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Postal service workers held rallies in over 200 cities across the US to protest Trump administration threats to dismantle USPS

By Natalia Marques, peoples dispatch

In its continued attack against social services and workers, the Trump administration has set its sights on the United States Postal Service (USPS). Amid growing threats to the USPS, workers organized with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) staged rallies across the country in defense of their livelihoods and the essential national service.

On March 23, postal workers rallied in Waco, Texas to Rochester, New York, holding signs that read “Fight like hell” and “Hell no to privatization!”

Workers with NALC in Silver Spring, Maryland. Photo: NALC

Privatization of the postal service?

On February 21, Trump proposed a merger between the USPS and the Commerce Department. “We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money,” the President said. “We’re thinking about doing that. And it’ll be a form of a merger, but it’ll remain the Postal Service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better.”

Elon Musk, top Trump adviser and world’s richest man, who leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which is leading the charge on federal spending cuts and privatization efforts, reportedly said outright during a conference earlier in March, “I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized. I think we should privatize the Post Office and Amtrak for example… We should privatize everything we possibly can.”

Earlier in March, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told Congress that USPS planned to cut over 10,000 jobs from the postal service, working in coordination with Musk’s DOGE, which has already launched major attacks against federal workers. DeJoy abruptly resigned from his post on March 24.

NALC President Brian L. Renfroe responded to DeJoy’s letter to Congress. “Postmaster General DeJoy laid out some of the ‘big problems’ DOGE could assist with. Some of these are issues we have been actively engaged in and advocating for years. These include USPS’s misallocated pension liabilities, which have cost the agency tens of billions of dollars, and a new investment strategy for USPS’s three retirement funds, which are currently held in Treasury bonds, missing out on hundreds of millions in annual returns.”

According to Renfroe, “these policy changes are needed to improve the Postal Service’s financial viability, and we welcome anyone’s help who can influence Congress and the Administration to finally enact them.”

“If DOGE wants to improve the Postal Service’s finances, the above actions will do just that. Misguided ideas like privatization will not.”

640,000 workers are employed by the USPS directly, while almost eight million people hold jobs attached in some way to the postal service.

People over profits

NALC President Brian L. Renfroe spoke at a rally in Los Angeles about the essential service that postal workers provide to people in the US. Renfroe outlined that plans to privatize the USPS are an attack on “51.5 million people that live in rural areas.”

“A privatized postal service, they’d deliver where it was profitable,” Renfroe said. “But they wouldn’t deliver where it’s not profitable. And we deliver everyday, no matter where someone is, for the same price.”

Privatizing the postal service would have massive effects that would reverberate throughout the US economy and for the millions whose jobs are connected to USPS. A report by Monique Morrissey for the Economic Policy Institute detailed how the postal service is a top employer for Black people and provides one of the best job opportunities available to those without Bachelor’s degrees.

“As is typical of jobs in the public sector, which are positions of trust that often require significant training,” Morrisey writes. “The pay of rank-and-file postal workers is better than the pay of many private-sector jobs that do not require a four-year college (bachelor’s) degree.” Additionally, nearly one in four postal workers is Black, which is double the share of Black people employed in the private sector, which Morrisey writes is “the result of a hard-fought battle by Black activists and unions for employment and pay parity dating back to the early days of the Postal Service.”

The National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRCLA), which represents USPS’s over 130,000 rural letter carriers, is set to join the movement of postal workers against privatization with a rally at Capitol Hill on Tuesday, March 25.

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