Mail carriers rally in Chicago to demand better pay, improved security
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Letter carriers for the United States Postal Service are upset that they have been without a new contract for over 500 days, and on Monday, a group of postal workers gathered in Chicago to talk about the money and the safety they feel they are owed.
There are over 200,000 letter carriers in American cities waiting for their union and USPS to hammer out a deal.
Where things stand exactly is being kept behind closed doors, but letter carriers want action on a number of items they say are long overdue, and on Monday dozens took to Federal Plaza in the Loop to voice them outside the Clark Street post office in the Loop.
Among the issues they want addressed: the addition of maternity time, the removal of forced overtime, more money for uniforms, and salary increases.
Letter carriers seek pay in line with counterparts at UPS
The letter carriers said they are grossly underpaid, despite helping keep the country afloat during the pandemic. The starting pay is about $19 per hour, and the pay ceiling is about $36 per hour, or about $10 lower than UPS drivers will get with their next deal.
"The starting pay of $19.33 is way too low. That's McDonald's wages. It's not attracting a lot of people to want the job," said Michael Caref, national business agent for the Illinois region of the National Association of Letter Carriers, the union for city letter carriers.
There is also the matter of carrier safety. Carriers want some sort of expansion of postal police to keep them safe, pointing to the shooting death of postal worker Octavia Redmond on July 19.
"That date changed everybody," Logan Square letter carrier Tyrone Valdez said. "Any kind of form of protection from the Postal Service – even body cams. Give us something. We have a postal police force that only – believe it or not – they're there to protect the buildings, not the carriers. That's kind of disheartening to us."
Valdez delivers mail in Logan Square. He's done it through the pandemic, and through safety scares, but he said he and his colleagues are through with the waiting.
"We have always been told its coming soon, Not soon enough," Valdez said. "We keep getting told that we'll have results soon, but it's just not good enough,"
The letter carriers' union wants their pay to fall more in line with the pay for UPS workers, but they have no idea how close they are to finalizing a contract, and that lack of clarity was part of the reason for Monday's rally – to spur some action and get a new deal done.
Other than more pay, what do letter carriers want in their new contract?
"The ask would be we have about 50 zip codes, about stations in Chicago, for example. We'd like them to hire 50 police officers in Chicago" for high-risk zip codes, Caref said.
"We want to go about our appointed rounds safely and come home to our families, and the postal service owes us that in our working conditions, and something needs to be done," said Elise Foster, president of NALC Branch 11.
Frontline workers and even union leaders on the ground said they aren't looped into what's on the table and where things stand with negotiations, more than 500 days into contract talks.
"We don't know, and that's kind of one of the reasons we are out here rallying. We want to bring some attention to the situation, try to get it moving along a little bit," Caref said.
In a statement, the Postal Service said, "We are executing on strategies to pull together the people, technology, transportation, equipment, and facilities into a well-integrated and streamlined mail and package network."
The contract negotiations come as postal workers are under added scrutiny as mail-in balloting has begun in much of the country, and former President Donald Trump has questioned the reliability of election mail, despite no evidence of any problems.
If a deal isn't reached soon, the two sides are expected to move to arbitration.
