Bad Mouth
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
So, yeah, that's one thing that they were promising was to get rid of that non-career workforce. So this TA comes out and after hearing that we're getting rid of the non-career significant raises, it's going to be historic for us. What they offered us was one point three percent.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. You'd think if you're making six figures a year, you could understand how to buy a used car and know that you promise low and deliver high. Like, I don't understand how making six figures a year, they haven't figured that out. But yeah. So in this contract, 1.3%.
Behind the Bastards
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And that's enough to piss anyone off because that drops about the same time that we all see the longshoremen going back to the table because they didn't get 60%. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm surprised more people just didn't call in sick because we all got this news on the workroom floor. And I was like, did you see this shit? I know people that quit that day. You know what I mean?
Behind the Bastards
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Like, yeah, it's wild. So one point three percent. They're keeping the city carrier assistance, the non-career workforce. They're removing some of our union protections. Right. Like it used to be you have a 12, 60 hour rule. You don't have to work more than 12 hours in a day or 60 hours in a week. You can say, I can't do this. I'm going home. And the union could protect you.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, if you are a CCA or if you have signed up to do overtime and they tell you to stay 16 hours, you have no choice.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I mean, it makes you think about, like, what was their first offer? Like, mind you, it's been over 500 days of negotiations. What was their first offer? We got to put the fuel in the mail trucks ourselves? Like, you know what I mean? Tom, do you want to talk about what the tentative agreement doesn't address? So...
Behind the Bastards
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It's been, it's up to four 99, but the rain trench coat, just the rain coat is $465 and you have to get it through a vendor. So you can't even pay them money to do that. Like a pair of polyester pants is, That's going to fall apart in two months. Ninety five dollars. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. No, it's it's wild. It's wild price gouging. And they were going to address that.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And what they did was they increased our they increased our uniform allowance by thirty five dollars. Right. Which is like three pairs of socks from those magazines.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Get, get the new Jack in your office, a fucking raincoat. Cause like I tried to do the math on it for winter gear, for a place like Minnesota to get all the winter gear and your summer gear, it's going to take you four years of uniform allowances to get all that gear, right? It's ridiculous.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, no, exactly. And God forbid you want to buy a pair of shorts as well, because Minnesota summers get over 100 heat index.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
One of the other things that Tom touched on that this agreement doesn't address is he talked about the noncompliance and the grievance backlog, but also just the toxic work environment, which we've talked about. And it's so bad. The whole reason we have the trope. of someone going postal is usually because someone's bullied to a point where violence occurs.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
They either take it out on management or my own manager in my first year got in a fist fight with one of the clerks. Jesus Christ. The post office has lost grievances because management was threatening to shoot an employee. Any letter carrier would have been fired for that immediately. That manager got a letter of warning.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Yeah, and then there's a bunch of wage theft too. Me personally, I caught my own manager putting in all the CCAs for two-hour lunches because the CCAs are new and don't know what they're doing and they don't know to check their time all the time. Putting us all in for two-hour lunches and then told me, tried to pretend to me, oh, that was just an automatic computer error.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Whereas if we take a 31-minute lunch... I have my phone blowing up being asked why I'm not moving and delivering the mail. But you guys managed to accidentally miss a two-hour line. Come on. Don't lie. You don't got to lie to be my friend. Like, come on. And then there's other places around the country where the NLC has won grievances where management was –
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
making CCAs work in the dark, delivering mail till like 7 30 PM and clocking them out at four o'clock in the afternoon. All right. So they got people out there working for free. It's it's, and we have to catch it. We have to catch them doing that. Yeah. They're never going to own up to it. They all watch their payroll, the management structure at, at the post office.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
It's like the Teemu version of Game of Thrones. They're all nasty. They're all backstabbing each other. And like the nastier you are and the more willing you are to screw people, the higher up you go in management at the post office. Like it's it's disgusting.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you do not fuck with the male cops, but the male cops, the postal inspectors work for management. Yeah. So, yeah. And yeah. Management does nothing but sit in their chair all day, sniffing their own farts, watching TikToks, and trying to figure out how to screw people through the virtue of spreadsheets while we are all out working our asses off.
