There’s Always Work at the Post Office (review)

There’s Always Work at the Post Office is an excellent book covering the struggle of African Americans to find value as citizens through their work, and in the larger society. The author begins describing the Post Office as “the graveyard of Negro talent” in that blacks suffering discrimination as lawyers, journalists, doctors, and educators could find stable, albeit less challenging, employment there. But the “graveyard” was actually the active laboratory of social change as the intelligent, educated postal employees found an avenue of expression for their ideas. The book goes a long way into illustrating how postal employees used their job security to venture out on behalf of a larger civil rights agenda. The morphing of workers’ rights initiatives into a civil rights movement had no easy hand off. African Americans first had to fight for equality in the workplace and within the unions that were supposedly progressive on behalf of their members.

Philip Rubio shows that racial discrimination was not monolithic. Countless small battles advancing civil rights were won incrementally over the years. But the small battles led to larger ones, and African American postal workers were leaders in such causes as military desegregation and the passage of antilynching laws. Many of the beneficial policies toward blacks that were encapsulated in President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive orders germinated with a push from members of postal unions. The anticommunist passion of the 1940s and 1950s threatened the position of blacks and unions but the forces for advancement eventually prevailed. The author’s retelling of the fight against segregation rules in postal unions down South is perhaps one of the most unique, relatively untold stories of antidiscrimination activism. And as a precursor to other successes in the civil rights movement, the abolishment of Jim Crow union branches in 1962 heralded the exceptional ability of African Americans to unite reformist ideals of labor, race, and society.

Rubio sorts his way to the climactic workers’ action of the 1970 Postal Strike where blacks provided much of the leadership to bring better labor conditions for the craft. There’s Always Work at the Post Office provides engrossing detail of the vacillating drama of New York’s Branch 36 that challenged President Nixon and led the way to a national work boycott. The “wildcat” strike set the stage for the creation of the semi-independent U.S. Postal Service and produced improved wages and services. And, in coda, the author relates how African Americans and other minorities, once discriminated against, have become a high percentage of today’s postal employees and leaders.

The book itself is an engaging piece. Rubio’s use of illustrations is mixed, however, as he places images in and out of their chronological footing and often employs amateur photos that do not really present compelling stories. But his intensive research in almost 150 pages of notes and bibliographical sources provides evidence of his skills as an historian. Rubio’s usage of oral history is slow in the early sections of the book but picks up as chapters follow. An excellent essay on black women in the post office is greatly enhanced through interviews that the author deftly uses. Rubio’s ability as a postal worker “insider” undoubtedly adds to his ability to gain insights into the history of the narrators that others could not.

There’s Always Work at the Post Office is not in full essence a work of oral history. It utilizes the narratives, not as stand-alones, but as part of the regular weave of research along with standard archival resources. It is a skill not to overemphasize every interesting phrase of an interview and clutter a book with a string of quotes that in the end take away from the larger historical account. Rubio has provided measured balance in his use of oral history in this case.

Rubio’s work relays to its readers the transformations we have all seen in society. During...