Postal carriers across the country say they are frustrated with the terms of a tentative contract negotiated by their union and plan to vote against the deal next month.

Several grassroots letter carrier groups say the 1.3 percent annual and semiannual wage increases cost of living adjustments (COLA) outlined in the tentative agreement between the USPS and the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) do not match the hours and demands of an increasingly demanding workplace.

In the week since NALC provided details of the tentative deal, letter carriers have, in hundreds of social media posts, expressed their frustrations and tried to organize their colleagues to vote against the deal.

The tentative agreement requires a simple majority vote for approval. A third-party arbitrator would resolve the labor impasse if members do not approve the tentative contract.

Building a Fighting NALC, a letter-book coalition advocating for a more inclusive collective bargaining process for rank and file employees, is calling for $30 an hour starting pay, an end to mandatory overtime and full COLAs for all members bargaining unit.

Under the tentative agreement, career carriers would earn between $25 and $40 an hour, depending on their seniority level. Non-career urban transportation assistants would earn a starting salary closer to $20 an hour.

The coalition is planning a national day of action this week and is calling on letter carriers to hand out ‘Vote No’ leaflets to colleagues before their shifts.

Tyler Vasseur, store manager for NALC Branch 9 in Minneapolis and a member of NALC’s Build a Fighting Steering Committee, told more than 500 letter carriers in a virtual meeting last weekend that COLAs and raises proposed salaries do not keep pace with inflation. .

“If inflation is 8 percent, that should mean an 8 percent increase for carriages,” Vasseur said. “That would be a real adjustment to the cost of living as it is now.”

Under tentative agreementrunning from May 20, 2023 to November 7, 2026, letter carriers will receive retroactive pay increases of 1.3% for November 2023 and November 2024 and will receive another 1.3% increase in November 2025.

Under the tentative agreement, letter carriers would retroactively receive three of the seven COLAs, as a lump sum, and would receive additional COLAs each March and September for the duration of the contract.

“The retroactive colas seem like a lot of money, but that’s because inflation has been historically high. This contract, as it stands, amounts to a cut in wages and a loss of purchasing power for the carters,” Vasseur said.

Some letter books say they feel disappointed by NALC’s negotiations, given the agreements reached by other major unions.

Last year, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters negotiated a contract that raised hourly pay for United Parcel Service (UPS) by $7.50 and ensured a maximum hourly pay rate of $49 through the end of the contract.

“They’re willing to vote against bad TA and fight for more,” Vasseur said. “I think this is an inspiration to the rest of us in the wider labor movement.”

Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 requires the USPS to set employee compensation and benefits at par with “comparable levels of work in the private sector of the economy.”

NALC National President Brian Renfroe told members on a recent Zoom call that UPS is an “obvious” private sector comparison for wages and benefits.

The USPS, he added, offers a more competitive benefits package. But in terms of wages, lettermen at the bottom of the pay scale are paid about 80-82% of what an equivalent employee at UPS would make.

At the other end of the pay scale, more senior carriers make about 87-88% of the equivalent salary of a UPS employee.

If the carriers vote to reject the tentative agreement and send the matter to arbitration, Renfroe said the union would risk having a third-party arbitrator determine a less favorable COLA calculation.

“The Postal Service could make a pretty strong case, just given what happened with inflation, it would be a struggle,” Renfroe said. “And judging by what happened in previous rounds of interest arbitration, I suspect that would be one of the issues they would address.”

Federal News Network requested an interview with Renfroe to share the union’s perspective on the tentative agreement.

Wesley, a regular carrier in the Boston metro area, launched the “NALC votes no” website last week. Among its features, the site allows letter carriers to pledge to vote no on the tentative agreement.

NALC members will receive mail-in ballots by mid-November to officially vote on the tentative agreement.

In an interview last week, Wesley, who asked that his name not be published, said the site had received more than 3,000 pledges to vote no on the contract.

Wesley said he was “cautiously optimistic” that a majority of letter carriers could vote to reject the tentative deal. While NALC has about 200,000 members, some of them usually vote on the union contract.

