Cool Zone Media.
Welcome Tock It Up and Hear, a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again. I'm your host, Bio long so long ago, in a galaxy far far away, we talked about the collapse of the US Postal Service and the absolute horror show that's been inflicted on postal workers. When we last left our intrepid heroes, things were not great. They have continued to be not great. And with us to talk about this entire shit show is bad Mouth.
He's a letter carrier and for it Worth and Tommy Espinoza, who is a former letter carrier and former union steward for the Post Office Union. That one. Yeah, look, it's like I got up at seven am this morning. It's up and that as I got up, you're getting you're getting tired. Via, But both of you two, welcome to the show, and I'm excited to talk to you both.
Yeah, it's great to be back.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Yeah. So all right, let's start in a place where many things start, which is to say, the nineteen seventies, the full crow upon which history pivoted. So one of the things that we talked about, listener sort of last episode is that post office workers are not legally allowed to go on strike. This is sort of nonsense, but it also doesn't mean that it's never happened. Oh, by the way, is this we're about to talk about wildcat strike disclaimers? No one here represents a union, there speaking
of their individual capacity, et cetera, et cetera. None of this is legal advice. I do I have any more caveats that we usually say for these things. That's roughly all of them. Yeah, but did you want to talk about sort of the last time that things kind of looked like this and what happens?
Yeah, tell me you want to take that one. Yeah.
So, just going back to the nineteen seventies, the working conditions for a letter carriers were so bad that most of them couldn't afford the cost of living. They found themselves in a position where they are working for a quasi federal position and are finding themselves on welfare, struggling just to find the means to get to work, oftentimes having to work a second job if they even have time for a second job.
Because the Post Office has.
And still is very good at skipping around a lot of labor laws. I think nowadays people probably work around sixty hour weeks. I think probably at a minimal around fifty hour weeks, especially around the holidays. And it's not just letter carriers, this is people inside of the distribution centers, inside of the warehouses.
Things were not good.
And on top of the actual working conditions themselves, the environment was incredibly toxic. There was a long history of abuse. You're dangling people's livelihood over their head. Think you're like holding a carrot over them, know, and it really pushed people to an edge. We saw a lot of violence on the workroom floor, not only from supervisors but from carriers that just snapped.
Yeah, it was a time of great disparity.
Yeah. The thing with the post office is tom was mentioned and they dangled a carrot, but there's never any goddamn carrot. It's all stick. It's supposed to be carrot and stick, it's all stick. There's no carrot there. Management in the post office is just trying to get you to move as fast as possible and cut corners, and that erode safety, it erodes service, and it just a toxic, horrible,
horrible environment. And so back in the seventies before the wildcat strike, it was illegal then, just like it's illegal now. The NELC National Association of Letter Carriers Congress called all the shots like we had some collective bargaining rights but
not full collective bargaining rights. But like back then, adjusted for inflation, starting wage was fifty thousand a year around about and it topped out at about sixty eight thousand dollars adjusted for inflation, and that took twenty one years to get to that point. Yeah, so it's pretty wild and like very similar to today. Now starting wage adjusted for inflation is just over forty thousand dollars before taxes.
So we're making even less money now than we were before that wildcat strike, right, And a couple of other real familiar things like you know, on popular wars, rampant inflation, you know, Yeah, every time you turn on the radio or TV, there's some lunatic politician that you can't stand hearing about.
Yeah, time is a flat circle.
But Vince Sobrado, who was an organizer out of New York City, the ANOC didn't strike all over the country. It was New York and Chicago and San Francisco. It was some major hubs, right, And Vince Sobrado came out of that and we won in that strike one collective bargaining rights. Now the thing we gave up, and it was a trade off. So we have a no layoff clause, so they can't lay us off, but we gave up the right to strike, making sure that there wouldn't be.
Another wildcat strike. Yeah.
Right, So that's kind of why our hands are tied in that sense. Now, if we have an impasse with our with our negotiation, and like we get a tentative agreement and we during the ratification process vote that down, now we can either try and go back to the bargaining table or it gets brought in front of an arbiter, basically an impartial judge, and they'll have a panel. The Post Office will pick two and the NELC will pick two, and then I think there's one impartial that's supposed to
be impartial between that. I believe that's how the arbitration process works. We got to prove our case in front of impartial arbiters instead of going on strike.
Yeah, and so, as we sort of mentioned before, one of the things about the Post Office is it's similar if people remember the rail like the rail strike that didn't happen where there's all of these troops you have to jump, you'd be able to go on strike. And that's because again, like rail workers, postal workers don't operate under the normal sort of national labor relations board like framework.
Right now, admittedly there was a very good chance that it like in like seven months, we don't even have that. No one has that anymore. But you know, as we are right now, yeah, it's I think things are going good. But as things are going right now, let's get in to the current tentative agreement, and I guess we should actually we should roll this back a little tiny bit. For people who haven't listened to these episodes before, can you explain what a tentative agreement is?