Behind the Bastards
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It's a very demoralizing and abusive situation. So we were hoping that shit would get addressed in the tentative agreement, and none of it was. So there was all sorts of problems with that. I'm with Building and Fighting NALC, and we are a basically a bottom up, more of a radical reform caucus.
Behind the Bastards
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I am out of Fort Worth, but like it started in Minneapolis and you got people in Chicago and New York and Naples, Florida and San Antonio, Hawaii, all over the country where basically we are tired of. Aha. We are tired of our leadership being in bed with management or at least doing things where they look like they're in bed with management.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
We've been putting on vote no rallies all over the country. You've probably seen some on the news. This is vote no for the tentative.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so we've been trying to get letter carriers to vote no on it. So we've been doing the vote no campaign so we can vote this shit down and get it in front of a judge. Because once it goes into arbitration, there's a lot of fear-mongering things. Oh, we could lose this. Oh, we could lose that. Oh, we could lose this. But like, Mia, you said it yourself. These are all concessions.
Behind the Bastards
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We're not getting anything for giving up all these things. 1.3% is what we're getting. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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It's a joke like that in and of itself would be a major concession to get something else. But we're doing all these concessions to get that.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. So the thing is, the Postal Reform Act says that we are supposed to get paid comparatively to a comparable company in the private sector. So an arbiter is going to look at that and try and look at UPS.
Behind the Bastards
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UPS or Amazon and the post office is really trying to push it towards Amazon, which is why I try to talk to every letter carrier I know to support and get some cross craft solidarity with Amazon because without going on too much of a rabbit trail, the whole, you know, a rising tide lifts all ships. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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And and one union in another industry helps everyone in every other industry and trying to get people to understand that. But like you compare our contract to UPS. Yeah. And UPS, they top out with I think their their benefits package tops out one hundred twenty four thousand a year. And it's about five or eight years to reach top scale.
Behind the Bastards
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Ours tops out with this tentative agreement at ninety three thousand a year. And it still takes us 13 years to get to top step. Screw. Christ, that's not comparable, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, not at all. So I'm not afraid of arbitration. I'm hoping we get this in front of an arbiter because unless that arbiter is completely crooked, I can't see him saying, well, you guys deserve 1.3%.
Behind the Bastards
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I try to sneak in as many anarchist shit without saying I'm an anarchist. I try and sneak as much of that shit in as I can. I get old heads who have a Trump hat on talking about anarchist talking points. It's funny as fuck to me.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I think I think the arbitration, there's a whole lot of fear mongering and shit. I think anyone paying attention to things, we can't get a worse deal is the main point there. And that's that's the whole point of the vote. No campaign is to just tell people, hey, dude, we might as well go down swinging like we're not going to get a worse deal than this.
Behind the Bastards
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But that's that's pretty much it for arbitration.
Behind the Bastards
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I am not a founding father, Stan, but the post office was actually invented by Benjamin Franklin, who I don't believe owned any slaves. And yeah, he was really racist. But yeah, I mean, like I know I know that I know that part. I just I don't think he actually owned anybody. But like that's it's a yeah. Yeah. And it was started, I think, 15 years before the Constitution was even written.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, I was trying to give the racist bastard a little bit of a win.
Behind the Bastards
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I take back my critical support. I take back my critical support. Uncritical opposition to Ben Franklin's slave-owning ass.
