Philip F. Rubio - Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service

It all started in New York. It was 12:01 A.M. on Wednesday, March 18, 1970, when a handful of letter carriers from the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) Branch 36 and two members of the Manhattan-Bronx Postal Union (MBPU) set up a picket line at the Grand Central Station Post Office (GCSPO) on Forty-Fifth Street and Lexington Avenue in the midtown borough of Manhattan in New York City. Less than two hours earlier, hundreds of Branch 36 members had left the Manhattan Center on West Thirty-Fourth Street, where they had just voted to strike until Congress granted them a pay raise. Branch 36 was the largest in the NALC at over 8,000 members from Manhattan and the Bronx.

This was a wildcat strike, meaning it was unauthorized by the nine national postal unions. Those on strike for the next eight days could have been fired, fined, jailed, and had their unions decertified, because it was illegal to strike the federal government. Nonetheless, picket lines were spreading from New York into New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, and California. Over 200,000 postal workers struck 671 post offices in dozens of cities and towns across the nation, including New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Boston, Worcester, Providence, Newark, Jersey City, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. And when it was over no one was fired.

From a handful of pickets in New York City to a nationwide strike, this grassroots labor action was transformational. It effectively forced collective bargaining on the administration of President Richard M. Nixon even before he signed it into law as part of the Postal Reorganization Act (PRA) on August 12, 1970, at the headquarters of the U.S. Post Office Department (USPOD) in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the White House. Surrounded by politicians, postal officials, and postal union leaders, Nixon, who had blasted the strikers just five months before, praised the law that created the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that as a government/corporate hybrid would replace the USPOD on July 1, 1971, and provide a 14 percent wage increase to postal workers. The USPS would collectively bargain with the postal unions without whom, Nixon said, this reform could not have been accomplished. This is the American system working in a way that we all like to see it work, where we put the country above the party and where we put service to the people above any other interests. Nixon further foresaw better operation of this department better service [and] better working conditions and better pay over the years for the hundreds of thousands of people who work very proudly for the Post Office Department here in Washington and across the country.