowed management to drop the plow and slow negotiations and not, and draw this out to the point that where we’re at now and this interest arbitration process, normally both sides will present briefs and witnesses and go through all aspects of the contract.

We present economic issues, work related issues, all of that. But now with the threat of the postal service being moved in the Department of Commerce, having our independent authority taken away, not being run by the Board of Governors anymore, realizing that we may not have anyone in management to negotiate with if those things happen, the union has decided to agree with management to go to an expedited process wherein the union is only going to present economic issues or pay scale management is entitled to put forward what they would like, but the union will put forward our issues. We are not going to be doing briefs, so the membership isn’t going to know after the fact what was asked for on our side, which is very disappointing and it’s a process that lacks transparency and quite frankly needs to be changed. So we’re going to put forward our economic proposals to the arbitrator.

The arbitration panel is three arbitrators, one picked by the union, one picked by management, and then one who we both agree on who’s the tiebreaker. And it sounds to me like in the expedited process, we basically play our case out to the mutually agreed upon arbitrator. He’ll go back and forth and talk to both sides and try to make an expedited ruling. We’re not putting forward as many things as we normally would. Now our national president is telling us that he wants to keep some of the work rules that they agreed on with management. He thinks they’re good even though the membership didn’t just vote down the contract because of the economic issues. People aren’t happy with the work rule issues either. He seems to think they’re a quote win so he can agree to memos with management to put a lot of these work issues into the contract. People are trying to push back on that in the union and say, Hey, let’s leave the work rules how they are right now in the current contract, extend that out and just simply deal with the pay because we know we can work with the current rules we have and how to navigate those,

But we think that your new work rules are not going to be helpful to us. So that fight now is playing itself out as well. And the threats, it’s not existential. I guess it’s an actual real threat from this current administration to attack and get the postal service and invalidate our collective bargaining agreements. So we’ve waited over 600 days for a raise and the longer this plays out, the worse we feel it will be for us. So

Mel Buer:

Yeah, it sounds like to me you waited till the house was on fire before you turned on the hose. And now with these threat, we will talk more when we come back from the break specifically about privatizing the postal service and what that would do to both workers and consumers. But it seems like at this point there’s not enough runway left to be able to get a decent contract out of this current contract period. And again, I want to underscore here that the contract expired in May of 2023. So the contract that is currently being negotiated to a stalemate at this point is supposed to run from 2023 to 2026. And we ran into this with the railroad unions a couple of years back where two and a half years of contract negotiations, we almost went to a national rail strike. The real news reported on this at the time, by the time that it was all said and done and the ink was dry, they were two and a half months out from negotiating the next contract because the periods expire. And so there’s this bottlenecking here that seems to be pretty pronounced, particularly in the NALC that is making it difficult for workers to get paid and also to plan for a much more uncertain future.

Melissa Rakestraw:

And it’s not always been standard that it takes over 600 days for us to negotiate a contract.

There have been some that we might not get an agreement until maybe a year after the contract has expired, but it’s been particularly exacerbated in this process. And after the tentative agreement was voted down, the union went into a 15 day period with management where they could try to renegotiate some of the specifics. Management offered 1.3% and 1.4% and 1.7% increases, which our executive counsel said, no, that’s not sufficient either. We’re not even going to send it back out to the membership for another vote because it’s so paltry at that point. Due to the NALC constitution, our national president does have the authority to call a work stoppage. Now it’s illegal. We have a no strike clause in our expired contract that we agree to abide by. And part of the reason it goes before this arbitration process is that the arbitrator is supposed to give us something that’s halfway decent to keep us happy, so we don’t want to strike. And it really undercuts the rights of the workers to be able to get a decent wage, which we’re not getting, and we also can’t strike or walk off the job and in this current, and we don’t want to have to do that. We don’t want to have to hurt the communities we serve and our customers. It’s not what we want to do, but it also puts our backs against the wall. There aren’t a lot of options open to us, quite frankly.

