August 21, 2020

By Denise Oliver Velez (for the Community Contributors Team)

Daily Kos

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has over 600,000 workers across the United States, and has been, as you know, under attack by Donald Trump, who, in his reckless attempt to screw up mail-in ballots, is also wreaking havoc on the lives of USPS employees. As a side benefit for the Bigot in Chief, he gets yet another opportunity to harm Black folks.  

Why Black folks? I’m well aware that postal employees run the gamut of colors and ethnicities, and Trump’s cruelty hurts them all; however, the USPS has historically been a bastion of economic stability and upward mobility for the Black community. Trump has the capability of once again, doing us direct harm.

Dean Baker, senior economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) made a very good point on Saturday.

In June, with co-author Hayley Brown, Baker took a deep dive into the connection between the Postal Service and the Black community. 

The Postal Service has historically been an important source of middle-class jobs for Black workers, especially where racial discrimination was strongest in the private sector. This pattern continues to the present. We previously posted our findings from an analysis of the Current Population Survey (CPS) that showed Black workers are substantially overrepresented among state and local government employees. The share of Black workers in state and local government jobs is 20 percent higher than in the private sector. If budget shortfalls force state and local governments to cut their workforces, Black workers will be disproportionately victimized by the layoffs. It turns out that the situation is similar with employees of the Postal Service. Postal workers are more than twice as likely to be Black as workers in the private sector. Our analysis of the CPS shows that in the three year period from 2017 to 2019, 26.8 percent of Postal Service workers were Black. This compares to 11.5 percent of the private sector workforce during this time period. As in state and local government, the pay gap between Black and white workers is narrower among those who are employed by the Post Office than among workers in the private sector...

In addition to jeopardizing a service the country depends upon for everything from medicines to democracy, forcing major cutbacks to the Postal Service will be a serious hit to the Black community, possibly depriving tens of thousands of Black workers of relatively good-paying jobs. Those whose positions are not eliminated outright may find their job quality diminished as recent proposals aim to reduce employee benefits. There have also been pushes to expand the agency’s use of noncareer workers, who are not eligible for the same pay and benefits as permanent employees…

At a time when the country is reexamining its history of racism and the ways in which racism continues to shape the economy and society, it would be tragic if Congress thoughtlessly struck a hammer blow to the Black middle-class community by forcing large-scale cuts on the Postal Service. Moving forward to reduce the impact of racism will be a long and difficult process. Going backward will only make it harder.

Pew Research uncovered similar numbers.

Around a quarter (23%) of Postal Service workers are black, 11% are Hispanic and 7% are Asian. In contrast, black Americans make up 13% of the national workforce, Hispanics 17% and Asian Americans 6%.

In 38 states, 50% or more of Postal Service employees are white, but racial and ethnic differences do exist. For example, in the District of Columbia, Delaware and Maryland, 60% or more of postal workers are black

This tweet, about a grandfather who worked for the Post Office, got me thinking about my own family.

One of the clippings I treasure is about my grandfather’s retirement from the P.O. that I mentioned in my tweet.

Born only 10 years after the era of enslavement, my grandfather worked first as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family in Topeka during a time when there were no gas stations and auto mechanic shops. They sent him to the Pierce-Racine factory in Wisconsin to learn how to essentially rebuild the entire car if it broke down. Armed with those mechanic skills, he moved with my grandmother to Chicago, where he got a job with the Motor Vehicles Division of the Post Office in 1917.  

He was able to buy a home in Chicago, and then afford to “move on up” to integrated Woodlawn—about 10 blocks away from the house Lorraine Hansberry made famous in A Raisin in the Sun—thanks to his wages from the P.O. My dad was also able to go to college, where he met my mom. When my mom gave birth to me in New York City, and my parent’s income was shaky, my grandparents were able to move to New York and buy a two-flat building in Brooklyn, which housed them, my parents, and baby me. My grandfather retired with a good pension, and when he died, it supported my grandmother. I was reminded that I am who I am today thanks to the economic stability afforded by the Postal Service.

I then started thinking about my longish list of other relatives, all with college degrees, who also held down jobs with the Postal Service.

