Tommy Espinoza
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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Right. So in terms of grievances within the union and our negotiation, a lot of it does have to do with the aforementioned workers' compensation. Employees are just simply not getting paid. I think the biggest problem with the union and the grievance procedure today is that management has figured out this really effective strategy.
Behind the Bastards
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If they don't settle on the lower levels and it gets pushed up to arbitration, then we have a massive backlog of cases happening. a pending arbitration, which could be scheduled years out.
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I think if you do the math for our current rate of handling these cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around 15 years to get through them all.
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Yeah, yeah. That's like when you go to a restaurant and there's that little stanchion out there that says it's a five-hour wait from this point. That's the point that we're at. Anything beyond today will be further along. Jesus Christ. And so I think that is just a major problem for us, clearly. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Management just not complying with any of this, and it makes it so that our employees have to wait. Something I do want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure, if we can, is just what's going on with the post office and the postmaster general.
Behind the Bastards
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All right, so... I want to go at this from the customer perspective first, because I think that's the best way to relate to people. I think by and large, people are losing faith in the post office. Either you have no idea what's going on or you don't care. And that's fine. I'd say before I joined, I didn't think of them at all.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, they're just the guy that shows up at my house every morning. A lot of people seem to think that the post office is going out of business. And our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service that is getting worse. People are paying more for worse service.
Behind the Bastards
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And it's easy to point out those issues from the outside and be rightfully upset at them. I do feel like we're doing a disservice to our customers. our customers, and I'm really not trying to attack them when I say that they're uninformed or clueless to the inner workings of the post office.
Behind the Bastards
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I do directly want to attack Congress and say that when they had pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in 2006, which required the post office to pre-fund 100% of its retiree health benefits and liabilities 75 years into the future. What? So overnight, the post office was handed a $5.5 billion burden.
Behind the Bastards
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And that's where the whole, I don't know if you remember, I certainly wasn't conscious of it at the time, the Save Our Post Office stickers that were being sold and trying to fund the post office. And really, that's where the rhetoric of the post office is going under comes from. The other thing I want to point out is that we are quasi-federal. We actually accept nothing from taxpayer monies.
Behind the Bastards
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It says it's a service, but really the post office is ran as a business. We don't even get... because they don't need to. My local union president loves to remind us that the post office is a business that has a revenue of $78.2 billion. And he'll want me to stress that the 0.2 is extremely important because 0.2 of a billion is 20 million. They are not in jeopardy.
Behind the Bastards
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We are not going out of business. And the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, He's the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath the president of the United States.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I think it was like $380,000 a year or something like that. DeJoy was appointed by Donald Trump. I'm assuming this is kind of a baseless assumption, so forgive me on not doing my research here, but I'm assuming that they're buddies because DeJoy has no idea.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so there's been a lot about DeJoy defrauding the election process. I wasn't part of the post office to see the inner workings of it, so it's kind of hard for me to say if it was hearsay or not. But I believe it, because DeJoy has no idea how to run a post office. He's never... been involved with this kind of business. He is in the same way that Trump is a businessman, a horrible businessman.
Behind the Bastards
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And his Delivering for America plan could really be redefined as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing is they're consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing post offices in order to save money and shoving three installations into one building. That's why... That's why the lines are getting longer.
Behind the Bastards
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It also means that from dispatch, the employees have to drive an extra mile or two into their working zone, which of course means that we're going to go into overtime. And this just throws a wrench in the mail handling process. He has single-handedly made the service a lot more reliable. And I do think that you're right. Unreliable. Yeah, sorry, more unreliable. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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And I do think that you're right. He wants to destroy the post office, not only for the election, but to the point where it makes more sense to go private. Now is the time to point out that DeJoy is a major shareholder in FedEx, which is a subcontractor for the USPS. And he has millions of dollars in equity involved. He's got skin in the game.
Behind the Bastards
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And so on the local level, on what's going on in my office, I actually have one of the better offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been sent to other offices and I have experienced firsthand the bullying and harassment from management pushing us to go faster. But even at one of the better offices, I work 60-hour weeks. I don't have set days off. It's not even a rotation.
Behind the Bastards
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When I get home, I'm spent, and my commute isn't that bad. I think I'm about 15 minutes each way. I really can't imagine driving two hours after an 11-hour shift just to eat and come back and do it again.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it would be illegal, but since it's in the contract, it's not illegal.