Behind the Bastards
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To hell with Ben Franklin, too. But yeah, we're coming in as Trump administration and stuff. And let me tell you that the situation wasn't really great under Biden either, because we have a postmaster, Louis Dickhead DeJoy. He was put into place by Donald Trump. And you've seen they wanted to slow walk the post office into privatization since the Reagan years. Right. And they're just slow.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
slowly chipping away at service and quality. DeJoy was connected to XPO, the giant logistics company. He had stock and I can't remember what position he held. He apparently detangled himself from that when he became postmaster. But, you know, they all say that. I don't know for sure. I am not an accountant, so I can't do that.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so, like, Detroit's also got a reputation as just being a massive job killer, besides looking like a low-rent Spider-Man villain. So, under his tenure, we've seen service quality take a nosedive, and I want to talk about this stuff, and this might get my ass in trouble, but, like,
Behind the Bastards
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I am tired as a letter carrier who loves my job, loves saying hi to people in the neighborhood, loves walking through yards and knowing the names of all the dogs on my route and being the face of the post office. It is so frustrating to have people blame the mailman and the letter carrier for the decline in service because we are out there being brutalized by the post office.
Behind the Bastards
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doing our best and fighting against the degradation of service that is a top-down problem with leadership in the post office. I wanted to outline some of the stuff that I have evidence of and have seen firsthand of management undercutting the service of The post office, they willfully delay the mail all the time. Jesus Christ. There's pictures of racks and racks of DPS.
Behind the Bastards
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It's the sorted letters and they come in trays just sitting in a warehouse somewhere. And management, they will order you on a regular basis to prioritize delivering packages over the mail. If it's a big, heavy day and they're looking at labor hours, they will sometimes tell you to not deliver the mail and just deliver the packages because the packages have a tracking number.
Behind the Bastards
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And their boss can get it. They can get in trouble for that. But they can lie and hide the mail for another day. Like that shit happens all the time.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Also, your junk mail. Have you ever have you ever ordered something and it says it was delivered, but you didn't get it and then it shows up the next day? Or it says that, oh, there's a vacation hold. I didn't put this on hold. And then it shows up the next day or you got to go down to the post office to get it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Yeah. Well, I mean, the severe weather delay can happen. But what I'm talking about is ones where the package didn't make it to the letter carrier who's out there delivering. Because this has happened to me multiple times.
Behind the Bastards
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And it didn't make it to me before I left the station, but because they want to make their numbers look good for their boss, they will scan it at the station as if it was delivered or as if it's a... Jesus Christ. Yeah, because they want their numbers to look good because their entire job is life on a spreadsheet. And so then I have to talk to my customers the following day.
Behind the Bastards
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They're like, it says it's delivered. I saw you, and you didn't drop it off. I was worried someone stole it. What happened? I was like, I know exactly what happened. I know what their name is. That's some of the service degradation. We've had people in other areas, catch management, throwing away mail. Jesus Christ. Oh, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Management reprimanded carriers who follow the manual and provide good customer service. I've been on the phone where I've had my manager call me because I was standing in one place for five minutes because I was helping an elderly woman
Behind the Bastards
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move her garbage cans and helped her get some groceries out of her car to bring in you know all the stuff that you see the good mailman the reason why people love the post office shit like that yeah i got told no you're not doing that and i had another customer come up to say hi to me
Behind the Bastards
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While I was on the phone and I just stopped to just say hi as I'm walking by and my manager chewed me out for even talking to the person. They don't care about us. And they throw us under the bus all the time because if I don't deliver a package because they never made it to me and it says delivered, the customer will come and complain at the post office.
Behind the Bastards
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Management will tell them, oh, I'll talk to the carrier. That carrier made a mistake. And it's no. Carriers do make mistakes, but like this intentional degradation of service to make the numbers that blame always goes on the letter carrier. And it is I we love our job. We love our jobs. We love our communities. We I got like I might start crying if I talk about this too much.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Like I love bringing treats to dogs. Like, I get Christmas cards from old folk on my route. Like, I know when people's birthdays are. And I had an old timer on my route, sat outside to say hi to me every day. Suddenly, he wasn't. And his wife was out in the garden. And I said, where is he? Oh, he passed last night. And she starts crying, and I start crying.
