LOS ANGELES—When the Post Office opened in the 18th century, it became clear that public control of mail delivery was a key to developing democracy in the new United States of America. More than two centuries later, the fight to save mail delivery from privatization and to save the United States Postal Service itself is no less important in the fight to save democracy—this time from a fascist tyrant in the White House and his billionaire backers.
Appropriately then, the American Postal Workers Union convention, which opened in Los Angeles on Aug.18, was like no other labor conclave. It was part revival meeting, featuring a visiting preacher, Everett Kelley, who also happens to be the president of the American Federation of Government Employees.
It was part walk-and-talk among the crowd by new APWU President Jonathan Smith, a Brooklyn rank-and-file member wielding a hand-held microphone, asking individual delegates what brought them to L.A. and encouraging chants and songs.
Think of the sidewalk interviews outside NBC headquarters in Manhattan, 30 Rock, for leading talk shows and you get the idea.
It was part a sea of signs, just like at a political convention. Surrounding Smith, thousands of convention delegates and alternates waved “The U.S. Mail is not for sale!”, “USPS is a service not a business”, “Vote by mail works!”, and “Don’t privatize our post office.”
All of it was to rev up the delegates and the union for the fight ahead against the anti-worker forces who dominate the federal government and want to privatize the Postal Service and sell off profitable portions to Wall Street.
While Kelley, an ordained minister who had his own church when he lived in Alabama, preached from the convention podium, Smith made some vital points during his walk-and-talk.
He also took aim at Postal Service management, headed by Trump’s latest Postmaster General, former Waste Management executive David Steiner.
Steiner says the USPS is so deep in red ink that it will run out of ready cash early next year. One of the few solutions Steiner and APWU agree to lobby for is to more than double USPS’s line of credit with the federal government, to $40 billion. It’s been $15 billion since 1992.
But otherwise for Steiner, it’s cut, cut, cut. In previous talks with his members, Smith has said the USPS has a list of hundreds of local post offices and drop-off centers it wants to close this year, leaving many workers a choice of moving, driving dozens of miles each way to new jobs, or quitting.
“We are in the fight of our lives,” Smith declared as he toured the convention hall. “We are being gutted inside the windows of the Postal Service and outside the windows of the Postal Service. We can’t afford to give away any work.” The union has more than 200,000 members.
In one example, a past GOP-named Postmaster General attempted to outsource stamp sales to part-time clerks at private office supply stores. That would have cost Postal Workers jobs. Then-APWU President Mark Dimondstein, Smith’s predecessor, led the successful defeat of that brainstorm—and other USPS management anti-worker schemes.
“We are fighting not only the Postal Service, but also for public opinion. We cannot lose the battle of public opinion, so we have the responsibility to dispel the lies” from Trump and the radical right about the Postal Service, mail-in balloting, and other issues, Smith added.
Those lies, backed by corporate cash for ads, are designed to reduce public trust in the Postal Service and its workers, whom Americans trust more than any other governmental institution.
“We are unbought and cannot be purchased. We are unbound and cannot be tied,” said Smith.
In his longer preaching to the crowd, Kelley hit on the threat to democracy and specifically to voting rights, from Trump and MAGA.“In April, the Supreme Court took away the Voting Rights Act, 6-3,” he declared. “Justice Kagan was right when she declared it ‘All but a dead letter.’
“I grew up in the Jim Crow South. I know what it feels like to be told you’re not better than somebody else because of the color of your skin. I survived that, but I recognize it. When a government begins deciding whose voice matters, whose vote matters, we all lose.
“I’m not going back to the back of the bus. I’m not going to the back of the workplace…. Enough is enough. I refuse to sacrifice by going backwards.”
But it’s not just repressive candidates who are a threat, Kelley preached. “Our rights to belong to a union are on the ballot. Our right to health care is on the ballot. Safe food is on the ballot. Clean air and water are on the ballot.”
And since the repressive foes of workers are toiling to deprive them, people of color, and other minorities of the right to vote, it shows, “If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be working so hard to take it away from you.”
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