Right, So, a tentative agreement is effectively the first draft. When you are going through and negotiating, you will reach a contract where management and the union kind of agree and they put it before their union members. And the idea is that your union members are able to vote whether or not this tentative agreement. And again, like that mouth was saying, if it gets rejected or if it gets turned down, then it goes back to the drawing board, or we get an arbitrator, and it goes through a
lengthy process. Our specific contract has been under negotiation since before I was in the Post Office. The amount of back pay that they're going to have to pay on some of these races is kind of insane, and I imagine that a lot of people won't see it for a long time. But yeah, that's what an a tentative agreement is. A lot of people think that it's a bad thing to go back to the drawing board, or a bad thing to renegotiate or be put before an arbitrator.
I largely think that is a myth. If you think about any sort of negotiation, the first the first offer is never the best one. I think a lot of people are just afraid that somehow you would end up giving more than you're getting. And I think that's just the way that the rhetoric has gone for unions lately, and I.
Guess I need to adjust that a little bit.
Because the Teamsters, they even like the Service Workers' Union, they're all really doing well. The Communications Union, we're in a little bit of a different age. But a lot of the Post Office is old heads, military veterans, that kind of sort who just come from a little bit of an earlier time when the labor movement was really starting to plant their feet on the ground.
Yeah, a lot of them are still dealing with I like most of us are the hangover from the Reagan years, right, So they're all terrified of union stuff. Even though they love the union and they're in the union, they're very distrustful of it. And they don't think that we can ask for what we deserve. They think we need to ask for what they think we can get based on the shit that management is saying because they're again still shell shocked from the Reagan years and all the anti labor stuff.
And that's how a profound impact on most of the unions that survived that period. A lot of them didn't, right, Which is which is you know, part of part of why you get people who behave like this. But on the downside is it means that you get handed a lot of deals that absolutely suck. But do you know what else absolutely sucks? It's the roddicts and services. That's
for this podcast. They probably don't I don't know. We are back, so let's talk about what the tentative agreements that y'all are being asked to sign is right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it's been I think we're coming up on six hundred days since our last contract expired.
Jeez.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's people that just want their backpay. So even if the back pay is dog shit, they're desperate because inflation is eight percent across the country in some places, right, and like people are just desperate for that chunk of money. That delaying process feels very very intentional.
Yeah.
So the Tenet Agreement comes out around five hundred days after negotiations were supposed to have started, and there's all sorts of nonsense going on during then. But we're getting promises like it's going to be a historic agreement, we're going to get significant raises. We're going to go to an all career workforce, which, by the way, we.
Don't have right now.
That is by the way, yeah uh okay. So in every other trade, you have an apprenticeship program, right, so when you get on the job, you're wet behind the ears, you're brand new, you are automatically career, you are automatically paying into your retirement, you're automatically getting the regular benefits everyone else is. In most trades, you're paying half the dues that the journeymen are paying, and you, you are considered a full employee.
You're the new jack. You're getting all the shit jobs, but you are a full employee.
The post Office has a position called the City Carrier Assistant, which on paper and how they'll tell you, sounds like an apprenticeship program, but it's really more like they took an apprenticeship program and an unpaid internship and jammed them together. Because these kids are coming in and I'm not even kids. I'm forty years old. I started as a CCA at forty years old. They're coming in making less than twenty dollars an hour. They're not considered a career, so they're
not paying into the retirement. You haven't got all the same union protections. Your benefits are super low. You get five days of annual leave a year and no sick time like it's it's yeah, it's a meat it's a meat grinder. So that was a big thing, and it creates a whole thirred tier because we already have two different, two different tiered wage system, which sucks enough, and you anyone that pays attention to labor.
That drives a huge wedge between.
Workers, and it crushes solidarity at kneecaps a union, and now with the CCA position in this non career workforce, it's created a whole third tier.
This is one of the things that the UAW is fighting for. It's like, is eliminating tearing system all together, because if you're actually trying to get a functional union and make people's jobs better, that's the thing that you do. And having a third tier yeah not good, extremely bad.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's because they've adopted sort of this Amazon model of doing things where they just have this burn andsurn situation where like Amazon Bezos said that he doesn't want
anyone working for Amazon for more than like two years. Yeah, if they have these people constantly and they're constantly burning through and they never have to pay full benefits, they never have to pay into their retirement, they never have to pay them more than twenty dollars an hour, and they can just get you to work your ass off and burn out and quit within two years. As people retire, their labor costs go down. It's evil. It's absolutely it's some jack welch hateful bullshit.
