Standing up to defend Portland post offices

PORTLAND, Ore.--Over a hundred activists, organized by the local Jobs with Justice chapter, protested at the University Station post office downtown on February 7. Delivering Valentines to the workers and a petition to postal management to keep the office open, this was the latest in a series of actions initiated by the local letter carriers union to fight back against threatened closures, service and job cuts.

The Portland-area Branch 82 of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) has been organizing in-the-streets resistance to deteriorating working conditions and attacks on their union for several years. In 2007, Branch 82 launched a picket outside the Beaverton Post Office to protest the contracting-out of mail delivery to a new housing development.

In 2010, Branch 82's organizing committee began responding to the deteriorating working conditions and customer service that are the results of a three-year, career employee hiring freeze.

Understaffing had left some offices with up to 25 percent of delivery routes without a regular letter carrier. The breaking up and parceling out of these "vacant" routes led to persistent mandatory overtime, late, irregular and after-dark delivery and longer lines and waits at the retail windows.

Management began hiring temporary "transitional" employees (TEs), who work without a regular schedule or assignment, at lower pay and without the benefits of a career letter carrier.

AFTER GATHERING written testimony from carriers, meeting with congressional aides and securing a congressional letter to USPS management, the organizing committee decided to go public and approached the Portland Jobs with Justice coalition with its 90 member unions and community groups to hold a Workers' Rights Board (WRB) hearing.

In late February 2011, over a hundred community and union members crowded into a local church to hear worker and customer testimony.

The WRB panel, made up of local elected officials, clergy, consumer advocacy, business and education leaders, issued a report with recommendations that postal management restore customer service and working conditions through full staffing by career employees, hiring first from the ranks of TEs.

By this time, the postmaster general had begun to announce a series of cuts nationally, including the reduction of days of delivery, the closure of thousands of post offices and sorting facilities and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of union jobs.

Despite the gloom and doom preached by management, Branch 82 responded by taking their story to over 70 neighborhood associations, business groups and local union meetings. The organizing committee doubled in size, despite the fact that carriers were working 10-hour days and six-day weeks.

Letters of support, resolutions and petition signatures were gathered. Visits to city commissioners and testimony at city council resulted in a letter signed by all commissioners to the postmaster general.

Determined to mobilize angry and despairing letter carriers, the Branch 82 organizing committee put petitions in the hands of every member, urging each to approach family, friends and associates. Public petitioning at local markets, libraries, fairs and shopping centers netted over 10,000 signatures.

In September 2011, national postal unions called a national day of action in each congressional district to take on the cuts nationally. In Portland, Branch 82 continued to mobilize members in a daily series of pre-shift rallies outside different post offices, daily picketing on different city bridges (Portland has 10), leading up to a January 8 rally and march of a thousand people, half of them postal workers.

Organizers credit the unprecedented turnout to the patient one-on-one, member-to-member and coalition building of Branch 82's organizing committee, reaching out to Jobs with Justice, Occupy Portland, the Rural Organizing Project and Working America.

Branch 82 leaders hope not only to send a message to postal management, Congress and the president but to other NALC branches--don't despair, mobilize. Continued and growing mobilizations, in concert with other public service workers and the public they serve, will be necessary to knock Congress and the president off their austerity and privatization agenda.