Behind the Bastards
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And, like, I get in trouble for taking five minutes to give her a hug and talk things through for a second. Like, it's...
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so you have DeJoy. He's doing that. And we have all of these. They're starting to – some of the stuff they're building, I think they're called SDNCs. It's basically they take a bunch of post offices from a metro area, and then they make one big distribution hub like Amazon. Well, that is adding an hour commute onto some of these letter carriers.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
They come in, they get to their mail truck, and then they have to drive their mail truck for an hour to even start delivering. Right. It's a huge mess and it's a huge fiasco and it feels very intentional because what's going to happen when they close those facilities built by the government down and it starts to privatize? Well, what do you know?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Amazon just got a new hub or whoever ends up trying to step in. That's a little conspiracy brain, but like certain fiascos done by DeJoy's Delivering for America plan seem tailor made to to fail for the post office, but work for someone else.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And then also you have Brian Renfro, who is the current president of the NALC, the one who was telling us that our tentative agreement was going to be historic when all it does is help management. He has gone on speaking tours lying about this tentative agreement, and everything he says sounds like management gave him a script.
Behind the Bastards
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And there's a whole lot of theories on that and how when he loses his position, people have running bets on what position he's going to take in the post office the second he's voted out. Yep, yep, yep. He's the one who's negotiated this whole contract. He used his position as president. He iced out everyone from the union. He's the only one who talked to the post office.
Behind the Bastards
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So this tentative agreement is his baby. Wait, what? Yep. The executive council. What? Yeah, he didn't tell the executive council. Wait, you didn't have like a bargaining team? No, but he had a bargaining team that were all of outside contractors. He had no one from the union with him. What? Yeah, because he wanted it to be his baby.
Behind the Bastards
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Oh my God. Oh yeah. No. And the thing is we're coming up on 600 days without a con without a ratified contract. Like he has been the only one doing it this whole time. And there was a bunch of shady shit. Okay. So he's struggled with alcoholism. I have dealt with addiction. I have lost friends to addiction. I have family members struggle with addiction.
Behind the Bastards
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I respect anybody who is going to take care of themselves. but he disappeared for something like 50 days or something. Didn't tell anybody. He ghosted everybody. He ghosted everybody. And this is the early days of negotiation. People stepped in to start negotiating with, Without him, it turns out he had gone and checked himself into rehab.
Behind the Bastards
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But the thing is, the NALC has two fucking vice presidents. I have all the respect in the world for someone to take care of themselves. But when you got 277,000 employees livelihood. Yeah. You're responsible for, and you got, I don't care if you got cancer, if you got an addiction problem, or I don't care what it is, if you got to step away to take care of yourself, please do that.
Behind the Bastards
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But put your vice, one of your two fucking vice presidents in charge. So what happens is someone steps in while he's gone, he comes back, gets mad at them, strips them of their responsibilities, blackballs them from the union, and goes back into negotiations all by himself. Which is why... Getting to the next point on this, at the most generous, he is inept as hell.
Behind the Bastards
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He is inept as hell and just the worst sort of person to be in there. At the worst, he is corrupt as hell and just DeJoy's stooge. And the thing is, we work for the federal government. Whether it's malice or incompetence with the federal government, it's usually both. And it doesn't matter which one it is to me, whether he's corrupt or just an idiot.
Behind the Bastards
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It's all the same to me because I can't make my fucking rent. So we expect DeJoy and the post office to do us dirty. That's their job as management. But to have the president of our own union doing this to us is unacceptable. And like it's. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I guess, I mean, like, the main objective we want to do, I'm sure we're running out of time. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I could talk about this shit for days. I mean, I do. That's pretty much all I do anymore.
Behind the Bastards
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But like Tom was saying, the building and fighting ALC and pushing for the vote no thing, the main thing that we're wanting is coming on to shows like this and getting the public perception of what the letter carrier deals with. what's going on. Because as Trump's coming in, they're going to be trying to privatize it like they always do. That's already been in the works.