So touching on that, if people are really quitting before they reach a point in their career where they're educated and can stand up for themselves or stand up for each other on the workroom floor. That's one of the major reasons that our union is failing. And like you said,
you use the exact example that I would have. The Amazon model is working really well if you can just make it so that people are so miserable they quit their job before they understand what their rights are, how they can protect each other, what even the contract says on the basics of when can you call out, when are you required to come in? Can they send you
home early without your pay? That's massive And when we were talking about the conditions of the nineteen seventies and how long it takes you to get to the top of the pay scale, this third tier actually increases that time by sometimes three or four years. I've known people who have been ccas for three or four years. I don't think I've seen beyond that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
What this does is it means that before you go career, you're spending all this time you're effectively a fully trained, full employee, completely capable of doing everything that's required of you. You're just not getting any of the career benefits making a minimum wage, and on top of that, the way our benefits work is it does come out of your paycheash. Sheet's not like other jobs where it might be a
separate package or already calculated. In for instance, a lot of the trades, they'll say, hey, you get twenty three an hour, but the reality is you're making around twenty nine or thirty. Because you're not paying into your health insurance or your retirement or anything like that, you're effectively making less than minimum wage. You're almost paying to go to work as a CCA then just to be yelled at and told that you're not going fast enough even
though there's no street standard. But that's getting into a little bit of nipicky key contract stuff that language.
But yeah, so yeah, that's one thing that they're promising is to get rid of that non career workforce. So this TA comes out and after hearing that we're getting rid of the non career significant raises, it's going to be historic for us. What they offered us was one point three percent.
Jesus Christy. Yeah, I mean this is some thing for if you are in a union and you hear your leadership say the words historic contract. You are screwed. That
agreement is going to suck. I remember on this show literally live and recording right before they're supposed to be the teamster's ups strike, right Like, I'm literally on the episode with two of the union people and we get the text of the contract in the middle of recording, and we get the thing with it is this is an historic contract and we're like reading it in the middle of the episode. Was like, wait, this fucking sucks. Shit.
It's like, that's how you know you are duped when you get the historic when they start pulling out the historic contract thing.
Yeah, you think if you're making six figures a year, you could understand how to buy a used car and know that you promise low and deliver high. Like, I don't understand how they exist figures of the year. They haven't figured that out. But yeah, so in this contract, one point three percent, and that's enough to piss anyone off because that drops about the same time that we all see the longshore men getting going back to the table because they didn't get sixty percent, you know what
I mean. Yeah, I'm surprised more people just didn't call in sick because we all got this news on the worker and floor, and I was like, did you see this shit? I know people that quit that day, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's it's wild. So one point three percent. They're keeping the city carrier assistance, the n career workforce. They're removing some of our union protections right like it used to be. You have a
twelve sixty hour rule. You don't have to work more than twelve hours in a day or sixty hours in a week. You can say I can't do this, I'm going home, and the union could protect you. Now, if you are a CCA, or if you have signed up to do overtime and they tell you to stay sixteen hours, you have you have no choice.
Jesus Christ. You gave up things for a one point that's that's a one point three percent raise, is like, like that that's the kind of thing that you get. If like I don't know, say, like you got like some unbelievable concession package somewhere else, maybe conceivably you would take that, or maybe maybe it's a thing where like you're you're you're like a nurse and your problem doesn't pay.
Your problem is you're working like two million hours a week, But like that's that's a that's a you got concession somewhere else kind of thing, not a we gave up stuff for like the worst rays you've ever seen.
Yeah, I mean it makes you think about, like what was there? What was their first offer? Like, mind you it's been it's been over five hundred days of negotiations. What was the first offer? We got to put the fuel in the mail trucks ourselves? Like what you know what I mean, what Tom do you want? Do you want to talk about? What the tone of agreement doesn't address?
So the tenetive agreement we spoke about the Post Office is strategy for uh, dealing with our grievances or how to combat the union last episode, and so for the people that didn't listen to it or just need a refresher, the Post Office has found this extremely effective strategy that if they just don't agree at any point in our in our grievance procedure, which is if they violate the contract and we want to be made whole, whatever that may look like, they can just keep on saying no
and push it up to arbitration, because there is a grievance procedure that ends up with a third party intervening as well, and if they push enough of those grievances up.
We have a major backlog on this process because our final resort is now just the standard of operation, and what that means is that there's nothing to force the post Office to comply with the contract if someone wasn't paid correctly, or was missing a whole day of pay, got sent home, or was put on emergency placement, which is a process where they say you did something dangerous and so they can take you off the clock.
It could be.
Months or even a year before your case is even looked at. They do have a process, of course, where they try and prioritize it, but it's obviously not working.
The other thing that the contract doesn't really touch on is our uniform situation, where the companies that make and manufacture the uniforms for our letter carriers and actually for all the positions in the Post Office are effectively trying to sell you a shirt for like eighty dollars or correct The most egregious one is like your winter parka is posed to four hundred dollars and your balance that you're you're given is I think three eighty FM I don't know it's been more.
It's up to four ninety nine.
But the rain trench coat, just the raincoat is four hundred and sixty five dollars and you have to get it through a vendor, so you can't even pay them money to do that. A pair of polyester pants that's going to fall apart in two months ninety.
Five dollars, Oh my god.
