To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
August 26, 2020
Re: Defend the postal service and the livelihoods of postal and all
workers!
by Tim Hall, Detroit Workers' Voice
Postal workers are responding with outrage as Trump and his lackey DeJoy attempt to dismantle the Postal Service.
The Postal Service has been hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dozens of postal workers have died, many more have suffered and are suffering from the disease, and some have understandably refused to come to work in pandemic conditions. Management had already been severely under-staffing the post office since the early 2010’s, resulting in incessant overtime, which sapped the health of the workers even before COVID arrived in early 2020. Rather than hire the needed staff, USPS management allowed delivery standards to degenerate, claiming this was unavoidable.
Consequently, when COVID-19 arrived the postal service was hit with a “perfect storm.” Mail backed up and deliveries fell behind. At the Allen Park National Distribution Center (NDC), which is the package delivery center near Detroit, the backlog reached a crisis point in April: a huge number (one report said 300) loaded semi trucks waited to be processed. Volunteers were solicited from postal stations in the Detroit area and the backlog was brought down, then began rising again.
Trump used this situation to amplify his disparagement of the post office and his calls for its privatization. In the midst of this crisis he replaced the retiring Postmaster-General with his buddy, Louis DeJoy, a corporate thug known for his ruthless destruction of businesses he has managed. DeJoy even has ownership of major amounts of stock in delivery companies that are rivals of the post office. Is this a barrier to him running the Post Office? Not in Trump’s eyes!
Since arriving at his post, Dejoy has quickly revealed his complete hostility to the workers, to the proper moving of the mail, and to the general public, by disrupting the postal system in major ways. He ordered abandonment of all overtime, without hiring any new workers, thus guaranteeing a further slowdown of mail delivery and putting pressure on the already-pressured workers to speed up. He fired a large number of high-level administrators. These were also enemies of the workers, like him, but by getting rid of them Dejoy gained even more freedom to make greater slashes in service and workers’ well-being than even those fossils had dared to do. Then DeJoy began removing postal processing machines and the maiboxes where the public drops mail. Postal management has been doing this for years; DeJoy just radically accelerated the process.
Protest by the workers had already been rising before DeJoy began his war against the USPS. Workers held events commemorating the deaths of their brothers and sisters due to COVID. Workers held large car caravans at processing centers protesting privatization plans –- two in Detroit drew at least 80 cars each. The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) national leadership continued its meek policy of pleading with Congress to stop Trump and DeJoy (while knowing that the Republicans can bottle up anything in the Senate), but the APWU did have its members make 30,000 calls to Congresspeople to get Trump to stop the attacks.
At the same time, Trump is refusing to allow any aid to the USPS to be attached to any COVID-19 stimulus bill. He has stopped the progress for such a bill altogether, while millions of unemployed workers risk losing their homes and apartments nationwide.
This combination of rabid refusal of aid with outright sabotage of the mail has brought outrage from the general public. The outrage is also linked to the likelihood that sabotage of the postal service will undermine the vote against Trump in the 2020 elections coming in November.
The issues of worker survival, both postal and non-postal, the general delivery of the mail, and the possibility of being unable to defeat Trump in the election due to his sabotage of the postal service -– these issues have put the fate of the post office and of postal workers on a far-larger number of lips than ever before. Nearly all eyes are on the postal service. What is to be done?
In this situation, the answers given by the two big unions, the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) and the APWU, are disturbing, to say the least.
The NALC has put its head in the sand like an ostrich. It says of the current delivery chaos and danger to the delivery of ballots, we can handle this. Well, it’s wonderful to know that the carriers’ leaders don’t think the carriers will go and hide under a rock, but this is tone-deaf. There is a crisis underway, folks! How about some concerted action, more than only a pledge to do the same as before! You did not even send a representative to the APWU-organized protest August 25 outside the Detroit Fort St. processing center!
The leadership of the APWU has been more active. After its telephone campaign did not rock the Trumpers and the crisis deepened, last week it called a ZOOM meeting of local officers, attended by 198. At this meeting it spent the majority of its time discussing how to talk to the media and congresspeople about the situation. However, point one on its list of what to do advised the workers not to help Dejoy slow down their work. How to avoid this was unclear. Now, as DeJoy removes equipment and bans overtime, lower management will inevitably resort to escalating pressure on the workers to get the mail out. This has been their natural function, but they will push even harder for speed-up. They will demand that the carriers finish their routes at impossible rates of speed, and they will demand that processing workers in the plants run the mail and “tie out” (empty the machines of mail at the end of the shift) at much greater rates. There is nothing in the contracts that establishes a required speed of work, and this issue has always been a subject of struggle. The APWU leadership is not addressing this matter, seemingly concerned only with DeJoy's robbery of postal machinery.