Behind the Bastards
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It's important that the public knows this degradation of service is the point of it. And how can the public sort of support our fight so we can keep the post office? So I wanted to just share a couple of links. If you're a letter carrier and you want to get involved, with reforming things from an electoral end. There's the concerned letter carriers, and you can go to concernedlettercarriers.com.
Behind the Bastards
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They're going to be running in 2026 to get rid of Renfro. If you are impatient like me and you can't fucking wait that long, and even if you're not a letter carrier, you can see how we're fighting with the building of fighting NALC, which is more of a radical bottom-up Reform Caucus.
Behind the Bastards
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If you want to get involved in that or you just want to kind of get updates from people who aren't going to bullshit you, you can go to FightingNALC.com to check that out. Oh, Tom, did you want to talk about the NALC Legislative Action Center?
Behind the Bastards
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There's one more plug I wanted to make because all the fire's out in L.A. right now because you have letter carriers where the post office burned down and so did their house. And now they're reporting to duty at another post office 20 minutes away to go and deliver mail to a devastated neighborhood. Because the thing is, when shit happens, whether it's a hurricane or a fire or, you know,
Behind the Bastards
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The first people who show up are your neighbors or the punks or the punks and mutual aid and your neighbors show up. The first person you see from the government, we're federal employees, we're not federales, but the first hint of normalcy that a lot of people get is,
Behind the Bastards
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trying to just hide out and be safe and then they see their mailman walking through their fucking lawn trying to deliver to their shit you know what i mean like that's important and we all love what we do we love being a part of the community and we love helping and Sorry, I knew I was going to cry at some fucking point. OK, so the NALC is a NALC disaster relief fund. The public can donate to it.
Behind the Bastards
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It's usually letter carriers. We all donate to it. And what happens is if your house burns down like in L.A. right now or if like you were devastated in the fires in Hawaii or whatever, when that happens, a letter carrier can apply to
Behind the Bastards
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And as soon as they're approved, which can happen within a day or two, they automatically get sent like $1,000 from the fund to just pay for their hotel or pay for their rent-a-car, and then they get approved. It's not a fix-all, but they'll get like...
Behind the Bastards
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they'll get another check after a little bit to help with some of their damages after they make their claim that's something that normally just it's just letter carriers giving to letter carriers so we can all take care of each other but like the public is allowed to donate to that too i know there's a lot of you guys have already been talking about a lot of mutual aid stuff at the beginning of your episodes lately i just want to plug that one is a mailman specific one yeah i'm sorry for crying no no yeah i mean it's it's emotional it's it's yeah this shit sucks bro
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, the thing with the post office is, Tom was mentioning, they dangle the carrot, but there's never any goddamn carrot. It's all stick. It's supposed to be carrot and stick. It's all stick. There's no carrot there. Management in the post office is just trying to get you to move as fast as possible and cut corners. And that erodes safety. It erodes service.
Behind the Bastards
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And it's just a toxic, horrible, horrible environment. And so back in the 70s, before the wildcat strike, it was illegal then, just like it's illegal now. The NALC, National Association of Letter Carriers, Congress called all the shots. Like we had some collective bargaining rights, but not full collective bargaining rights.
Behind the Bastards
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But like back then, adjusted for inflation, starting wage was $50,000 a year, roundabout. And it topped out at about $68,000 adjusted for inflation. And that took 21 years to get to that point. Jesus. Yeah. So it's pretty wild. And like very similar to today, now starting wage adjusted for inflation is just over $40,000 before taxes.
Behind the Bastards
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So we're making even less money now than we were before that wildcat strike, right? And a couple other real familiar things like, you know, unpopular wars, rampant inflation. You know, every time you turn on the radio or TV, there's some lunatic politician that you can't stand hearing about. Time is a flat circle.