Oh yeah, no, it's it's wild. It's wild price gouging. And they were going to address that. And what they did was they increased are they increased our uniform allowance by thirty five dollars, which is like three pairs of socks from those magazines, right, incredible stuff.
Yeah, it's it's it's wild.
Someone should dig into who's running that company and like who they're working with to get those contracts, because probably a fun story there.
I think it's like four out of five of the approved manufacturers where the distributors are owned by the same people.
So oh great, okay, yeah, I'm bequeathing this as a gift to I know there's a bunch of journalists. You listen to this, go go do that story. I guarantee you'll find some unbelievably unhinged stuff.
And a quick shout out to any letter carriers that are are listening to this. If you don't use your entire allowance, look out for the ccas, look out for the PTFs, the non career and the fresh faces on there. If you don't use the entirety of your uniform allowance, to the way that they view it is that they can give us less money, So use all of it. Don't protest by not spending that money. It's not even yours, so suspend it, give it to someone.
Do something, you know, Yeah, get the new jack in your office a fucking raincoat, because like I tried to do the math on it. For winter gear, for a place like Minnesota, to get all the winter gear and your summer gear, it's going to take you four years of uniform allowances to get all that gear.
Jesus right, it's ridiculous.
Yeah, And like it's Minnesota, right, Like I'm from Chicago, so like it is, it is slightly warmer in Chicago and you get wincheles in negative forty here, yeah, and like Minnesota is much worse. So like that is that that is not like optional stuff. That is the difference between you having hypothermia and you notia.
Yeah, no exactly, and God forbid you want to buy a pair of shorts as well, because Minnesota summers get over one hundred index h.
Yeah, speaking speaking of ways to not die in Minnesota summers, here are some product and services that will probably not help you with that, but maybe they will and we are back.
One of the other things that Tom touched on that this agreement doesn't address is he talked about the non compliance and the grievance backlog, but also just the toxic work environment, which we've talked about, and it's so bad. The whole reason we have the trope of someone going postal is usually because someone's bullied to a point where violence occurs. They either take it out on management or my own manager in my first year got in a fistfight with one of the clerks.
Jesus correct.
The post office has lost grievances because management was threatening to shoot an employee. Any letter carrier would have been fired for that immediately that manager got a letter of warning.
Yeah, we have a joint statement on violence in the workplace, which I think you were about to get into the leg. Yeah, they're just not complying. It's a very one sided thing. Effectively, management has qualified immunity.
Great, great, your managers are also cops that could attack you. Incredible, incredible stuff from the post office.
Yeah, and then and then there's a bunch of wage stuff too. I mean personally, I caught my own manager putting in all the ccas for two hour lunches because the ccas are new and don't know what they're doing, and they don't know to check their time all the time, putting us all in for two hour lunches and then told me, tried to pretend to me, oh, that was
just an automatic computer error. Whereas if we take a thirty one minute lunch, I have my phone blowing up being asked why I'm not moving and delivering the mail. But you guys managed to accidentally miss a two hour left.
Come on, don't lie. You don't got a lie. You don't getta lie to be my friend, like, come on.
And then and then there's other places around the country where we the anlc's one grievances where management was making CCA's work in the dark, delivering mail till like seven thirty pm and clocking them out at.
Four o'clock in the absolu business.
All right, So they got people out there working for free. It's it's and we have to catch we have to catch.
Them doing that.
Yeah, they're never going to own up to it that they all watch their payroll. The management structure at the post office, it's like the TMU version of Game of Thrones. They're all nasty, they're all backstabbing each other, and like, the nastier you are and the more willing you.
Are to screw people, the higher up you.
Go in management at the post office, like it's it's disgusting.
So there's even more convoluted ways that the management finds to effectively steal from the employees. And one of them huge problem is changing the metrics on what a route looks like. And so they can alter the times of hey, how long you were in the office packing your truck when you got back to the office and started unloading and cleaning. And so what they do is they make it look like the street time took you, let's call it five hours, and you were in the office for
four hours. That way they can make a route look smaller than it actually is and have an excuse not to hire another person, which makes it so that this poor carrier who was assigned to this route now has a ten hour day, eleven hour day just by default on a light day, on a regular day. This is a really big problem for the rural carriers. Their contract is a little bit different. Effectively, they get paid by the job, not necessarily hourly, or that's the case for a.
Lot of them.
And so if you're adjusting their times, they're going to be paid out for an eight hour day. But the route has just been stretched out through this method of just dishonest scanning and disalmist entries and they get free labor. And I'm not even well versed on the RCAA contract. That's a whole other You know, there's only nine unions that go into the post office, which means there's probably nine different contracts.
Yeah, and in every single one of these contracts, they're inventing new, different and unique ways to do wage theft just steal people's money, which and it's worth noting again like if a post carrier like broke into an office and stole the amount of money that is being stolen from them, they would go to prison forever, right, But because it's your boss doing this, Like, the worst thing that happens to them is they have to go through
a grievance procedure even though they are just literally robbing you.
