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.

Instead, NALC President Brian Renfroe negotiated with the Postal Service for more than 500 days. At times he promised the end result would be “historic” and would eliminate the entry-level City Carrier Assistant tier (it doesn’t).

In fact, this agreement would intensify speedup by reducing each carrier’s daily guaranteed office time from 33 minutes to 20, which could lead to eliminating routes.

“I just don’t know what he spent two years doing,” Talbert said. “I just truly do not understand.”

A week after the deal was announced, 700 people joined a vote-no Zoom call organized by the rank-and-file network Build a Fighting NALC, with the support of a loose coalition that includes a popular podcaster and two opposition slates for the union’s 2026 leadership election.

Carriers started meeting in the parking lots of their post offices to take group photos with homemade “vote no” signs. Some brought resolutions to their monthly membership meetings recommending a no vote.

In Naples, Florida, 50 people turned out for a union meeting on a Friday night, only to learn that the branch president would not allow their resolution to be heard — he claimed it was unconstitutional. Nonetheless, one member after another gave stirring testimony on why they’re voting no, among them two letter carriers who are homeless.

A few days later, 25 letter carriers joined a contract rally in front of the main Naples post office. Branch officers boycotted, but carriers from as far as Fort Myers, an........

© Truthout