Behind the Bastards
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But Vince Sobrato, who was an organizer out of New York City, the NLC didn't strike all over the country. It was New York and Chicago and San Francisco. It was some major hubs. Right. And Vince Sobrato came out of that. And we won in that strike one collective bargaining rights. Now, the thing we gave up and it was a tradeoff. So we have a no layoff clause. So they can't lay us off.
Behind the Bastards
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But we gave up the right to strike, making sure that there wouldn't be another wildcat strike.
Behind the Bastards
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Right. So that's kind of why our hands are tied in that sense. And now if we have an impasse with our with our negotiation and like we get a tentative agreement and we during the ratification process vote that down, now we can either try and go back to the bargaining table. Or it gets brought in front of an arbiter, basically an impartial judge, and they'll have a panel.
Behind the Bastards
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The post office will pick two and the NALC will pick two. And then I think there's one impartial that's supposed to be impartial between that. I believe that's how the arbitration process works. We got to prove our case in front of impartial arbiters instead of going on strike.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, a lot of a lot of them are still dealing with like most of us are the hangover from the Reagan years. Yeah. Right. So they're all terrified of union stuff, even though they love the union and they're in the union. They're very distrustful of it. And they don't think that we can ask for what we deserve.
Behind the Bastards
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They think we need to ask for what they think we can get based on the shit that management is saying, because they're, again, still shell shocked from the Reagan years and all the anti-labor stuff.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, yeah. So it's been, I think we're coming up on 600 days since our last contract expired. Jeez. Yeah, yeah. There's people that just want their back pay. So even if the back pay is dog shit... They're desperate because inflation is 8 percent across the country in some places. Right. And like people are just desperate for that chunk of money. That delaying process feels very, very intentional.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. So the tentative agreement comes out around 500 days after negotiations were supposed to have started. And there was all sorts of nonsense going on during then. But we're getting promises like it's going to be a historic agreement. We're going to get significant raises. We're going to go to an all-career workforce, which, by the way, we don't have right now.
Behind the Bastards
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Can you explain what that is, by the way? Yeah. Okay. So in every other trade, you have an apprenticeship program, right? So when you get on the job, you're wet behind the ears, you're brand new, you are automatically career. You are automatically paying into your retirement. You're automatically... getting the regular benefits everyone else is.
Behind the Bastards
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In most trades, you're paying half the dues that the journeymen are paying and you are considered a full employee. You're the new Jack, you're getting all the shit jobs, but you are a full employee.
Behind the Bastards
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The post office has a position called the city carrier assistant, which on paper and how they'll tell you sounds like an apprenticeship program, but it's really more like they took an apprenticeship program and an unpaid internship and jammed them together. Because these kids are coming in, and not even kids. I'm 40 years old. I started as a CCA at 40 years old.
Behind the Bastards
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They're coming in making less than $20 an hour. They're not considered a career, so they're not paying into their retirement. You don't got all the same union protections. Your benefits are super low. You get five days of annual leave a year and no sick time. Yeah, it's a meat grinder.
Behind the Bastards
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So that was a big thing, and it creates a whole third tier because we already have two different tiered wage system, which sucks enough. And anyone that pays attention to labor, that drives a huge wedge between workers, and it crushes solidarity. It kneecaps a union. And now with the CCA position in this non-career workforce, it's created a whole third tier.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, exactly. And it's because they've adopted sort of this Amazon model of doing things where they just have this burn and churn situation where like Amazon, what is it? Bezos said that he doesn't want anyone working for Amazon for more than like two years.
Behind the Bastards
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If they have these people constantly and they're constantly burning through them and they never have to pay full benefits, they never have to pay into their retirement. They never have to pay them more than $20 an hour. And they can just get you to work your ass off and burn out and quit within two years. As people retire, their labor costs go down. It's evil.
Behind the Bastards
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It's absolutely, it's some Jack Welch hateful, hateful bullshit.