Arbitration Award Shows Why We Need The Right to Strike
The 2023-2026 arbitration decision was announced on Monday, March 24. This award is nearly identical to the tentative agreement (TA) that NALC members voted down by an over 2-to-1 margin over two months ago. This undemocratic process directly contradicted the will of the vast majority of letter carriers across the country. In the absence of any semblance of a contract campaign by the national leadership, the rank and file of NALC took it upon themselves to build a Vote NO campaign. We organized parking lot meetings and rallies, took group photos, passed over 50 Vote NO resolutions in our branches, and mobilized our coworkers to vote down the sellout TA, and fight for more. All this without any support from our national leadership!
This arbitration decision results in a pay cut for letter carriers. While it has slowed recently, overall inflation has risen roughly 6% since the end of the last contract in May 2023. The general wage increases of 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 per year, combined with our Diet COLA doesn’t keep up with this increase, let alone the longer term rise in prices since the pandemic! In 2024 a report of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found postal workers fared the worst relative to inflation – losing 13% of their purchasing power since 2013.
Build a Fighting NALC (BFN) is firmly opposed to any process that does not give workers the final vote on our contract. Binding interest arbitration is just another form of “collective begging”. NALC members should always get the final say on the issues of wages, working conditions, and anything else in a contract that impacts our lives at work. Binding interest arbitration was a concession given to management in the aftermath of the 1970 postal wildcat strike, which is why BFN is fighting for the Right to Strike. This is the exact situation that such action calls for, as strike action is the most powerful weapon workers have to fight for our interests. The threat of privatization from the Trump administration makes this more pressing. TSA workers just had their collective bargaining rights revoked. We could be next. We need to be prepared to call for special meetings in every branch, open to all members, immediately after an Executive Order to privatize USPS is issued, to discuss escalating actions, and how to fight back.
For the third time NALC President Brian Renfroe and the rest of the national leadership were outflanked by Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino, who before expedited arbitration began on March 17, released a memo stating what the arbitration decision would be, and gave an inside look into management’s collaboration with NALC leadership on the contract.
Our national leadership is not elected to collaborate with management. They are elected to fight, and to advocate for the rights and interests of NALC members. The Vote NO campaign showed that the members overwhelmingly reject Renfroe's approach, and put us on better footing to fight in the future through giving members valuable experience in organizing collective action. It is crystal clear that we must vote out Renfroe, and anyone else who sold out NALC members on this contract, in the 2026 national leadership elections, but “Anyone but Renfroe” is not enough. We cannot expect change to happen by just changing the national leadership alone. We call on NALC members to continue the process of building BFN chapters, discuss our material, build off of the experiences of the past year and a half, and prepare for the battles to come.
Join BFN April 6th 1pmEST/12pmCST/10amPST to talk about launching the Right to Strike campaign, and about entering our next phase of building BFN nationally. You can register for the meeting here.
Build a Fighting NALC Coordinating Committee
