Join the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee to build a movement against the sellout! Fill out the form below for more information.

The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) announced a tentative agreement with the United States Postal Service (USPS) last Friday. While the full contract language has not yet been released, even the self-serving highlights make clear that the deal paves the way for deeper attacks on wages, working conditions and the very existence of the public postal service.

The contract appears to be patterned after the agreement reached with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), particularly its paltry wage increases of just 1.3 to 1.5 percent per year. That deal was imposed on city carriers through binding arbitration after they rejected it earlier this year. The contract for the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRLCA) also follows the NALC template; voting on that agreement is currently underway and is set to conclude later this week.

Although referenced in passing in an accompanying statement by APWU President Mark Dimondstein, the highlights do not even mention of the Trump administration’s ongoing drive to privatize the Postal Service—signaled most clearly by its appointment of FedEx board member David Steiner as Postmaster General.

Nor does it mention “Delivering for America,” the ongoing restructuring program aimed at automating jobs, cutting routes and closing facilities to prepare the USPS for privatization. The obvious conclusion is that the contract not only provides no meaningful barriers to these attacks, but will in fact facilitate them. Similar claims of “victory” by the Teamsters at UPS two years ago were followed within weeks of ratification by massive layoffs driven by automation.

The privatization of the USPS is part of Trump’s broader plan to establish an oligarchic dictatorship. Significantly, the tentative agreement was announced on the same day that mass protests broke out in Los Angeles against immigration raids—protests that Trump seized on as a pretext to deploy the National Guard and Marines into the streets, as part of his ongoing coup d’état.

The APWU—which at times postures as one of the more “left” trade unions—has issued no serious statement on Trump’s assault on democratic rights, aside from a brief post on X/Twitter calling for the release of union official David Huerta, who was beaten and arrested by police. It has done nothing to mobilize its 222,000 members—or the working class more broadly—to oppose Trump’s conspiracy through mass industrial action.

Such measures will only be organized by workers themselves, through the formation of rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees, independent of the union apparatus and the Democratic Party.

Sub-inflation pay increases and entrenchment of two-tier exploitation

The meager annual wage increases—1.3 percent in 2024, 1.4 percent in 2025, and 1.5 percent in 2026—are less than half the current rate of inflation. According to the website FinanceBuzz, between 2013 and 2023, postal worker wages fell the furthest behind inflation out of 37 job categories tracked by federal statistics.

For the vast layer of non-career Postal Support Employees (PSEs)—who now comprise more than 20 percent of the workforce—the agreement provides slightly higher raises of 2.3 to 2.5 percent, but no cost-of-living adjustments (COLA). Like “supplemental” employees in the auto and other industries, PSEs form a super-exploited bottom tier, with management dangling the promise of career status only after two full years of continuous service.

In rural areas, where PSEs in Remotely Managed Post Offices (RMPOs) must wait four years for a paltry $1-per-hour raise, poverty wages are institutionalized. The union bureaucracy touts the “automatic conversion” of PSEs to career status after 24 months, but this provision is riddled with loopholes. Workers in RMPOs are excluded entirely, and management can simply terminate non-career employees before they qualify for conversion.

Job Security: Illusions and Loopholes

The APWU leadership claims the contract “expands no-layoff protections,” but this is a fraud. These so-called protections apply only to career employees with at least six years of service, and only to those on the rolls as of September 20, 2024. Anyone converted after that date is left out in the cold.

Meanwhile, the contract preserves management’s right to “excess” workers—that is, to force them to transfer up to 50 miles away or face the loss of their job. This long-used tactic allows management to push workers out without technically laying them off.

Most damningly, the tentative agreement contains no language preventing the closure or consolidation of postal facilities. Between 2006 and 2015, the number of USPS processing centers fell by two-thirds, from 673 to 232, according to the APWU itself. In 2021, the first full year of the “Delivering for America” plan, 18 additional mail processing centers were shut down.

The new contract apparently offers no meaningful obstacle to the continuation—or acceleration—of these attacks. The APWU’s own “highlights” are silent on the issue of facility closures, and the union bureaucracy has a long record of acquiescing to management’s restructuring plans.

Union bureaucracy: an arm of management

The APWU bureaucracy has long functioned as an arm of management, suppressing opposition from below and enforcing concessions on the workforce.

Dimondstein has sought to divert workers into fruitless appeals to the Democratic Party, including through the “Grand Alliance to Save Our Public Postal Service,” a coalition dominated by liberal NGOs and advocacy groups. In 2021, the Alliance hosted a three-day “People’s Postal Summit,” and the APWU endorsed the 2022 Postal Reform Act. While the union leadership hailed the legislation as a “historic victory,” it in fact shifted $200 billion in retiree healthcare costs to Medicare, freeing up capital for privatization and infrastructure upgrades.

With privatization on the agenda, the postal unions are supporting House Resolution 70, which is a nonbinding statement obligating nobody to anything, as a supposed solution. At any rate, Trump has shown that he does not consider himself bound by Congress, the law, the courts or anything else and is preparing to rule through military force.

Aware of deep opposition among the rank and file, the APWU is maintaining the appearance of transparency by holding a contract livestream on June 11—with all questions vetted in advance. There is still no indication of when the full contract will be released. In the previous agreement, workers did not receive copies for two months, and the version they voted on included a disclaimer stating it was not the final version of the deal.

At any rate, the vote will be an undemocratic sham. Anti-strike laws, which the APWU loyally upholds, ban strikes by federal employees and will be used to override any “no” vote and impose a deal through binding arbitration, as happened with the NALC.

Far from organizing a fight against this illegitimate law, the union bureaucracy uses it to browbeat workers into believing there is nothing they can do. But the last national postal strike in 1970 was an unsanctioned wildcat, showing that a genuine fight today requires a rebellion against the union apparatus.

The Need for an Independent, Rank-and-File Movement

The reality is that postal workers face a two-front war: against the Trump administration’s drive to privatize the postal service, and against a union bureaucracy that functions as its enforcer.

The APWU has proven, time and again, that it will not wage a genuine fight to defend jobs, wages or the public character of the postal service. Its alliance with the Democratic Party and the so-called “Grand Alliance to Save Our Public Postal Service” is a dead end, offering nothing but empty promises and toothless gestures.

The way forward is for postal workers to organize independently by forming rank-and-file committees in every workplace. These committees must be democratically controlled by workers themselves and committed to a program of struggle—not backroom negotiations—for their basic rights. They must demand the rejection of the tentative agreement and fight for:

• Real, inflation-busting wage increases for all workers, both career and non-career;
• Immediate conversion of all PSEs to career status, with full back pay and benefits;
• An end to all facility closures and excessing, including the reversal of closures carried out under the Delivering for America program;
• A halt to all privatization efforts and the full protection of USPS as a public service.

Workers must assert their inalienable right to strike and appeal to the entire working class to join a united struggle in defense of the public postal service and against dictatorship.

This is not just a national struggle but an international one. Postal workers in Canada, Britain and around the world face the same attacks—job cuts, automation and privatization. The experience of Royal Mail workers in the UK, who faced mass layoffs after privatization, and Canadian postal workers battling AI surveillance, demonstrates that these are not isolated events but part of a global offensive by capital against the working class.

The task now is to unite these struggles, break the stranglehold of the union bureaucracies and build a movement that fights for the interests of workers—not the profits of corporations and their political servants. The tentative agreement is not a step forward but a warning. Only through independent, collective action can postal workers defend their jobs, their rights and the future of the public postal service.