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, you do not fuck with the mail cops. But the mail cops the postal inspectors work for management. Yeah so yeah, and management does nothing but sit in their chair all day, sniffing their own farts, watching tiktoks and trying to figure out how to screw people through the virtue of spreadsheets while we are all out working our asses off. It's a very demoralizing and abusive,
abusive situation. So we were hoping that shit would get addressed in the tenetive agreement, and none of it was. So there's all sorts of problems with that. I'm with building a fighting an elc and we are basically a bottom up more of a radical reform caucus. I am out of Fort Worth, but like it's started in Minneapolis, and you've got people in Chicago and New York and Naples, Florida, and San Antonio, Hawaii, all over the country who are basically, we are tired.
Of we are tired of our.
Leadership being in bed with management or at least doing things where they look like they're in bed with management. We've been putting on vote no rallies all over the country. You've probably seen some of the news.
And this is vote no for the tin devisse. Yes, this is this is this is a vote to send your bargaining reps back to the table with the demand that we can't take a deal that sucks this much. That's what a vote no thing is.
Yeah.
So yeah, we've been trying to get letter carriers to vote no on it. That's so we've been doing the vote no campaigns so we can vote this shit down and get it in front of a judge, because once it goes into arbitration, there's a lot of fear mongering things, Oh we could lose this, Oh we could lose that. Oh we could lose this. But like Mia, you you said it yourself. These are all concessions. We're not getting anything for giving up all these things. One point three percent is what we're getting.
Like, yeah, like one point three percent is the kind of raise that like in a normal functioning union is like that, that's like a company's opening agreement that both you and the company knows you're not going to take Yeah like that, it's a.
Joke, Like that in and of itself would be a major concession to get something else. But we're doing all these concessions to get that. Yeah, that's the win quote unquote.
Yeah.
So the thing is the Postal Reform Act says that we are supposed to get paid comparatively to a comparable
company in the private sector. So an arbiter is going to look at that and try and look at UPS, UPS or Amazon, and the Post Office is really trying to push it towards Amazon, which is why I try to talk to every letter carrier I know to support and get some crosscraft solidarity with Amazon, because without going on too much of a rabbit trail, the whole you know, a rising tide lifts all ships, and one union in another industry helps everyone in every other industry.
And trying to get people to understand that.
But like you compare our contract to UPS and UPS they top out with I think their benefits package tops out one hundred and twenty four thousand a year, and it's about you know, five or eight years to reach top scale. Ours tops out with this tentative agreement at ninety three thousand a year. And it still takes us thirteen years to get to top steps. Christ, that's not comparable, right,
So I'm not afraid of arbitration. I'm hoping we get this in front of an arbiter, because unless that arbiter is completely crooked, I can't see him saying, well, you guys deserve one point three percent.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when I first saw bad Mouth talking and what his posts were on Reddit and stuff like that, I got really excited because I remember when I was speaking to my local president and talking to the stewards in my area across like a couple of different stations. The kind of big question was what do you do when the union breaks your heart? And I guess the answer is everything that Badmouth has just talked about, You build
a better one. You remind people that there is an alternative, that everything started somewhere.
And if you go to his first.
Episode on the From Aid to Arbitration podcasts, he has something called the CCA Corner where he's educating the newcomers the fresh spaces. He's just talking about horizontal power and I was listening to that episode before we had spoken. I got so excited just to hear what this person was up to You know.
I tried to say sneak in as many anarchist ship without saying I'm an anarchist. I try and sneak as much of that ship in as I can. I get old heads who have a Trump hat on talking about anarchist docking points.
It's it's funny as fuck to me, you.
Know, who won't break your heart frogs that support this podcast if you don't buy them, but therefore cannot be.
Is there anything else you want to talk about with arbitration or should we move on to the impending doom of the post listeners? Yeah?
I think I think the arbitration there's a whole lot of fear mongering and ship I think anyone paying attention to things. We can't get a worse deal is the main point there, and that's that's the whole point of the vote no campaign is to just tell people, hey, dude, we might as well go down swinging like we're not going to get a worse deal than this.
But that's that's pretty much it for arbitration.
Yeah, so let's let let's let's move on to the future of the post office, which I want to take a second to mention that like, Okay, look like I am not someone who has any respect for the people who built the US government. However, if you want the US government to like exist, right, the postal service is something that was deemed so important that it is like establishing the postal service is in the main body of
the constitution. Now freedom of speech right, and like the right to free association that is not in the main body of the constitution. That is a fucking amendment. Right. The people who built the American system thought that the postal service was a more important thing to make sure to have in the main body of the constitution that
set up the modern version of the government. Right, they thought that shit was more important than like you're right to have freedom of assembly, like you're right to not literally be grabbed off the street and tortured, which is like the Fourth Amendment. Right, So, like you know, in the scale of priorities of like how how important is the postal service? Like that's how important people who set it up thought it was. And those people were not very smart and like a bunch of racist slave voters.