Mel Buer:

Right, and this is a common theme among many, many collective bargaining agreements and unions across this country. It’s sort of a thorn in the side of most organizers is that these no strike clauses are often very standard in contracts, which removes really the sort of the one real bargaining chip that you have to withhold your labor in order to forced through an agreement that is actually beneficial to workers. I want to turn now to developments at the federal level where the current administration seems to be laying the groundwork for total privatization of the US Postal Service. In February, multiple media outlets reported on the plan saying, president Donald Trump plans to disband the US Postal Services Board of Governors and place the agency under direct control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick. Can you, Melissa, can you just give us a sense for listeners who really aren’t quite sure what this means, what would this plan look like the postal service as it is now and how it would be changed?

Melissa Rakestraw:

So the plan is a bad deal for customers and for workers. It’s not going to be good for the American public or the postal worker, either one. It’s going to create an environment if the privatization is able to move forward the way that they’ve planned it, where they could sell off access to your mailbox to private companies right now, for security reasons and a lot of reasons, the only people that have the legal right to access your mailbox is your letter carrier. Other people can’t be coming around digging around in there, seeing what’s in there, taking things out, messing with your mailbox. It’s a federal crime, so there is that protection. They want to sell off mailbox access to private companies so that they can have their own low wage workforce delivering items into people’s mailboxes. In addition to that, it would put it in, if the post office is privatized and you don’t have that lower rate universal service that the postal service provides, it’s not going to have, well, what’s going to happen is private companies are going to be able to raise their prices through the roof.

UPS FedEx, Amazon is not going to have the competition of the efficient postal service delivery standards where you can get things fairly quickly and at a very affordable rate once you don’t have the post office’s lower rates there, those private companies are going to have an even bigger monopoly than they already do. For instance, for some things, the same exact package sent through the post office might be $30 and it’s going to cost you a hundred to send it through UPS. And it’s the same exact service. Local businesses and especially people who run businesses out of their homes and send things through the mail service, if they had to send everything through UPS or FedEx, they would go out of business. It’s just that simple. And the other process of this is too, it’s already started to happen where they’re slowing down the mail service and the customers, it’s hard for them to rely upon timely delivery, which was intentional by postal management.

The Trump appointed postmaster, general Louis DeJoy who prioritized just the delivery of packages, he was consolidating sorting centers. There’s a huge backup. They’re not hiring enough people to timely sort the mail. So you create a situation to make customers less reliant upon the postal service, then you say, well, now we’re going to sell off these services to the highest bidder, right? So that’s going to crush small businesses, independent people who rely on the postal service to send out whatever products they sell, and the consumer, so many people, it is part of their process now to order everything online and the post office is the only delivery service that’s really affordable, quite frankly, and the competition we provide there. The other huge aspect of this is they want to invalidate our collective bargaining agreements. If they’re able to move us into commerce, they want to make it illegal to even have a union.

It would be the way things were pre 1970, pre Wildcat strike where the workers weren’t allowed to organize. They had to go to Congress to beg for wage increases and benefits. It was a very unfair system, quite frankly. There were people that had to live on public assistance to get by. And we’re actually seeing a situation now where even though we are unionized workforce, our new hires have such a low wage scale that a lot of them are getting public assistance as well. They’re finding themselves in situations they can’t afford rent in the communities where they work. A lot of cities where there’s a high cost of San Francisco, for example, they can’t find letter carriers to work in those cities because nobody can afford to live near where they work. That’s going to be deteriorated even further under the plan that’s being put forward.

