The Lost Post Office Union Episode

your mail. Is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show.

federal employees. That is especially not true for members of the post Office and that is a real issue because the government has decided that, like, yeah, I know, all these people who do vital service are not allowed to go on strike and it absolutely sucks. Yeah. So I think this gets into sort of where I want to start, which is with the sort of history of the National Association Letters Carriers, a union that is not allowed to strike,

and how sort of weird that is. So Yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins of the union and what effect that has had on how organizing works or it doesn't work.

People were working months straight with no days off, and those were close to twelve hour days, and so these postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided in nineteen seventy to go on strike despite it being illegal. This conversation is not new it was illegal then, it's illegal now. And I do want to be crystal clear here. I am not advocating for a strike that would also be against the law, and we don't advocate for anything

that's against the law. What I do want to advocate for is the right to strike, because being quasi federal, there's a lot of limitations in what the NLC and the general postal unions are able to do. In total, there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the Post Office, some of which are the manager's unions, so

take that as it is. Yet, on top of not being able to strike, none of our money that we collect as uniondes can be used for lobbying purposes, so they can't support a single candidate or any of the parties involved. We have a separate fund for that with the NLC, called the Letter Carrier's Political Fund, to try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there. And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back. We are unable to

organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued or labeled as a strike, and they're I think generally afraid of public opinion.

is buying attempting to buy politicians. And then also your leadership is like, we can't strike, I mean, we can't protest because someone might think it's a strike, the public might commanditusen. It's like that that doesn't seem I don't it really seems like it's like it's not only have you tied both hands behind your back, you've like tied them behind your back to your legs. You're now rolling around on the ground.

they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in the National Guard to try and deliver mail, and the National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards. It's just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail. An interviewer is asking him, do you think that you're doing a good job. It's just like, no, it's just some kid, you know. And don't get me wrong, I'm just some guy. But you need the training, you

need to know what you're doing. And it's not something that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the first time, the mail had stopped, and that won us collective bargaining binding arbitration, which is a process that I think most people within unions know what they mean, but to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance and eventually we call in a third party, an arbitrator to decide

for us, and those are generally lawyers. On top of binding arbitration, it gave us a new pay scale and set in motion. I think over it's got to be hundreds of raises between the colas and the new pay table. It used to be twenty one years for you to reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous, and I think it's eight. Yeah. So the Post Office was forced to reorganize, and so is the union. This is

where the American Postal Workers Union was born. And from this strike we were able to settle on the National Agreement. So there's the National Agreement, which is our binding contract. There's the JCAM, which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual, which is what the Post Office and the union use as the interpretation of the contract. That way we are not arguing and spending time about the contract could mean we can just focus on whether or not someone broke

our agreement. So after this one would imagine that a quasi federal institution would honor the contract that was created, argain in good faith and treat their employees. Isn't that right?

sort of heyday of militancy was. I mean, like, you know, if you look at like how the UAW worked in like the sixties, right, they'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line, and if someone did a contract violation. He would blow the whistle and everyone would just sit down and you'd immediately have a strike, right, and it wor you know, and like that level of miltancy.

You don't need to get like be at that level to enforce a contract, but you have to actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management over it. And if you're not willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless. And that's a real issue with a lot of unions.

And that's something that like you know, I think, okay, the enforcements of laws depends on sort of depends on a set of relative balance of forces and whether people care about enforcing the law, which is how like for example, like if you pirate like seven movies and you get

you get three copyright strike, you go to prison. But you know, like the sam Altman or whatever like AI company can literally steal everything on the entire Internet and get money for it, and no one will love to prosecute him, right, And so so you know, whether or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal and you going to prison for it largely has to do with the balance

of forces involved. And that's something that you should keep in mind when and this is this is the thing, this is the thing that that cuts the other way a lot too write like a lot like employers just do illegal actions literally all the time, and it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care.

done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes, we will pay this individual, and the post Office is liable to pay them. But now they are off the rolls, which means there's a greater period of time before this individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that within the post Office the managers need to fill out. I believe it's an eighty one thirty or you know. All these forms have some numbers associated with them that

they just refuse to fill out. And there's no recourse, there's no cheez path for us to take to make them hurry or make them get this individual the money that they're owed. And some people this doesn't ruin their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever. But I imagine for many many working Americans that's that's their livelihood immediately down the drain.