So I would argue it's actually more important than they thought it was because they're you know, I mean, like obviously their priorities are completely out of whack.
But like, I am not a founding father, stand but the post office was actually invented by Benjamin Franklin, who I don't believe owned any slaves, and yeah he was really racist, but yeah, oh yeah, I mean, like I know, I know that, I know that part. I'm I just I don't think he actually owned anybody, but like that's it's a yeah, yeah, and it was started I think fifteen years before the Constitution was even written.
Oh no, he did. He He did own a slave as a young man, and I think freed him.
You know, I was trying to.
Get the racist bastard a little bit of a win.
But like we're finding this out live on the so yeah, he did for his early life and then became an abolitionist later, which is still bad.
Yeah yeah, that's uh. You know, I'm glad you came around eventually, I guess. I don't know.
Look, we're finding this out live on the show. Oh my god, that was a lot of time of him owning slaves. That absolutely, I take that.
I take back my critical support, uncritical opposition.
To help with Brent Franklin teach us that in school.
To hell with Bent Franklin too.
Yeah, we're coming in this Trump administration and stuff. And let me tell you that the situation wasn't really great under Biden either, because we have a Postmaster Lewis Dickhead to Joy. He was put into place by Donald Trump. And you've seen they wanted to slow walk the post Office into privatization since the Reagan years, right, and they're just slowly chipping away at service and quality. D Joy was connected to XPO, the giant logistics company. He had
stock and I can't remember what position he held. He apparently detangled himself from that when he became postmaster.
But you know, they all say that I don't know for sure. I am not an accountant, so I can't.
Do that well and like and like, also I want to point out the president of the United States is issuing a cryptocurrency like that shit that shit is that she is so fake now?
Like oh god, yeah.
So like Joy's also got a reputations of just being a massive job killer besides looking like a low rent spider Man villain. So under his tenure, we've seen service take quality.
Take a nose dive.
And I want to talk about this stuff and this might get my ass in trouble, But like I am tired as a as a letter carrier who loves my job, loves saying hi to people in the neighborhood, loves walking three yards and knowing the names of all the dogs on my route, and being the face of the post office.
It is so frustrating to have people blame the mail man and the letter carrier for the decline in service because we are out there being brutalized by the Post Office, doing our best and fighting against the degradation of service. That is a top down problem with leadership in the post Office. I wanted to outline some of the stuff that I have evidence of and have seen firsthand of management undercutting the service of the post Office. They willfully
delay the mail all the time. There's pictures of racks and racks of DPS. It's assorted letters and they come in trays just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, and management they will order you on a regular basis to prioritize delivering packages over the mail. If it's a big, heavy day and they're looking at labor hours, they will sometimes tell you to not deliver the mail and just.
Deliver the packages because the packages.
Have a tracking number, and their boss can get in They can get in trouble for that, but they can lie and hide the mail for another day.
Like that shit happens all the time.
Yeah, So it's like can just be like they can just be like hiding like your bills.
Yep, or like social Security check yeah yeah, also your junk mail. Have you ever have you ever ordered something and it says it was delivered but you didn't get it, and then it shows up the next day, or it says that, oh there's a vacation hold, I didn't put this on hold and then it shows up the next day, or you got to go down to the post office to get it.
Or recently, severe weather delay.
Yeah, well I mean the severe the severe weather delay can happen, but I'm talking What I'm talking about is ones where the package didn't make it to the letter carrier who's out there delivering. Because this has happened to me multiple times, and it didn't make it to me before I left the station. But because they want to make their numbers look good for their boss, they will scan it at the station as if it was delivered or as if it's a Jesus yeah.
So because they.
Want their numbers to look good, because their entire job is life on a spreadsheet. And so then I have to I have to talk to my customers the following day.
But like it said, it is delivered. I didn't.
I saw you, and you didn't drop it off. I was worried someone stole it. What happened. I was like, I know exactly what happened. I know what their name is. That's some of the service degradation. We've had people in other areas catch management throwing.
Away mail Jesus Christ.
Yeah, oh yeah, management reprimanding carriers who follow the manual and provide good customer service. Like I've been on the phone where I've had my manager call me because I was standing in one place for five minutes because I was helping an elderly woman move her garbage cans and helped her get some groceries out of her car to bring in. You know, all the stuff that you see the good mail man, the reason why people loved the post office.
Shit like that.
I got told no, you're not doing that, and I had another customer come up to say hi to me while I was on the phone, and I just stopped to say hi as I'm walking by, and my manager chewed me out for even talking to the person. They don't care about us, and they throw us all under the bus all the time. Because if I don't deliver a package because they never made it to me and it says delivered, the customer will come and complain at the post office.
Management will tell them, Oh, I'll talk to the carrier.
That carrier made a mistake, and it's no carriers do make mistakes, but like this intentional degradation of service to make the numbers, that blame always goes on the letter carrier, and it is we love our job. We love our jobs, We love our communities.
I got like I might. I'm gonna start crying if I talk about this too much.
