Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service
Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service, by Philip F. Rubio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
They defied the Nixon administration and their own unions. On March 18, 1970, starting in New York, over 200,000 postal employees walked off the job in cities and towns throughout the country. The wildcat strike lasted eight days and led to collective bargaining rights, significant wage increases, and perhaps most importantly, a demonstration of unified strength and dignity amongst the rank-and-file.
My father, a postal clerk in New Haven, retired in 1968, two years before the wildcat. During his career, postal employees had no right to bargain for wages and benefits. They could only lobby Congress to improve their status. I can remember, as a pre-teen, sitting with family members around the kitchen table writing letters to our representatives asking for raises. Even at that young age, it seemed wrong, even shameful, to be pleading with our legislators. After reading historian Philip F. Rubio’s Undelivered, I learned that postal reformers called the process that embarrassed me “collective begging.”
1970 would change all that and Rubio provides the immediate history leading up those events, as well as a longer look at the beginnings of unionization among postal employees. It goes back to a letter carriers’ association during the Civil War, and continues to build through the 20th century, so by the 1960s, 84% of postal workers belonged to unions. Not until the ending of the Civil War were African Americans allowed to work in the post office, and their story of organizing and unionization was often one of racist exclusion and the formation of separate associations or branches. But by 1970, Blacks were well integrated into the numerous postal unions, and played a vital role along with military veterans and younger workers in what Rubio calls “the Great Postal Strike.”
The Prelude
During the summer of 1968, three major postal unions voted to end “no strike” clauses from their constitutions and the following June, over 2,000 postal employees demonstrated at the General Post Office in New York. Angered by President Nixon’s low wage offer, and Congress’ own raise, they shouted “Strike” and held signs indicating the same. The fundamental grievance remained low pay. “Collective begging” meant that 20% of New York City postal workers needed second or even third jobs and 16% qualified for food stamps and welfare. But expectations were rising for these workers in the midst of gains for NYC municipal employees and the labor and civil rights activism of the ‘60s.
In the midst of this, “postal workers were enraged” when they learned that National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) President James Rademacher had secretly met with Nixon on December 5, 1969, and agreed on a wage increase in exchange for reorganizing the post office as the US Postal Service (USPS). Perhaps the final straw came two months later when Nixon unilaterally deferred the scheduled July, 1970 postal pay raise to January,1971.
The Strike Itself
Rubio devotes about a third of the book to the strike itself. Day by day, city by city, region by region — enhanced by over 50 oral histories he conducted of leaders and rank and filers — he brings the reader into the action itself, energizing as the strike spreads, amidst the fears of government repression. We learn about worker meetings, formal and informal, and workplace culture. With access to a vast array of government sources, including the Nixon Presidential Library papers and chief aide H.R. Haldeman’s Diaries, Rubio tells us what the other side is thinking, worrying about, and doing. The result, a page turner, which reads like a mystery even though we know the ending.
First to strike, NALC Manhattan-Bronx Branch 36 letter carriers set up a picket line in front of the grand old post office (now part of Penn Station) in the heart of New York. Prior to the strike, Rubio introduces us to that local and its increasingly militant meetings, and some of its activists, including Vincent Sombrotto. Then in his late thirties, Sombrotto would become national president of the NALC in 1978. The night before the strike, Branch 36’s membership carried out a strike vote amidst a meeting of nearly 4,000 letter carriers, and the affirmative carried 60-40%, even with its members knowing a strike could mean termination.
New York’s postal clerks, mostly members of the Manhattan-Bronx Postal Union (MBPU), the largest local within the National Postal Union, had not yet voted, but observed the carriers’ picket lines. At a mass meeting on the first day, members called for a voice vote for a strike, but local president Moe Biller held out for a secret ballot. Three days later, MBPU voted to join the carriers on strike by a 9-1 margin. Like Sombrotto, Biller would become well known during the strike, and would assume the presidency of his national union in 1980.
The strike spreads across the Northeast to the Midwest and California. Meanwhile NALC President Rademacher meets at the White House and asks strikers to return to work to give him a chance to negotiate with Nixon. Throughout the eight days, Nixon tries persuasion and threats, finally giving into the latter and sends thousands of (unarmed) National Guard and Federal troops into New York. Like most Americans, the troops bear no animus toward the postal workers, and no violence occurs.
