USPS Letter Carriers Vote No on Contract:
Reform Movement Calls for $30/hr and the Right to Strike!
NALC is organizing rallies across the country on March 23. To find a rally near you:
https://www.nalc.org/news/fight-like-hell
In January, the 200,000 members of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) voted down a tentative agreement on [date] for the first time in almost 50 years by a 70% margin. Union members have been without a contract for almost 2 years and voted down the TA’s weak offer of 1.3% yearly increases; starting wages just above $20/hr; and an 11-yr wage progression, down from the current 15.5 years.
The Independent Socialist Group interviewed Chris Persampieri, a member of the NALC who’s part of the reform caucus Building a Fighting NALC (BFN). BFN has called for transparent, open bargaining, a $30/hr starting wage, no mandatory overtime, an all-career workforce (meaning no temps), a 6-year progression to top pay, an average worker’s wage for union officers, and the right to strike. BFN called for a no vote on the contract and is pushing for a strong contract for NALC union members.
The majority of letter carriers in your union voted no on the tentative agreement, including yourself. Can you explain why members weren’t satisfied with the offer?
The last tentative agreement passed with I believe 94% approval, a 94% yes. And now we went through a 70.7% no vote. And the turnout for the vote was 58% higher than last time.
This tentative agreement was 100% a concession to management. Management got everything it wanted and we got nothing out of it. We lost money from inflation on this tentative agreement. We were heroes in 2020 during the pandemic, and some of us were hoping we would get something out of it, and we got nothing at all.
We have a thing called City Carrier Assistants (CCAs), which is a non-career workforce, which basically means you’re a temp. When I started, I was a temp for three and a half years. And it doesn’t count towards your retirement. They can work you. I used to work 16 days straight, one day off, working 15 days straight, one day off. That would be common amongst everybody. About 60% quit after their first year. Everyone I started with is gone. The group of people I went to the academy with was eventually just me. Everyone else left around that first year, because nobody wants to work – at that time it was like $16, $19 an hour – that much.
I think about 43% of us are non-career workforce, which is really fucking bad. Right now, the wage is $19.33/hr. You can get a job down the street at Subway making $20/hr. You want to go work in 112 degree heat? You’re inside that mail truck, which just adds on ten degrees, plus the heat. We have letter carriers getting robbed of our keys, dying of heat stroke, like in Dallas. Daryl Gates was a big case, he died. Management saw how slow he was going and said “hurry up and beat the heat.” And then two hours later, he was 63 years old, there’s a ring cam, he collapsed on the front lawn and died of heat stroke. There are people dying of heat stroke, getting robbed of our arrow keys, slipping and sliding on ice. We have someone get a concussion. They’re not going to do this for $19.33/hr. This isn’t worth it. I can work in Subway and make more money. So no one’s coming to work here, which is now affecting the mail service because we have to work tons of overtime.
We have a rule that’s called 1260, you can’t work above 12 hours a day. President Renfroe gave that up so that management can legally work us 16 hours a day. The letter carrier jacket, right now it goes for $690 for that jacket. Our uniform allowance is about $750. That’s your entire allowance. You’re only gonna get one jacket and then it’s nothing else. The pants: if you see how rough they all look, we have to wear either hand-me-downs or we have to wear pants with holes in them and crap like that. Our uniform allowance increase was $14 for this year. $14, which will cover nothing. Our health insurance coverage didn’t go up. We still have to pay more, our prices went up this year.
You’re part of Build a Fighting NALC (BFN). How did this reform caucus in the union get organized and what is it hoping to achieve?
They were a reform group that started in Minneapolis trying to go against the old guard, trying to win elections, and they started making demands of what we should be arguing for nationally. It caught on. It started over the demand for “we want open bargaining. We want President Renfroe to give us monthly updates. Where are we? What’s going on? What’s our rights? What’s up with the 1260 rule? What about overtime?” It was a big win, it was very popular. Locally, we got unions to endorse this resolution and this vote, this thing for open bargaining, got about 35 to 45 locals endorsing it. Big ones, like Boston, Minneapolis, I got mine, branch 18, southeastern Massachusetts.
Now our [BFN’s] demands are this. $30 an hour to start. An all-career workforce. If you count CCA time, it’s 15.5 years to get your maximum wage. We want it down to six. The right to strike. And most importantly, union officers take a wage no higher than the wage of an average worker.
The NALC rank and file have been described as “dormant.” Why do you think that so many workers don’t get involved? How could they be inspired to participate?
My dad worked at the Quincy Shipyards. He was a union worker, and my mom worked in an office, she was a union worker. I have that. But you have a lot of Gen Zers, they don’t know anybody who’s been in a union. There’s no history, that history has gone, or if they [their parents] weren’t in a union, they probably didn’t fight that much or anything.
