To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
December 12, 2020
Re: The situation among postal workers - Dec. 2020
The postal workers are exhausted from overwork in the huge election mailing effort and are about to enter into the also-huge Christmas mail rush. They are wondering what burdens Postmaster DeJoy will throw on them next. They are in the midst of a grim battle with under-staffing and COVID-19 without support from postal management. The leaders of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) have failed to rise to several major opportunities to defend the workers, while the leaders of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) have confined their activities to cooperation with management with ballot mail and to negotiation for their own new contract.
Contrary to the Trump lies, the postal service handled the mail-in ballots extremely well and the election was run as well as a bourgeois election between two rich candidates can be run. Now that the ballots have arrived, postal workers are facing the always-heavy Christmas rush with many troubling problems on their hands.
Postal workers continue to work 80- and even 90-hour weeks, as they did handling the ballots. Under-staffing is severe everywhere, a result of years of little hiring and of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many facilities are so under-staffed that management is doing craft (hourly) work. Workers laboring a month straight without a day off has been reported. Carriers from southern California have been brought up to San Francisco and housed in hotels just to cover the workloads. There are similar reports from Chicago. There are reports of mail being delayed for weeks in some areas. A photo in a newspaper showed huge lines of semi trucks lined up to drop off packages at a processing center.
Management is making haphazard attempts to hire, but new workers often quit when they find the horrendous workloads and hours they are faced with. Even experienced workers are leaving when they can, via early outs, because the load is unbearable. The low pay for the second-tier carriers and clerks, a result of the ongoing betrayal by the top leaders since 2011, does not prevent many of these workers from quitting; many are leaving in droves. In high-cost-of- living areas the pay on the lower tiers is far from enough. In the San Francisco Bay Area management has had to give up trying to hire at that pay and is offering full regular starting pay, as no one can afford prices there on $17 an hour. There is a similar problem in the state of Washington. Management is attempting to rush these new workers onto the jobs without full orientation.
COVID-19 is surging, up by 25% in some places, cutting down postal workers as it has since March. Management in some places is refusing to apply scientific public health measures. All it does there is provide masks and does not even require wearing them. Often there is no systematic testing or contact-tracing. Social distancing is a joke. Workers are given a mask and then they are on their own. Protests by activists and union members get no results. The national union leaderships say nothing about this.
The NALC has not uttered a peep about these issues. It has just reached a tentative new contract with the USPS in which the low-tier workers get a raise from $17.29 to $17.79 an hour. That's going to go a long way in the San Francisco Bay! The rest of the tentative agreement brings 1% yearly pay increases for four years. But the leadership does not seem to be addressing the under-staffing and COVID-19 crises.
The APWU leadership has reached new lows with its failure to lead the workers in any mass actions in defense of their livelihoods, in demands for funding for the postal service and in defense against the authoritarian threats of President Trump. President Mark Dimondstein gave an underplayed call for a November 17 action against Postmaster DeJoy; it turned out to be very tiny. 30 small events were held across the country. To mobilize this unimpressive number, Dimondstein sent out a letter to local presidents calling upon them to organize distribution of flyers and hold press events urging postal workers to call their Congresspeople demanding funding for the USPS. A number of calls were made for the badly needed funding, but the small number of events pales when compared to the 300 tiny local events the union organized on August 28 of last year. And even those actions were really token, not a show of force at all, and gained only a brief notice by the public.
To fail to call into wide action one of the largest unions in the U.S. at a time of massive crisis is nothing but reprehensible. At this moment the postal workers have great support from the general public. But the moment is being lost. Not only are the workers being ground into dust but Trump has called the whole election process into question. Early November, during the count which was threatened brutally by Trump, would have been the moment to show that a large mass of workers stand squarely against Trump's proto-fascist antics and demand serious improvement of working conditions, defense against COVID-19 and funding the for USPS. But Dimondstein sat on his hands. Now he has printed in the union's magazine the call to action against a Trump coup. It may have some relevance, but the most important moment to issue it was during the vote counting, and it needed to be matched by action. A major chance was missed. Trump is still plotting but the printing of the call is late and the lack of organization of any action is, again, reprehensible.
In Detroit and some other areas, activists acted with greater energy
than Dimondstein has showed. Detroit retirees and a friend distributed
450 flyers at the main Detroit processing center on November 17,
raising a call to the workers to be ready to act against a Trump coup.
The leaflet also urged workers to call Congresspeople demanding funding
for the service and action against DeJoy. Other activists in Denver,
Kalamazoo, Des Moines, San Francisco, New York and elsewhere carried
out parallel activities. But Dimondstein and his aides left the workers
without leadership at the crucial time. When George Floyd was murdered
by the police, young activists mounted a massive show of force and
righteous indignation and gained very wide support. But when a whole
presidential election is threatened and called into question,
Dimondstein is absent. He makes a few peeps in order to claim he did
something, but really it was nothing. Sic semper (thus always) top
labor bureaucrats. <>
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