And this robbery is a big issue. Everywhere in the country there are stories of expensive, high-tech sorting machines shut down, locked, even dismantled and removed. At the Metroplex sorting center north of Detroit, a union rep reported today that at least five delivery bar code machines and one flat sorter had been removed. It is not clear what the APWU leadership is doing about this, apart from its vocal verbal campaign. Some workers in the state of Washington yesterday took matters into their own hands and renovated and re-attached some shut-down machines and began running mail on them. It looks unlikely that the APWU leadership will organize similar actions, committed as it is to union “business as usual.”
But the greatest failing of the APWU leadership’s ZOOM meeting last week was that it did not call for a national public action against the DeJoy sabotage and for aid to the USPS. Nothing was said about this rather obvious need. Only a few days later the leadership seems to have realized it may lose the faith of the members, who want action; it then called for a national action on August 25th, scattered in all the areas of postal work. This was not the most powerful form of action they could call right now, but it helps. Members of the public are noticing that the postal workers are fighting for themselves. This makes that clearer.
Actions under this call were held in a large number of local areas. Most were small rallies. One was held in Detroit that attracted about 60 people. (A few days earlier Detroit APWU retiree leader Jane Duggan, who had organized the earlier car caravans, held a small rally at a Detroit postal station, Old Redford, that Dejoy planned to close -– and he promptly postponed its closing.) The August 25 rally in Detroit attracted some media attention. Nearly half of the attendees were nearby APWU officials. Plant workers passed by on their way to and from their shifts, clearly not feeling involved at the moment. The rally was addressed by Jane and three APWU local and state officials and one state legislative representative.
What comes next in the postal workers' struggle is unclear. Much activity protesting DeJoy's crimes has been organized by “allies” of the postal workers. A few days ago, MoveOn, a Democratic Party network, organized a wide number of rallies protesting the DeJoy slowdown of the mail. Local congresspeople like Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Brenda Lawrence and Senator Gary Peters have showed up at some of the local APWU-sponsored events in Detroit, making pledges of support. Kind words, but the workers know that it will take much more to stop the Trump juggernaut.
The reluctance of the APWU leadership (and the refusal of the NALC) to call for serious, concerted actions like large-scale rallies and marches is damaging to the workers’ prospects. The Trump attacks on the postal service are attacks on the very livelihood of the workers; any privatization will threaten all the rights and favorable conditions the workers have fought for all these years and will threaten the existence of the unions altogether. The attacks by lackey DeJoy on postal equipment, hours, and delivery timing and quality are extremely alarming to the public at large, many of whom are directly dependent on the continuance of the postal service. And a re-election of Trump will be a catastrophe for workers and the general public as well.
Is there opposition from among the ordinary workers to the crisis and to the union leaderships’ weakness? In Detroit the car caravans were the product of local APWU activists and allies. They involved largely retirees as drivers but met with great enthusiasm from the workers at the big facility where they took place. Now the local leadership is more involved but it is not announcing any dramatic moves. What further national action will be called by the national APWU leadership remains to be seen. The fact that they so quickly changed their passive course and called for these tiny-actions-everywhere shows that the leadership is under pressure from the rank and file to do something.
Nationally there is a Labor Notes ZOOM rank-and-file postal discussion group, whose members have organized local protest actions in the past. Recently it spent much of its time discussing how to talk to the media. When one member two weeks ago called for national action by the union leaderships, this resulted in no discussion by the group and no analysis of the stands of the leaderships was even attempted. But by now the group must have responded to the latest national move.
Meanwhile, in the plants and on the streets, the workers are conscious of the problems of under-staffing and delays and their relationship to the November election, but there does not yet seem to be any idea of the real possibility of effective common mass action. But time will tell. Crises have a way of metastasizing.
Down with the robber DeJoy!
Restore postal machines, hire new workers and end postal delay!
Defend the livelihoods of postal and all workers!
Down with Trump! <>
Back to main
page,
how to order CV,
write us!