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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
Mel Buer: 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.
Melissa Rakestraw: The NALC is a National Association of Letter Carriers. We didn’t have collective bargaining rights with the Post Office until after the Great Postal Strike of 1970, the largest wildcat strike in U.S. history. We represent all letter carriers throughout the state of Illinois in our region within the NALC, there’s 15 regions.
Mel Buer: And these are the folks who are outside of the mail handling post office who are delivering your mail, on route to your house every day.
Melissa Rakestraw: We’re coming to your doorstep hopefully every day to deliver your mail Monday through Saturday, and we are one of the most beloved groups of workers out there. Most people love their mailman.
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: Can you give us a bit of an overview about these negotiations and what’s at stake for members across the country?
Melissa Rakestraw: Right before Covid hit, we negotiated a contract and it was set to expire in May of 2023. 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 U.S. public when our contract expired, our contract expired in May of 2023. Our national president has pretty much full control over bargaining
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 7 to 9% salary increases for us. 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 colors.
We’re seeing UPS, which we feel is comparable to us, 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’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.
We finally were handed a tentative agreement in October of 2024, well past 500 days, and it was 1.3% increase per year.An insult, quite frankly. No protections around the mandatory overtime, no protections in regards to enforcing our contract. 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.
Mel Buer: The tentative agreement has been rejected, so now technically we’ve reached the point where U.S. Postal Service officials have been notified that they are at impasse, which really means that there is a stalemate. They need to bring in a third party to talk about this. We will hear dates about hearings that will be coming up 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. How do you feel about this development?
Melissa Rakestraw: 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 were already behind. So that’s extremely frustrating.
Now with the threat of the Postal Service being moved in the Department of Commerce, having our independent authority taken away, the union has decided to agree with management to go to an expedited process, wherein the union is only going to present economic issues, our pay scale.
Mel Buer: 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 U.S. Postal Service. Can you give us a sense of what this plan would look like?
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. In addition to that, if the Post Office is privatized, private companies are going to be able to raise their prices through the roof.
Mel Buer: So what’s the recourse then?
Melissa Rakestraw: This kind of attack on our jobs, attacks our communities as well. 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…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. I truly believe our only way forward is through solidarity. It’s what has sustained the labor movement from day one. It’s time that all of us have to stick together and fight back.
Mel Buer: To engage in a very simple act of solidarity is a very radicalizing thing. There’s nothing quite like it. What are some things to keep in mind for anyone who’s getting into this and who’s new to it?
Melissa Rakestraw: 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.
This episode of the Working Peoples Podcast was originally published on March 24.