Like I love bringing treats to dogs, like I get Christmas cards from old folk on my route, like I.
Know, like I know when the people's birthdays are.
And I had an old timer on my route, sat outside to say ah to be every day. Suddenly he wasn't and his wife was out in the garden and I said, where is he? Oh, he passed last night, And she starts crying are crying and like I get in trouble for taking five minutes to give her a hug and talk things through for.
A second, Like it's yeah, sorry.
This is one of these areas where like delivering the mail is a social thing, but the thing is like sociality is the enemy of capital, and that's that's the people who are running the post office that they don't give a shit about, you know, like the actual social bonds and ties that you know, that that are the thing that society is supposed to be composed of. Like they care about their metrics and them being able to make more money in them, you know, being able to
advance higher in their career ladder. Yes, it reminds me a lot of the campaign against the school system, where you deliberately other fund things and then you blame the teachers for why the service is bad, and it's like, well, it is not the teacher's fault that there's like forty eight kids in a classroom, right, like yeah, you know, and there's there's also a very very similar prepatization campaign
run by a bunch of Australia powerful forces. So let's go back and talk a bit about like who the people are who are doing this and what their sort of plans are.
Yeah, so you have to Joy he's doing that, and we have all of these they're starting to some of the stuff they're building these I think they're called sdncs. It's basically they take a bunch of post offices from a metro area and then they make one big distribution hub like Amazon. Well that is adding an hour commute onto some of these letter carriers. They come in, they get to their mail truck, and then they have to drive their mail truck for an hour to even start delivering. Right.
It's a huge message.
It's a huge fiasco, and it feels very intentional because what's going to happen when they close those facilities built by the government down and it starts to privatize. Well, what do you know, Amazon just got a new hub or whoever ends up trying to step in. That's a little conspiracy brain But like certain fiascos done by the Joys delivering for America, Plane Taylor made to fail for
the Post Office but work for someone else. And then also you have Brian Renfrow, who is the current president of the NLC, the one who was telling us that our tentative agreement was going to be historic, when all it does is help management. He has gone on speaking tours lying about this tentative agreement, and everything he says
sounds like management gave him a script. And there's a whole lot of theories on that and how when he you know, when he loses his position, people have running bets on what position he's going to take in the Post Office the second he's voted out.
Yeah yeah, yeah, he's.
The one who's negotiated this whole contract. He used his position as president. He iced out everyone from the union. He's the only one who talked to the Post Office. So this, this tentative agreement is his baby. Wait what yep, the executive council What yeah, he didn't tell the executive council.
Well, he didn't have like a bargaining team.
No, he had a bargaining team that were all of outside contractors. He had no one from the union with him. What yeah, because he wanted it to be his baby.
That's so unhiddh. That's like I need to stop here for a second because that's like, if your union is doing that to you, you need to understand, like, dear listener, that is not how any of this shit is supposed to work. Yep, Like, even even a normal corrupt union will have a bargaining team that is composed of like it will have a bargaining team that isn't outside contractors. So there'll be people from inside the union who are like the stooges of like whatever sort of management click
is in power. Like having them all be outside contractors is one of the most ludicrous things I've ever heard. You need to negotiation cutting out. That's so wild, Oh my god.
Oh yeah, no.
And the thing is, we're coming up on six hundred days without a con without a ratified contract, Like he has been the only one doing it this whole time. And there's a bunch of shady shit. Okay, So he's struggled with alcoholism. I have dealt with addiction. I have lost friends to addiction. I have family members struggle with addiction. I respect anybody who is going to take care themselves. But he disappeared for something like fifty days or something.
Didn't tell anybody, He ghosted everybody. He ghosted everybody, And this is the early days of negotiation. People stepped in to start negotiating without him. It turns out he had gone and checked himself into rehab. But the thing is, the NLC has two fucking vice presidents. I have all the respect in the world for someone to take care
of themselves. But when you got two hundred and seventy seven thousand employees livelihood you're responsible for, and you got I don't care if you got cancer, if you got an addiction problem, or I don't care what it is. If you got to step away to take care of yourself, please do that. But put your vice, one of your
two fucking vice presidents in charge. So what happens is someone steps in while he's gone, he comes back, gets mad that at them, strips them of their responsibilities, blackballs them from the union, and goes back into negotiations all by himself, Which is why getting to the next point on this. At the most generous, he is in ept as hell. He is in ept as hell and just the worst sort of person to be in there. At the worst, he has corrupt as hell and just DeJoy's stooge.
And the thing is, we work for the federal government. Whether it's malice or incompetence with a federal government, it's usually both, and it doesn't matter which one it is to me, Whether he's corrupt or just an idiot, it's all the same to me because I can't make my fucking rent. So we expect de Joy and the Post Office to do us dirty. That's their job as management. But to have the president of our own union doing this to us is unacceptable and like it's yeah, yeah, yeah.
