A wave of anger is cresting at post offices across the country. Letter carriers are looking at the big raises that other union members have won—38 percent over four years at Boeing, 62 percent in six years at the East Coast ports, $7.50 in five years at UPS.
They’re comparing those gains to the tentative agreement their president handed them in October: 1.3 percent a year for three years.
“It doesn’t account for everything we went through with Covid,” said Saqia Talbert, a letter carrier in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “We were massively understaffed, and we were working 70 to 80 hours a week, every week, for two years straight.”
The website FinanceBuzz recently found that postal workers had fallen farther behind inflation than any other job it analyzed, including many jobs that are much less unionized.
The deal covers 200,000 people. The National Association of Letter Carriers is the largest of the four postal unions, which together make up the largest union workforce in the U.S.
If ratified, it will be retroactive to May 2023, when the previous contract expired. Many carriers are salty about the long, secretive bargaining process; the union could have moved to binding arbitration as early as July 2023.