This plan was put out in 2018 by then Secretary Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, talking about their ideas of making the post office a privatized entity, getting rid of the pensions that we receive, making the people who are already locked into a pension have a longer term before they can qualify. Right now, we can retire after 30 years and believe me, your body is ready after carrying mail for 30 years. They want to make it so that doesn’t matter anymore. Of course, we have a social security gap payment. I could retire when I’m 57 and between 57 and 62 when I can collect social security, I’d receive a gap payment to make up for the fact that I can’t get social security yet. They would get rid of that. They want us to pay a higher percentage of our wages into our pensions, of course a higher percentage of our wages into our healthcare. And they claim that, well, this is justified because the private sector doesn’t necessarily have the same sort of pension benefits. And my answer to that would be, well, that’s because of 40 years of union busting and destroying unions in this country, and the private sector deserves those benefits too. Allowing them to come in and attack our unions and take those things away would be a huge hit for the entire working class, not just for letter carriers. We should be fighting for these same benefits in all unions

As opposed to saying, well, you shouldn’t be getting it because private sector workers may not have it.

Mel Buer:

So what’s the recourse then? Let’s spend some time on this because we’ve talked a little bit about if we see a privatized US Postal service and we see these sort of collective bargaining agreements become null and void, it dovetails into the conversation that I think a lot of folks in union organizing are having about what happens when they remove the rest of the teeth from the NLRA and what recourse do unions have to begin organizing. Now, my personal opinion as a union journalist should have happened, should have started maybe like a year or a couple or five, 10 years ago. The minute that we started seeing these flashing red lights that this is what they were trying to dismantle, especially with the SpaceX case and what’s going on with Elon Musk’s companies and Google and Waffle House of all places suing to make parts of the NLRA and Noll and void. What does that look like for workers in this country and especially for letter carriers in your own context? Right,

Melissa Rakestraw:

Right. So let me backtrack a little bit because something you talked about there. At first when we’re talking about how the attacks on the postal workers affect our communities and other folks, we do the last mile of delivery for other companies. We go where they don’t go. There’s a lot of inner city neighborhoods, the Amazon UPS, they opt out, they’re not going there. Rural areas, we’re not going there. We’ll give it to the post office, let them deliver it. Those folks aren’t going to have a service or what service they may get is going to be terrible and very high priced. So that kind of attack on our jobs attacks our communities as well. And when we talk about moving forward, what’s it look like? That’s why I’m so adamant that we have settled for a terrible contract and that we have to fight these privatization efforts because we are the largest unionized workforce in a civilian workforce outside of the federal government directly.

Anything that they can do and attack us and our unions, they can do to anybody else, if not worse. And if you’re talking about having, they want to create a workplace non-unionized, take us back. We should be going the opposite direction with trying to unionize the places that aren’t unionized, whether it be the Amazon delivery drivers, Amazon warehouses, all of these networks going forward. We’ve seen some gains in non-unionized workplaces unionizing, and at the same token, you’ve seen unionized workers attacked as well. So I truly believe our only way forward is through solidarity. It’s what has sustained the labor movement from day one and the birth of the labor movement came out of the Great Depression. And then we see the robber Baron era. I think we’re looking at a modern robber baron era where you’re allowing someone, the richest man in the world who is a union buster, who has done everything he can to keep unions out of his workplaces now come into our realm and say, I’m going after the big dogs.

I’m going after these folks who’ve been unionized for decades and are implanted across the whole entire country. So it’s time that all of us have to stick together and fight back. And I’ve seen this across the federal workforce as well. When you see people attacked in the national parks, even in the IRS Social Security Administration, his attacks on the OPM and the Social Security Administration are going to impact all of us who rely upon the services of those departments. Like right now, OPM administers our pensions. They deal with a lot of the administration of our healthcare plans. It’s whenever you have an issue, it already takes forever to find someone to help you with your problem, and it’s going to be even worse and even more exacerbated now that those folks’ jobs are going to be cut and these are people that actually provide a worthwhile service to workers, to the American public at large. And all of us have to step forward and demand better because no one’s coming to save us. The courts aren’t going to save us. No elected officials are going to save us. It’s going to be our own fight back that wins this.