After the settlement, H.R. Haldeman noted the popular support for the letter carriers, with a precautionary and prescient observation about the air traffic controllers: “Theory is that the mailman is a family friend, so you can’t hurt him, but no one knows the air traffic man. Also, they make a lot more money, hence invoke a lot less popular sympathy.”
Eight days into the strike, NALC President Rademacher convinces the bulk of the strikers that a deal, while not spelled out, has been reached with good wage increases and the guarantee of collective bargaining. And so, on March 25th, with the last holdout— in New York — seemingly in agreement, the strike ends.
Postal Reorganization and the “Manufactured Crisis”
The agreement meant workers would now have collective bargaining and arbitration, amnesty to all strikers, a roughly 14% pay increase, but not the full employee health benefit package many wanted. On the whole, strikers viewed the result as a victory, as a win not just against the government, but against their own national unions, as the energy came from the rank-and-file and the locals. Some of that spirit continued through the ‘70s with calls for more wildcat strikes and at least three wildcats erupted. With the reorganization that Nixon wanted, so-called business principles were adopted, with emphasis on efficiency, mechanization, and automation. Though the workplace became more stressful, postal employees now had greater protection not only in contract talks, but in arbitration.
While the political climate of the ‘60s helped enable the rank-and- file revolt of 1970, the neoliberal atmosphere of the ‘80s put organized labor and the postal unions on the defensive. The latter now had to fight against cuts in postal subsidies and calls for privatization and the outsourcing of work. By the time of President George Bush’s second administration, political elites saw the USPS as a “service” that could subsidize the federal budget under strain by tax cuts for the rich and huge expenditures for the country’s wars. Enter the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) and the “manufactured crisis.”
The PAEA required the USPS to set aside $5.6 billion a year for the next ten years to cover the future health benefits of its retirees, a mandate not required for any other government agency or private company, for that matter. It meant that the Postal Service would be in the red, could be easily blamed for that status, and service cuts would be demanded and carried out. How did something as outrageous as the PAEA get passed? Rubio spends several pages trying to answer the question, but here further investigation would be helpful. Republicans held the majority in both houses, but the bill also enjoyed Democratic support. Rubio quotes one Democratic representative as admitting that “a bunch of Democrats got suckered on that one…They didn’t realize how radical the changes were.”
Rubio’s narrative ends in 2019, when he saw “no PAEA reform in sight,” but, fortunately, change did come in 2022 with the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 which repealed the pre-funding mandate. Nonetheless, shifts in administrations and Congress may well bring additional manufactured crises.
Of course, technological change has impacted the Postal Service. Yet, while the use of email and electronic bill paying has meant a decline in residential first-class mail, the volume of packages handled by postal employees has increased. The USPS agreement to deliver FedEx and UPS packages “the last mile” has been a big factor, as have the more than one billion yearly packages mailed by Amazon. (2020, a year not covered by Rubio’s book, saw a record volume for USPS packages, undoubtedly related to Covid.)
Over the last few years, the huge increase in voting by mail reminds us of the valuable service that the USPS provides. Recently, the Office of Inspector General proposed a return to postal banking, which the Post Office provided from 1911 to 1967. Its return would not only immediately help poor “unbanked” residents but could help stabilize postal revenues.
However, that suggestion has “yet to be publicly embraced by the USPS.”
That inaction by the Postal Service exemplifies the “contradictions…between the visionary universal service,” the very idea of the post office, and its actual behavior. Rubio’s focus in Undelivered has been on the struggle between that idea, that service, and the treatment of labor. And not only do postal workers—the first federal employees to strike on a massive level and achieve collective bargaining— continue to face attacks from right-wing political forces, but all public employees are similarly targeted. For Rubio, “the USPS as a threatened institution is the canary in the coal mine for American labor and government services.”
While “collective begging” is a relic of the past for postal workers, the need for collective action remains high. From time to time, Rubio mentions interest in one big “industrial” union for postal workers, instead of the seven that now serve, divided by craft and level of independence. Thinking back to the historic organizing of the CIO, and the enthusiasm that it generated, one can certainly speculate what its power might bring to postal employees. In the meantime, the last words belong to the author of this impressive book who reminds us what ordinary workers can achieve: “Saving the USPS and its unions from an undelivered future will probably require a combination of union bargaining, political negotiation, public outcry, and especially rank-and-file militancy in the spirit of the 1970 postal wildcat strike.”
Reviewed by Maynard Seider, writer/director of the documentary Farewell to Factory Towns? and author of The Gritty Berkshires: A People’s History from the Hoosac Tunnel to MASS MoCA.