STATEMENT BY PAUL V. HOGROGIAN NATIONAL PRESIDENT
NATIONAL POSTAL MAIL HANDLERS UNION
UPON THE OPENING OF NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE
UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE
WASHINGTON, D.C. JUNE 25, 2025
On behalf of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union and the 55,000 Mail Handlers that our Union represents, we are pleased to be here in the Benjamin Franklin Room to open the 2025 negotiations with the Postal Service. Although we expect a difficult round of bargaining, the NPMHU is committed to making every reasonable effort to reach an agreement that is good for our members, good for the Postal Service, and good for the American mailing public.
The Postal Service certainly is facing continuing challenges. Some of those challenges are caused by economic conditions, others by a decline in mail volumes, and still others by operational changes.
When the parties negotiated in 2011, 2016, 2019 and 2022, the Postal Service was seeking substantial reductions in labor costs from bargaining unit employees represented by the Mail Handlers Union, including substantial numbers of non-career employees earning less money and having fewer benefits than career employees. Some of those proposals actually were achieved by the Postal Service during those negotiations, especially from the 2013 Fishgold interest arbitration award. Based on these fundamental changes in our workforce, the Postal Service has reduced its overall labor costs for mail handling activities, and many of those reductions, including a revised wage scale for future career employees, are now scheduled to continue well into the foreseeable future. But this revised wage scale has resulted in several unintended consequences as a result of several unexpectedly large Cost of Living Adjustments during COVID and the proportional COLA provision of our contract that was a result of the Fishgold award. The current wage scales are badly broken. They have created major inequities in pay and barely provide a living wage for employees at the lower steps of the scale.
The employees at the lower steps of the wage scale make significantly less than their counterparts in the private sector. The clearest and most recent example of this is the UPS/Teamsters bargaining agreement.