which could be scheduled years out. I think if you do the math for our current rate of handling these cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around fifteen years to get through the.

so that our employees have to wait. Something I do want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure if we can, is just what's going on with the post Office and the Postmaster General. Yeah, all right, So I want to go at this from the customer perspective first. I think that's the best way to relate to people. I think by and large, people are losing faith in the post Office. Either you have no idea what's going on, or you don't care. And that's fine, I'd say. Before

I joined, I didn't think of them at all. You know, they're just the guy that shows up at my house every morning. A lot of people seem to think that the post Office is going out of business, and our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service that is getting worse. People are paying more for worse service, and it's easy to point out those issues from the outside

and be rightfully upset at them. I do feel like we're doing a disservice to our customers, and I'm not really not trying to attack them when I say that they're uninformed or clueless to the inner workings of the

Post Office. I do directly want to attack Congress and say that, yeah, when they posted, they had pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in two thousand and six, which required the Post Office to prefund one hundred percent of its retiree health benefits and liabilities seventy five years into the future. What so, overnight, the Post Office was handed a five point five billion

dollar burden. And that's where the whole I don't know if you remember, I certainly wasn't conscious of it at the time, to save our post office stickers that were being sold and trying to fund the post Office, and really that's where the rhetoric of the Post Office is going under comes from. The Other thing I want to point out is that we are quasi federal. We actually accept nothing from tax payer monies. It says it's a service, but really the post officees ran as a business. We

don't even get subsidized because they don't need to. My local union president loves to remind us that the post Office is a business that has a revenue of seventy eight point two billion dollars, and he'll want me to stress that the point two is extremely important because point two of a billion is twenty million. They are not

in jeopardy. We are not going out of business. And the Postmaster General, Louis de Joy, he's the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath the President of the United States.

as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing is they're consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing post offices in order to save money and shoving three installations into one building. That's why the lines are getting longer. It also means that from dispatch the employees have to drive an extra mile or two into their working zone, which of course means that we're going to go into overtime. And this just throws a wrench in the mail handling process.

He has single handedly made the service a lot more reliable, and I do think that you're right. Irreliable, yeah, sorry, more unreliable, And I do think that you're right. He wants to destroy the post office, not only for the election, but to the point where it makes more sense to go private. Now is the time to point out that the Joy is a major shareholder in FedEx, which is christ which is a subcontractor for the USPS, and he has millions of dollars in equity involved. He's got skin in the game.

fifteen minutes each way. And I really can't imagine driving two hours after an eleven hour shift just to eat and come back and do it again.

guaranteed to be scheduled. So if they don't like you, they just will schedule schedule you once a week for an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if you're in a busy place, then that just means that they're going to work you to death. So when you join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family. You lose time with your loved ones and your friends. And I myself, am so fortunate that all my loved

ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk about it, I get asked the same thing, why don't you quit? And the truth is this job is awesome. I love it, I want to work it. I just want it to make sense and be livable, and I'm not gonna give up just because we haven't reached the point where it is. You know, if you walk away. Now it doesn't get better. I'm sure someone would take my place, but it helps to have people stick around.

et cetera. And so if you can just cause high turn off rates on purpose, that's that's the thing that a lot of these sort of business google like Nightmare factory people love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell. But you know, they're still getting paid.

you to use your leave Jesus Christ. I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've been doing that a lot at my office.