On a call with one of my goddaughters, I mentioned to her that I was writing about the USPS and the Black community. She spoke of being a “Post Office baby,” describing how her mom and dad met at the Post Office. Her dad worked six days a week, picking up night shifts to collect overtime, she said. Her parents not only bought their own home; that overtime money also paid for homes for my goddaughter’s paternal and maternal grandparents and an aunt. She—and her brothers and sisters and cousins—were able to go to college thanks to the steady income of the Postal Service.

To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about how many people of color around me are connected to the Post Office. My husband’s godfather—who is Puerto Rican—and many of his closest friends are veterans who are also USPS alumni. They’re also vets who are really pissed off about what Trump is trying to pull.

Some of you film buffs may remember Robert Townsend’s first film, Hollywood Shuffle. In pursuit of an acting career, Townsend’s Bobby Taylor is disgusted that he has to play demeaning roles, such as over-the-top portrayals of gang members. His disapproving grandmother reminds him that he doesn’t have to demean himself like that, because “there’s always work at the Post Office.” At the end of the film, Bobby gets a commercial gig that his grandmother can celebrate.

The commercial within a movie isn’t the only media that pays homage to Bobby’s grandmother’s words of wisdom. There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality, by Philip F. Rubio, is an in-depth look into the role the Postal Service played (and still plays) in the formation of the Black middle class.

The book also chronicles the fierce union activism of Black postal workers.

Black postal workers--often college-educated military veterans--fought their way into postal positions and unions and became a critical force for social change. They combined Black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike, which resulted in full collective bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly established U.S. Postal Service in 1971. In making the fight for equality primary, African American postal workers were influential in shaping today's post office and postal unions.

At the very beginning of this 2010 lecture at the Smithsonian, Rubio explains how the line from the film became the title of his book.

What I find of real interest about Rubio is that he is not simply an academic; he was actually a postal worker, which he describes in his guest blog for the Smithsonian.

While working at the post office in North Carolina I became more aware of the historical narrative of the post office being a niche job for African Americans. Many of my black co-workers, for example, had college degrees and were active in their community as well as at the workplace. Black civic engagement in the postal unions over the years had a lot to do with why the Great Postal Strike of 1970 was so successful. That rank-and-file “wildcat” strike produced the good salary, benefits, and union protection with full collective bargaining rights enjoyed by newly-hired postal workers like me ten years later.

I started as a Bulk Mail Center distribution clerk in Denver, Colorado, in 1980, and then transferred that same year to letter carrier craft, where I stayed until my early retirement in 2000 in Durham, North Carolina, where my family and I had moved in 1988. I left the post office after being accepted by the history doctoral program at Duke University, whose East Campus was right across the street from my mail route. I “clocked out” of West Durham Post Office on a Friday in late August, and started classes the following Monday. With my main focus being on US, African American, and labor history, studying the black experience at the post office pulled those three areas together. It also became a lens through which I could examine the post office and its unions. But it was an important story in its own right—a narrative of struggle and activism with countless stories to read and hear about.

Rubio also describes the struggle to get rid of the photograph that was required with postal job applications—photos that would allow Black applicants to be rejected.

On November 7, 1940, just two days after the election that President Franklin D. Roosevelt won for his third term, he signed Executive Order 8587 abolishing the civil service application photograph. This was no minor matter. The NAACP and the historically-black National Alliance of Postal Employees (NAPE, formed in 1913 after Blacks were excluded from the Railway Mail Association) had been campaigning against the use of the application photograph since the Wilson administration began using it in 1914 to screen out as many African American applicants as it could. And the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), at the time still battling to keep Jim Crow branches out of its organization, had voted at its 1939 convention to support abolition of the discriminatory application photograph.

Those days of militant union efforts have not ended, and once again postal workers face a threat that comes from the highest office in the land. Black postal workers are united with their brother and sister union members to nullify the threat, not only to their livelihood, but to the lives of those they serve. 

The American Postal Workers Union is asking us all to help them fight back.

It’s on all of us to ensure the Postal Service is protected. Not just so we get our mail, or so we will be able to safely vote—but so that there will always be work at the Post Office.

Posted with permission