It’s the only thing that’s ever won anything significant for workers in the past, and we have to get back to that one-on-one organizing with their coworkers and within our unions, within our branches than in our communities, in other unions, in our communities, and we’re all in this together. The attacks that have gone on on the immigrant community, on the trans community, L-G-B-T-Q community, it’s all related. We can’t step back and say, well, maybe I’m not in that community or does it impact me directly? So it’s not my fight well wrong, it is our fight and we’ve got to figure out how not to let them divide us because there’s more of us than there are of them, and solidarity is our way forward.

Mel Buer:

If there’s one thing that even a sort of half-hearted study of labor history can teach you is that we’ve been here before and we were very successful as American activists, as folks who have inherited the legacy of the labor movement of the feminist movement, of the civil rights movement, that we’ve been through much worse conditions and we won everything that we have today because of the work that we as members of the working class have done in this country, which is an amazing thing to think about and internalize when if any of my listeners are sitting here absolutely overwhelmed by the last two and a half months, two months of really intense not great things coming out of this administration, there is a way forward, as some of my friends like to say, we’re not cooked yet. There is a space for us to be able to organize, and especially in the federal workforce, what we’re seeing is the boss is the best organizer because a lot of people are joining unions when they previously didn’t think they needed to or decided not to.

And this is kind of a radicalizing moment for a lot of folks. And so it’s a reminder to just be where your hands are at and do something that will help you feel less helpless if you can get out of your house to kind of engage in something that’s going to help you. And that really kind of takes me to my last question here, which is something to do as we are experiencing threats against the postal service and NALC has recently put out a call to all branches of the union to organize rallies in opposition to this privatization. They are to be scheduled for March 23rd. This episode will be out on March 19th to say hell no to a private postal service. So just want to read a little bit from a statement by NALC President Brian Renfro who said these local rallies nationwide will bring together NALC members and the public to show their support for letter carriers, all postal employees and the postal service at a crucial time. This is an opportunity to educate our customers about everything at stake if the postal service is privatized or restructured. So really I want to give us a moment to talk about what are these things that you’re hoping to communicate to the American public with these rallies and how can our listeners show support for letter carriers and to get more engaged in through these rallies and other various actions that they can take?

Melissa Rakestraw:

Right. So one of the things I would suggest is look for the rallies in your communities on March 23rd. Ask your letter carrier, Hey, where’s the local rally that you guys are having? Because most likely every branch in the country is going to be organizing something. So I would encourage folks to ask their letter carrier, what is your local planning? And I’d like to show up with your sign that says, I love my post office and hands off hell no to dismantling the postal service. I think that kind of support with four letter carriers and seeing our community support us is so invigorating and gives us the kind of energy to realize we are not alone in this fight. That’s one thing I’ve tried to express with my membership is that we have a huge fight on our hands. Don’t underestimate it. However, we are not helpless and we are not going to be anybody’s victim because we can fight this and we can win.

And like you said, the blueprints are there from the labor movement of the past. So I’m going to love to see customers come out and support us. Talk to your letter carrier about what’s going on, ask them questions to educate yourself too of what you can do to help out. We run the largest food drive in the country is run by the letter carriers union every Saturday before the second Saturday in May. And we take what we gather from every door that we deliver to and we deliver it to our local food banks because we know that there’s need this need in our communities. We’ve done this for over 30 years and it’s something that we take very seriously. We take a lot of pride in and when we see the customers then appreciating us, showing up to our rallies, honking when they drive by one of our protests, it makes us realize that they appreciate us too.

They appreciate what we do for them, that they appreciate us being there. They appreciate us checking on their elderly neighbor if she or he hasn’t picked up their mail for a couple days and finding out what’s going on and also knowing that we aren’t alone. We can get together with other folks in our community who are also wanting to fight back. I was really encouraged because last Saturday here in a suburban area outside Chicago, the town’s called Lyle, Illinois, there’s a Tesla dealership and there were over 400 people who showed up outside of it to protest just random people from the community. And this is not a hotbed of activism, right? In the city of Chicago, you expect to see a lot of protests and that kind of thing out in the suburban areas. Not so much usually, but it showed me that people want to fight. People do not want to take this line down. People know that there’s a lot at stake here and that they are coming after all of us. The entire working class is under attack here. It’s not just this group or that group. It’s all of us.