They're meant to be from the bottom up, by the workers, for the workers. But it really does feel like it's like national is its own entity. And so I guess that would bring us to talking about the union and the future of the union.

within the Post Office. It's public knowledge he's dealing with substance abuse with alcoholism, and that's something that hits very close to home within my family, and I really don't want to demonize that he's struggling, But what I do want to say is when you're going through something like that and you've accepted a position on the national level like this, you really need to either step down or

appoint someone to handle things in your place. As negotiations started over a year ago, he kind of went missing and it was later revealed that he was an inpatient, which is fine, get your help, but there was nothing left, no notes left for us to strategize with, and our membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the leadership has gone missing. It's very dark times for the NALC well.

organized group of people who can make decisions for themselves. And if it's if that's not happening, and you get to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people who can just sort of vanish like that's that for whatever. And you know, literally whatever reason that is right, it could just be you get sick. It could just be like whatever happens,

that's just a terrible way to organize things. And I guess it's also like I want to make take it like like like a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out of a job, like you're like I ideally, if you were in an organization, it should be able to function without you. There should Not having an indispensable person is a fiasco. Don't do that. This is true of both like your tiny local mutual aid group, as

much as is true of your giant national union. So this, this has been this has been mea talking about the indispensable person don't have.

Branch nine of the NAOC, and namely this individual Tyler Vasser, who when I had originally posted on Reddit asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would be great for this inner view. His Branch nine has passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for contract negotiations, and I hope this sweeps the nation. We're not allowed to strike, as I've mentioned, and our leadership is so shy when it comes to activism or mobilization of the workforce. They

don't want to touch the topic. The closest thing we have to it is a rally that is Enough is Enough that's being held in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to postal workers. We're being robbed and

we're being harassed. But even then, we're missing a large chunk of the danger that is posed to postal workers because yes, we're being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied and harassed inside of our work places by management, by the people who are supposed to empower us to do the job effectively, and so they don't want to touch the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation. But to me, pushing for the right to strike is a I'm not sure how to

word this. It is such an important part of the nilc's identity, the postal strike of nineteen seventy that it seems silly to ignore it today and pretend like it didn't happen. So for the future, I think that activism is our key to success. I think that the old heads that lead our union come from a time where

unions were frowned upon, where activism was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion will be largely in our favor, and that public opinion can really put pressure on the legislative branch on Kongs And if we are transparent about our union, what we're asking for, the issues that we're facing, I think that the public would be on our side.

If the people in America knew that management was falsifying time records or training records and interfering with workers' comps claim and back pay, or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay, that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions big or small, that they would care, and that they would join us in the streets. One major thing that happened, I think it was last year in

the summer, we had a letter carrier. His name is Eugene Gates, who died in the Texas heat Jesus because management told him not to take as many breaks or he would face discipline. These pressures that we face when when you're threatened that you will lose your job if you don't listen to us, you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion. And further, Yeah, I think that the post office killed mister Gates. And yeah, there wasn't

as much outcry or or anger behind the movement. I often find myself thinking that while I don't have the answers, I do know that we need to care more. Yeah, and it's hard to care when when you're exhausted. I acknowledge that.

stuff that's happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think that's sort of important in terms of getting people to you know, like trying trying to actually do like mass mobilizations even just to get people to understand what's going on, is that I think a lot of people who are facing these kinds of conditions think that they're alone and think that it's just something that happens to them, or they've been in them for so long

they think that it's sort of normal. And having a bunch of people go no, like A, this happens and b it shouldn't happen is extraordinarily powerful because you know, like that that feeling of isolation is is the thing that all of that you know, you're that your bosses depend on to make sure that you know you you just keep going along with these conditions even though they are just objectively horrific, and I think any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to go anywhere.

I want to push is for union solidarity. I want the NLC to hire organizers, specifically organizers to try and get the public mobilized and as well as the workforce, so that we can put pressure on Congress, so that we can show our bargaining teams that we support them, and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms.

And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and reaching out to the other movements in a time where union support is higher than ever is such a clear path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason, because people are afraid to speak out against the Post Office. And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen with our current contract, but I do know that the fight never ends, and that while we stand on the shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these

giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively new employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the footsteps of some warriors. The branch president I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard work over the years that I don't have to reinvent that weel, none of us do. We just have to continue the struggle.

your front door, says for the postal worker. You know, there's nothing better that you can do than talking about it. Word of mouth is the best advertisement.

Please look at the Mayan mar episodes, the Free Burmer, the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that me. I believe you've done the same work as James with border kindness. Those are two topics that I think y'all hit really well and that really touched me as a person. Sometimes I'll relisten to those episodes when I'm having a hard day just to remind myself that it's all the same, it's all the same fight.