So on that note, that's one of the big pushes for the union recently has been to reach open bargaining where the membership is actually a part of it. And that's what to my knowledge, it's one of the major issues that the building and fighting an IOC or the building better union talks are going towards.
Yeah, you can you talk about what open bargaining is. It's a thing that should be the standard for all unions.
But yeah, I mean, open bargaining is effectively the bottom up structure of having your members or even the representatives put forward motions that are open to the public and open to the membership so that you can effectively ask for more or get a different variety of opinions and strategies, you know, the duality of power kind of structure. But what the Post Office currently has, it's not open bargaining or what postal union has. It's not open bargaining. They
have their own team that they send in. They don't talk to the membership. You kind of just elect your officials and then they come back with whatever they ended up with, and they don't consult with any of their bottom line, which is problematic for obvious reasons, including this one where someone can go missing for fifty days and most of the membership has no idea. I've even talked to people. I think it was like two or three
weeks ago. I went to a bar and I ran into a letter carrier from the next city over as a go did you vote?
Know?
And it's like, what are you talking about? He doesn't know that there's a vote going on.
Is out there?
Yeah? Yeah?
But yeah, yeah, I guess.
I mean, like the main objective we want to I'm sure we're running at a time.
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
I could talk about this shit for days. I mean I do. That's pretty much all I do anymore.
Like Tom was saying, the building of fighting ALC and pushing for the vote, no thing. The main thing that we're wanting is coming on too shows like this and getting the public perception of what the letter carrier deals with what's going on. Because this Trump's coming in, they're going to be trying to privatize it like they always do.
That's already been in the works.
It's important that the public knows this degradation of service is the point of it, and how can the public sort of support our fight so we can keep the post office. So I wanted to just share a couple of links. If you're a letter carrier and you want to get involved with reforming things from an electoral end, there's the Concern Letter Carriers and you can go to
Concern Lettercarriers dot com. They're going to be running in twenty twenty six to get rid of Renfro if you are impatient like me and you can't fucking wait that long. And even if you're not a letter carrier, you can see how we're fighting with the building of Fighting ANLC, which is more of a radical bottom up reform caucus. If you want to get involved in that, or you just want to kind of get updates from people who aren't going to bullshit you, you can go to Fighting
NLC dot com to check that out. Oh, Tom, did you want to talk about the NLC Legislative Action Center.
Yeah, so we touched briefly on last episode. The NLC actually can't really use a lot of the money and funds from the union itself to lobby or to push Congress or anything like that, so there are separate organizations. There are facets of our organization that do that. You can find that at NLC dot org. Specifically, they do have a link where you put in new zip code and it gives you the appropriate congress member to write a letter to and really push them on what to do.
There.
You can also donate to their fund if you see so fit and are able to do so.
Yeah, and at that Legislative Action thing is actually pretty cool because you don't even have to call. They'll have pre filled out things that you can just click, enter your email and it'll do it for you. So it's a real quick snap. It's the easiest way to harass for your congress person aside from drunk dialing Ted Cruz, which is my favorite.
Yeah, we'll have links to all that well, linked to all that in the Discover.
There's one more plug I wanted to make because all the fires out in LA right now, because you have letter carriers where the post office burned down, and so did their house, and now they're they're reporting to duty at another post office twenty minutes away to go and
deliver deliver mail to a devastated neighborhood. Because the thing is, when shit happens, whether it's a hurricane or a fire or you know, the first people who show up are your neighbors or the punks or the punks and mutual aid in your neighbors show up, the first person you see from the government.
We're federal employees, were not federal allies.
But the first hint of normalcy that a lot of people get is trying to just hide out and be safe, and then they see their mail man walking through their fucking lawn trying to deliver to their shit, you know what I mean. Like that's important. And we all love what we do. We love being a part of the community, and we love helping. And sorry, I knew I was gonna cry at some fucker point.
Okay.
So the NELC is an NLC disaster relief fund. The public can donate to it. It's usually letter carriers. We all donate to it. And what happens is if your house burns down like in LA right now, or if like you were devastating the fires in in in Hawaii
or whatever. When that happens, a letter carrier can apply and as soon as they're approved, which can happen within a day or two, they automatically get sent like a thousand dollars from the fund to just pay for their pay for their hotel or pay for their rent a.
Car, and then they get approved.
It's not a fix all, but they'll get like they'll get another check after a little bit to help with some of their damages after they make their claim. That's something that normally it's just letter carriers giving to letter carriers so we can all take care of each other. But like the public is allowed to donate to that too. I know there's a lot of you guys have already been talking about a lot of mutual aid stuff at the beginning of your episodes lately. I just want to
plug that one as a mailman specific one. Yeah, I'm sorry for crying.
No, No, Yeah, I mean it's emotional.
Yeah, that shit sucks, bro, Yeah.
It really does. Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to make sure people know before we head off?
If I have one thing, it's just help your co workers. You don't have to be a steward. You don't have to be anything. Just find somebody who don't think deserves it.
Help them too. I guarantee you.
That did he do.
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