But a lot of young people do understand that they don’t have much of a future right now. It doesn’t look hopeful for them. And when I tell them 30 bucks an hour, their eyes light up like “you think we could get it?” I’m like “well, we have to fight for it.” You have to explain it to them. Some people are like, “how does it actually work?” People didn’t know how to vote. So there’s been a lot of education of the young people. But a lot of the older workers, most of them sadly are like “that’s not my problem, I’m retiring in a year or two. Good luck, I’m out of here. There’s a kind of senioritis I think you have with some of them.
But the rest of us, like the 43% are still CCA, there’s that anger, they’ve never had it good, and they only want it to get better, and this is their way to actually express it. To see such a high turnout means people care to a large degree. I feel hopeful about what’s going on in my union.
Teamsters at UPS have faced similar conditions to NALC members, such as low pay, two-tier pay systems, and forced overtime. Have there been solidarity efforts between NALC, the Teamsters, and other unions?
Our union doesn’t call for any solidarity with anything. If any of that happens, it’s rank and file members. Us in BFN, we’ll be ready. But it has to happen because Amazon is dragging us all down with their low wages, the whole field. FedEx needs to be organized. The whole field needs to be organized.
The starting wage for a driver at UPS is about $35/hr. After 16 years of being a letter carrier, your top wage is $36/hr. What UPS starts at, and what we end with after 16 years, is almost the same. Everyone knows that. That’s why the gap needs to be closed. And they [UPS Teamsters] max out after 4 years. They go up to I think 45 or 49 bucks an hour. It’s just a joke, how bad it is.
The Biden administration refused to remove DeJoy, the “postmaster general” appointed by Trump, who’s been degrading the postal service, and many union leaders lined up behind Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party in the 2024 elections. What do you think of the labor movement’s strategy of supporting Democrats in elections?
The Democrats are just being the dead end to all this stuff. Biden had two solid years, no excuses, for the Democratic Party to fundamentally overhaul and change it [how the post office works]. And they whiffed. The Democrats, they did some stuff, but not enough to fundamentally change anything.
We [BFN] do bring up the need that the Democrats and the Republicans are not our friends. They could be doing a lot. They choose not to do anything. And now we have President Musk and Trump going after us hard. You have some very brainwashed people who think that privatization is going to be a good thing, and we have to educate them on why it’s a bad thing.
Socialists started the labor movement in the US and have historically been among the most involved in building the labor movement. Do you think unions have benefitted from socialist ideas and politics, and if so, in what ways?
A lot of the people in the reform groups are socialists. I think you have to have a broader picture for society I think to really motivate you. The $30/hr is something that we know is something that management’s never going to give up. You have a weak demand, no one wants that. You have to have a bold demand. And you have liberals and stuff who are like “oh no, we can get a 2% raise, that should be enough.” People want fighters, and we know our history, we know what needs to get done. We have to put in the hard work of going out and flyering people in the cold. On Sunday mornings, I got a bunch of people, we’re flyering the CCAs on Amazon Sunday. The people who are getting it the worst need to be reached out to, and a lot of them, they’re happy to see us, now they know us [BFN], like “oh yeah, you’re BFN right?” Like yeah, that’s us. It’s like, “I have some questions about this now.” That’s how we can talk to them, because the union leadership doesn’t reach out to them.
We do need the right to strike. That is the most crucial thing. And if your group is not calling for the right to strike, this isn’t good. You need that. Labor has to win that back. And that’s such a radical demand, $30 an hour, when we’re getting $19/hr, that’s why we’re catching on with our message. These radical demands are winning people over. I don’t think I’ve seen [a guy] go “naw, $30’s too much.” No one’s worried about that. It’s like, “$30’s going to change my life.” And it takes a bold, radical socialist vision of that to happen. And you’re not going to get that with the Democrat or Republican leadership because Democratic and Republican leadership has led us to where we are now today. We’ve been endorsing Democrats and some pro-postal Republicans, and we’re on the threat of privatization and we’re making poverty wages for this.
The most committed people in my experience are always the people of an anti-capitalist view on society, that know that we’re just equipment to the people in charge, and you have to know how to talk to your coworkers about it because sometimes they might, if you say socialist or communist, they might go, “oh, I don’t know.” But if you actually explain it like, instead of having lobbyists run the post office, what if we as workers elected our own people to run the post office and we elected management and we elected how things got done. We could actually elect clerks and mechanics and letter carriers and we could all run the post office democratically. That’s the idea that people want to hear.
Independent Socialist Group 