Behind the Bastards
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So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the post office... Well, I guess I should explain. When you join as a letter carrier, the first 90 days, they can fire you for any reason and... You're something called either a CCA or a PTF, and that means part-time flexible or city carrier assistant. You are only guaranteed four hours for showing up for work.
Behind the Bastards
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You're not guaranteed to be scheduled. So if they don't like you, they just will schedule you once a week for an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if you're in a busy place, then that just means that they're going to work you to death. So when you join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family, you lose time with your loved ones and your friends.
Behind the Bastards
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And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk about it, I get asked the same thing. Why don't you quit? And the truth is, this job is awesome. I love it. I want to work it. I just want it to make sense and be livable. And I'm not going to give up just because... We haven't reached the point where it is.
Behind the Bastards
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If you walk away now, it doesn't get better. I'm sure someone would take my place, but it helps to have people stick around.
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Right. And so I try and hold that in mind when I've been overworked and I'm at the end of one of my major shifts because I had to carry part of another route because someone else called out. I really have to stop and think to myself that this other person who called out is just as exhausted as I am, is probably going to get a letter of warning for calling out. That's another issue.
Behind the Bastards
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They don't want you to use your leave. Jesus Christ. I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've been doing that a lot at my office as well. It reminds me a lot, our issues of your recent episode. I think it was you about the nurses union, the shift change episode. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Their members are dealing with a lot of the same things where the unions are so big that they become detached from the membership. And we are finding out afterwards what our bargaining agreements are, what our strategy was. Everything's after the contract has been signed. And that's just not how unions were meant to be. They're meant to be from the bottom up, by the workers, for the workers.
Behind the Bastards
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But it really does feel like national is its own entity. And so I guess that would bring us to talking about the union and the future of the union.
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So I got to be careful here because Brian Renfro, he's our national leader of the union. He's been struggling with problems in his personal life. And I don't feel like I'm ousting him as it's public knowledge, at least within the post office, it's public knowledge. He's dealing with substance abuse, with alcoholism. And that's something that hits very close to home within my family and
Behind the Bastards
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And I really don't want to demonize that he's struggling. But what I do want to say is when you're going through something like that and you've accepted a position on the national level like this, you really need to either step down or appoint someone to handle things in your place. As negotiations started over a year ago, he kind of went missing.
Behind the Bastards
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And it was later revealed that he was an inpatient, which is fine. Get your help. But there was nothing left, no notes left for us to strategize with. And our membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the leadership has gone missing. It's very dark times for the NALC.
Behind the Bastards
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Well, yeah, that's kind of the funny thing about joining a union from an anarchist perspective. It gets a little funky how hierarchical they typically are and the problems that we know we are going to face when you have a system that's built like a pyramid. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so I was saying we're in dark times, but there's such a bright future that I can see for us.
Behind the Bastards
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Branch 9 of the NALC, and namely this individual, Tyler Vassar, who when I had originally posted on Reddit asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would be great for this interview. His branch, Branch 9, has passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for contract negotiations and I hope this sweeps the nation. We're not allowed to strike, as I've mentioned,
Behind the Bastards
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And our leadership is so shy when it comes to activism or mobilization of the workforce. They don't want to touch the topic. The closest thing we have to it is a rally that is Enough is Enough that's being held in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to postal workers. We're being robbed and we're being harassed. But even then, we're...
Behind the Bastards
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missing a large chunk of the danger that is posed to postal workers. Because yes, we're being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied and harassed inside of our workplaces by management, by the people who are supposed to empower us to do the job effectively. And so... They don't want to touch the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation.
Behind the Bastards
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Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for giving us the mail carriers a platform to stand on.
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But to me, pushing for the right to strike is a... I'm not sure how to word this. It is such an important part of the NALC's identity, the postal strike of 1970, that it seems silly to ignore it today and pretend like it didn't happen. Yeah. So for the future, I think that activism is our key to success.
Behind the Bastards
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I think that the old heads that lead our union come from a time where unions were frowned upon, where activism was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion will be largely in our favor and that public opinion can really put pressure on the legislative branch, on Congress, and on
Behind the Bastards
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If we are transparent about our union, what we're asking for, the issues that we're facing, I think that the public would be on our side. If the people in America knew that management was falsifying time records or training records and interfering with workers' comps claim and back pay,
Behind the Bastards
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or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay, that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions, big or small, that they would care and that they would join us in the streets. One major thing that happened, I think it was last year in the summer, We had a letter carrier. His name is Eugene Gates, who died in the Texas heat. Jesus, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Because management told him not to take as many breaks or he would face discipline. Jesus. These pressures that we face when you're threatened that you will lose your job if you don't listen to us, you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion and further.
