ORLANDO, Fla.—The Postal Workers and the Rural Letter Carriers (NRLCA) have launched complementary campaigns against the GOP Donald Trump regime’s threat to privatize the Postal Service.
The NRLCA, the smaller of the two, went first, with a mass march of its 500 convention delegates, plus supporters, through downtown Orlando, Fla., on August 18.
Speakers at the ensuing evening rally, including union President Don Maston and Postal Workers President Mark Dimondstein, blasted the Trump regime’s potential preliminary moves towards privatization: Firing the entire Board of Governors of the USPS, and parking the Postal Service within the corporate-oriented Commerce Department.
Those moves are preludes to Trump’s real goal, selling profitable parts of the Postal Service to Wall Street and abandoning the rest of the U.S., especially “unprofitable” rural routes. Those routes serve 51 million people.
Both unions stressed that the USPS not only provides universal service, but also “good, union, living-wage jobs with fair hiring practices and equal pay for equal work for workers from all walks of life,” as the Postal Workers put it.
“Let’s not sugarcoat it: The threats we face are real and unlike anything I’ve seen in my career,” Maston said in his keynote address to NRLCA delegates before the group set off on its march. “But we’ve shown strength this year—House Resolution 70 now has a bipartisan majority of cosponsors because of the pressure you helped build.”
That nonbinding resolution opposes postal privatization and dismantling. But while A members of both parties co-sponsor it, it hasn’t come up for a vote yet. Even if it passed, it wouldn’t tie Trump’s hands.
Even louder message
“Here in Orlando, we’re sending an even louder message: We reject privatization. We demand safety. And we are not for sale,” Maston said.
The Postal Workers (APWU) later rolled out a national campaign to get unions, cities, counties, and states to bombard Congress with petitions denouncing privatization. It provided a model text for them to approve, keyed to the 250TH anniversary of the founding of the Post Office, the Postal Service’s government-run predecessor, in 1775.
The USPS became an independent corporation, existing on sales of postage and some other products, plus a small congressional subsidy for serving the blind and handicapped, in 1970. But it took a nationwide postal strike to accomplish that.
The petition stresses the need for universal service. Eliminating that requirement is another target of Trump, the right-wingers on his staff, and the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page manifesto, Project 2025, which Trump adopted as his campaign platform.
At a prior Letter Carriers rally, two workers spoke with People’s World about what would happen if universal daily service ended.
A carrier from Ogden, Utah, said Salt Lake City would still see daily service—and the rest of Utah wouldn’t. Another who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs said he’d get six days a week service, but his elderly parents, who live around 100 miles away in the rural Delaware River valley, would not.
APWU’s petition language for cities, counties, states, and unions stresses that universal service also provides vital items such as Social Security checks and medicines by mail.
“The 250th anniversary gives us a great opportunity to build even more support for the public Postal Service in the face of billionaire-led efforts to privatize this national treasure,” said APWU President Dimondstein in unveiling the petition campaign.
“These efforts seek to remove the Postal Service from public ownership and turn it over to private companies for profit,” he said of the corporate interests salivating over USPS revenues, which they don’t want to share with workers.
“APWU sees the proclamations as a critical tool in building public support for the Postal Service, good union jobs, and community services at a time when the Postal Service is facing an ‘existential threat’ from a presidential administration openly hostile to public services and a new Postmaster General with ties to FedEx. That firm is an aggressively anti-worker, anti-union private shipper.
“Postal workers move mail to every home in America, no matter who you are or where you live…The campaign will reinforce the need for a public, independent Postal Service,” while celebrating its 250-year record of achievement, APWU adds.
“Any effort to privatize the USPS, in whole or in part, would undermine the very public mission of the Postal Service, the universal service mandate and the dedicated work of hundreds of thousands of public servants,” it concludes.
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