There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality

NINE: Prelude to a Strike (1966–1970)

CHAPTER NINE prelude to a strike (1966–1970) Asked what it was like to work at the gpo in midtown Manhattan in 1968, mail handler and military service veteran Richard Thomas was blunt: ‘‘Actually gpo was an embarrassment to the postal service because of the filth. On the outside, it’s recognized as the leading post o≈ce in the world. The columns there look all romantic and everything. But the inside—the working conditions were horrible. I mean horrible. Old wooden floors. Old cement floors. Back then we used to unload trucks. Mail was on the floor so we had to drag the bags. It was like a slave mentality back then. . . . When you worked, you worked like a slave.’’∞ Born in the Bronx to parents who were union members, Thomas joined the mbpu—‘‘mainly because they had a credit union’’—before switching to the npmhu after the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike. He thought the npmhu could better represent him and other mail handlers in management disputes.≤ Growing postal worker militancy in the late sixties was primarily a product of frustration and demoralization over economic and work issues, such as Thomas described. That militancy was fueled by the influx into the post o≈ce ofyoungpeople,women,veterans,andespeciallyblacks,whointurnratcheted up the struggle for equality as a key part of the general campaign by postal unions for workplace reforms. Many jobs had opened up in the post o≈ce in 1965 that for the first time made black recruitment a priority, thanks in large parttothegainsoftheblackfreedommovement,andinparticulartheactivism of the napfe, still popularly known as the National Alliance. Many newly hired black postal workers were joining other unions, although only the National Alliance and the npu emphasized rank-and-file militancy as well as the struggle for equality.≥ By the late 1960s postal unions seemed to be on a collision course with the federal government. All postal unions were concerned with the government’s stalling on work-life issues, and with insu≈cient pay raises from Congress that were lagging behind the cost of living. The Alliance and the npu were especially struggling with their diminished status of 208 | prelude to a strike Forty nalc Branch 41 letter carriers dramatize the low pay received by postal workers in 1969 by applying for welfare at the Brooklyn Department of Social Services o≈ce. Many postal workers were actually eligible for and received welfare. Courtesy of Postal Record, National Association of Letter Carriers, afl-cio. ‘‘formal recognition’’ (as opposed to the ‘‘exclusive recognition’’ enjoyed by the afl-cio postal unions) and the slow pace of workplace reform. Meanwhile, poor working conditions and management styles created an overall service dysfunction and notable incidents like the October 1966 Chicago post o≈ce mail backlog. This ‘‘crisis,’’ as it was later described, became the opening sought by those who wanted the post o≈ce taken out of the executive branch and converted into a government corporation. In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Kappel Commission to investigate the crisis in postal operations and labor-management relations, and proposed that the post o≈ce be converted to a federal corporation.∂ By the end of the decade, Congress and President Richard M. Nixon had continued the Johnson administration’s practice of stalling postal pay raises prelude to a strike | 209 because of inflation, and were now tying them to proposals for a new postal corporation. By 1970 the post o≈ce’s overall service had deteriorated as it struggled to handle a one-third increase in mail volume while its costs doubled, producing an annual deficit of over one billion dollars a year.∑ Nixon’s Executive Order 11491, issued on October 29, 1969 (e√ective January 1, 1970), made the Alliance’s existence even more tenuous. Nixon’s order eliminated all representation categories except ‘‘exclusive’’ (dominated by the afl-cio unions). Aside from tensions between government and labor over daily work life and the post o≈ce’s future, a divide was also growing within the postal unions between bureaucratic leadership and a frustrated rank and file denied the right to strike, full collective bargaining rights, and a living wage. The growing convergence of civil rights unionism and rank-and-file militancy (along with the influence of Black Power) produced widespread alienation and scattered incidents in the year preceding the nation’s largest wildcat strike that began on March 18, 1970...