On Friday, the United States Postal Service (USPS) and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRLCA) announced a tentative agreement (TA) for a new three-year contract covering approximately 130,000 rural postal workers.
A brief “highlights” package was posted to the NRLCA’s website. As expected, the deal is a virtual copy of the concessions-filled agreement imposed earlier this year on city letter carriers by the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). That deal was enforced by arbitration after city carriers rejected a similar deal by 70 percent in an earlier ratification vote.
“It’s basically a carbon copy of the City carrier contract,” one letter carrier remarked to the WSWS. “No matter how bad inflation is or was they hold the standard of 1.3 percent raise. Over the last couple of years inflation has gone up at least 30 percent on most items, housing costs have doubled, they are actual reports of homeless carriers and somehow a 1.3% raise is fair.