Mel Buer:

Agreed, agreed. And again, really to underscore this last couple of minutes, really just to remind folks that are listening to this that are feeling dismayed by how things are going for us, and it’s been kind of a precipitous drop. It’s been going pretty bad for a while. Certainly through the last couple of administrations we’ve been feeling this kind of squeeze, especially since 2008, but it is getting, I dunno, I suppose I could say it has to get worse before it gets better. But the thing is is that this is also allowing folks to kind of reach a place where they can reach into these movements in a way that maybe they didn’t feel they had a way to before. And to engage in a very simple act of solidarity is a very radicalizing thing and a very positive thing. There’s nothing quite like it really.

And being able to kind of remind yourself that, especially with the letter carriers, these are members of your community that come to your house every day that know you, your family, your neighbors, and are often neighbors themselves. So these are the things to think about is that if you’re feeling like there’s just too much going on, then this is a really important piece where you can just get out of the house and in Chicago it’ll be nicer than it has been in terms of weather for the last couple of weeks. Be able to stand out in the warmth and get to know the folks that you see driving around your neighborhood every day. Before I let you go though, I just want to ask if you have any final parting thoughts for the folks listening either to continue to show support for letter carriers or how to feel more connected to their community or if you have some thoughts about folks who are looking to organize and don’t know where to start, what are some things to keep in mind for anyone who’s getting into this and who’s new to it?

Melissa Rakestraw:

So I think one of the things would be if you’re aware of something going on, go to it. Go to an organizing meeting, go introduce yourself. Say, Hey, I’ve never done this before, but I want to get involved because the people who have been organizing for years, upon years upon years, love to see new people come to the door and say, Hey, what can I do to help? You mentioned that the feeling that people get when you engage in a collective action, it’s really hard to explain if you haven’t done it. I can remember in 2012 when the CTU Chicago Teachers Union went on strike and the odds were pitted against them with Rah Emanuel being the mayor of the 1% trying to crush their union quite frankly, and when we surrounded city hall on every side, it’s a huge block in downtown Chicago and it was just a sea of red and thousands of people and you’re all on the same wavelength and realize we all want the same thing and they’re going to have to give it to us and just sporadic things that happen of that nature.

We’ve seen starting from Occupy even before that in Wisconsin when public workers fought back the Black Lives Matter movement where people took to the streets and said, this is not okay and we deserve better and we’re not in the prep with it anymore. The Standing Rock show down that went on and I think over the last few years we haven’t seen as much of people in the streets and fighting back and we’re going to have to get back into that and not just being on the streets, but being organized off the streets and getting into organizing meetings, getting into spaces, whether it be in our unions, our community groups where we can discuss strategy and a path forward and what are our demands and what can we all agree on. There’s a lot of things we can agree on and we should put those as our things that we all want to bring us together in our union.

Yeah, we have been fighting for a better contract for ourselves and now we realize we have to take that fight out into the community for the very survival of the post office itself. The US’ oldest institution that predates the Constitution that Benjamin Franklin founded before the signing of the Constitution of this country that established an infrastructure in this country literally was established through the post office. The history is incredible and this is the history that belongs to the working people of the us. It’s not something that we can allow the oligarchs and the billionaires to come in and take away from us and dismantle and destroy because once they’ve crushed it, it’s going to be a lot harder to build it back. So we have to meet them and show them we aren’t backing down, that we’re all willing to fight for it and there’s more of us than there are of them. We always have to keep that in mind and you’re going to lose every battle you don’t fight. The only way we can win is to fight and when we fight, we win.

Mel Buer:

Well said. Melissa, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thanks

Melissa Rakestraw:

A lot for having me.

Mel Buer:

That’s it for us here at Working People. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Mel er and thanks so much for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mel Buer.