Last week, on Monday, March 24, 2025, Arbitrator Dennis Nolan issued a final arbitration award after serving as neutral arbitration between the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) and the United States Postal Service (USPS) following their struggle to reach a mutually agreeable contract in February. The award sets the terms of a three-year collective-bargaining agreement.
But while NALC President Brian Renfroe has issued a statement largely praising this outcome, not all postal workers are pleased, and in fact many feel that it is a step in the wrong direction and ultimately oppositional to the union and the workers.
Tyler Vasseur is both a member and a steward of NALC Branch 9 based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as Coordinating Committee Chair of Build A Fighting NALC (BFN), a growing group of members within the union who are fighting for reformation and seeking to give union members the voice they should already have. Tyler joined us this past Saturday to share his thoughts on the arbitration award.
“It’s essentially identical to the Tentative Agreement that we overwhelmingly rejected as NALC members by an over 2:1 margin a couple months ago— it’s essentially the same thing,” Tyler said. “Rather than the (current) general wage increase of 1.3%/1.3%/1.3% over the three-year life of the contract, it’s 1.3%, 1.4%, and 1.5%, and so if that’s not a slap in the face I don’t know what is, it amounts to a few cents extra an hour for the general wage increases.”