Before starting his USPS job in April, Wesley previously worked in digital fundraising and advocacy for nonprofit organizations.

“I was just trying to put something together that would be a useful resource for other operators who were getting very frustrated,” Wesley said of the site he launched.

Wesley said he likes his job as a letter carrier, but the starting pay — especially in a major metropolitan area — isn’t enough to make up for the long hours.

“The biggest thing people don’t realize is how understaffed we are. It is very difficult for us to get people to join as letter carriers,” he said.

Wesley said they take about 20,000 steps in an average work day. Between June and mid-October, he worked 60 hours a week every week and only recently used his vacation time for a vacation.

“There’s just a lot of jobs that pay the same or better and don’t have overtime forced into 60 hours and don’t have a lot of the hardships that come along with being a mail carrier,” he said.

“I feel that this contract, in addition to and primarily being a slap in the face to the mailmen, is also a strategic disaster for the Postal Service if they want to actually have enough people to deliver the mail,” he added.

Since NALC first revealed details of the tentative agreement on Oct. 18, the Federal News Network has received a steady stream of calls and emails from letter carriers upset about the deal.

“People are having trouble living day to day with this money they are paying. It’s way below what we’re entitled to based on the economy,” a letter carrier in Newport News, Va., told the Federal News Network in a phone call.

The letter carrier, who has worked at the USPS for 10 years, said the tentative agreement does not reflect the dangers employees face on their routes.

The USPS, as of 2020, has seen an increase in mail theft and related crimes.

A bookmaker in Portland, Oregon said overall wage increases and COLAs are not keeping pace with inflation.

“Our wages and working conditions have been deteriorating for years and this tentative agreement does nothing to stop the bleeding. I will vote not to ratify and urge all the carriers I know to do the same,” the carrier said.

Another letter carrier, based in San Diego, said the tentative deal “is terrible for letter carriers in the city” and doesn’t keep up with their expenses.

NALC management says the 1.3 percent annual raises do not reflect the full scope of compensation for letter carriers under the tentative agreement.

Factoring in semi-annual COLAs, the union says drivers at the bottom end of the pay scale would get about a 25 percent pay raise and drivers at the top of that scale would get about an 11 percent increase.

Renfroe said the tentative agreement represents the best possible outcome given the Postal Service’s financial constraints.

“Everybody, I think, would look at this agreement — or, frankly, any other agreement in our history — and see areas where we’d like to negotiate that, we’d like to negotiate that. There is no doubt about it. And believe me, there’s a lot I wish I had negotiated. But I can tell you that when it comes to this round of negotiations, the reason we gave it up and went on and on is to squeeze every penny out of them that we could, given the circumstances right now. And the circumstances right now are that we’re negotiating with an employer that lost $6.5 billion last year.”

Renfroe said the tentative agreement will result in the USPS spending about $1 billion more than it first agreed to when negotiations began.

The union continued to negotiate with the USPS for nearly two years, he added, because the USPS “continued to move in a positive direction in terms of the amount of money they were willing to spend.”

“As long as we could continue to move them, we could continue to pursue the economic goals that we had, we continued to negotiate. And eventually it comes to a point normally — and it happened this time — where it became pretty obvious to me that I had pushed as hard as I could,” Renfroe told members in a meeting virtual from October 23.

Renfroe said the union gets positive results during arbitration when the USPS is in better financial health, but doesn’t see such gains when the agency is in worse financial shape.

The USPS ended fiscal 2023 with a net loss of $6.5 billion and is expected to soon announce an even larger net loss for fiscal 2024.

“There is naturally more risk when the Postal Service loses several billion dollars a year — which they have done every year since 2010 — than a scenario that we hope, through our continued work on Capitol Hill and at the White House and other things, with some of these policy things, we can get to a place where they break even as they should,” Renfroe said.

“While we feel very good about our case, we do not believe that at this particular time, given the circumstances before us, we could get a better economic package than the package that is included in this tentative agreement. ,” Renfroe said.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located in the European Economic Area.