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I think that the post office killed Mr. Gates. And there wasn't as much outcry or anger behind the movement. I often find myself thinking that while I don't have the answers, I do know that we need to care more. Yeah. And it's hard to care when you're exhausted. I acknowledge that.
Behind the Bastards
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Right. And one of the strategies that I really want to push forward as I grow within the union, and don't get me wrong, I want to stay a steward. I think that educating our members and being part of the workforce is my place in the union. But what I want to push is for union solidarity. I want the NALC to hire organizers, specifically organizers, to try and get the public involved
Behind the Bastards
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mobilized and as well as the workforce so that we can put pressure on congress so that we can show our bargaining teams that we support them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms and yeah i think that having solidarity between unions and reaching out to the other movements in a time where union support is higher than ever is
Behind the Bastards
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such a clear path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason, because people are afraid to speak out against the post office. And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen with our current contract. But I do know that the fight never ends and that while we stand on the shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these giants by not giving up now.
Behind the Bastards
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And I'm a relatively new employee and steward. But I'm really walking in the footsteps of some warriors. The branch president I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard work over the years that I don't have to reinvent the wheel. None of us do. We just have to continue the struggle. Hmm.
Behind the Bastards
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In general, there is on the NALC site, which is just nalc.com, there is a section where you put in your address and it It'll give you the email addresses, the phone numbers for your representatives so that you can make some noise. Again, we're amazingly limited in what we can do, so there's not really anything that you can donate to to help us. including the Letter Carrier Political Fund.
Behind the Bastards
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But yeah, just pay attention to us. Maybe leave a bottle of water out in your front door. It says, for the postal worker. There's nothing better that you can do than talking about it. Word of mouth is the best advertisement.
Behind the Bastards
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I appreciate that. Yeah, I never imagined myself to become a federal employee. And it is just as bad as I imagined. Yeah. So I do want to shout out, actually, it's a little meta, I guess, but I do want to shout out some important episodes of It Could Happen Here that hit me very closely, if I can.
Behind the Bastards
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Because a lot of the people listening will be postal workers that have been pointed in this direction. Please... look at the Myanmar episodes, the Free Burma, the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that, Mia, I believe you've done the same work as James with Border Kindness. Those are two topics that I think y'all hit really well and that really touched me as a person.
Behind the Bastards
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Sometimes I'll re-listen to those episodes when I'm having a hard day just to remind myself that It's all the same. It's all the same fight.
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Yeah, exactly. So just fight the burnout and stay in the fight.
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Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic. I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people on our side of politics to be infighting a lot. It shouldn't come to a surprise. Yeah. So in 1969, just over 50 years ago, the salary for postal workers was under $2 an hour. People were working months straight with no days off. And those were close to 12 hour days.
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And so these postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided in 1970 to go on strike, despite it being illegal. This conversation is not new. It was illegal then. It's illegal now. And I do want to be crystal clear here. I am not advocating for a strike. That would also be against the law. And we don't advocate for anything that's against the law.
Behind the Bastards
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What I do want to advocate for is the right to strike, because... Being quasi-federal, there's a lot of limitations in what the NALC and the general postal unions are able to do. In total, there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the post office, some of which are the managers' unions, so take that as it is. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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On top of not being able to strike, none of our money that we collect as union dues can be used for lobbying purposes. So they can't support a single candidate or any of the parties involved. We have a separate fund for that with the NALC called the Letter Carriers Political Fund to try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there.
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And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back. We are... unable to organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued or labeled as a strike. And they're, I think, generally afraid of public opinion.
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And so talk about what happens when we push past all of these barriers and just do it anyways. Yeah. you know, in March, 1970, 210,000 postal workers defied law, defied the general leadership of the time. And it all started in New York where people clocked in and at nine o'clock, they just walked out. Um, soon, let's see, it was, uh,
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Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, the nation joined very shortly after once it broke the news that they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in the National Guard to try and deliver mail. The National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards. It's just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail and the
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An interviewer is asking him, do you think that you're doing a good job? He's just like, no, it's just some kid, you know? And don't get me wrong, I'm just some guy, but you need the training, you need to know what you're doing, and it's not something that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the first time, the mail had stopped.
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And that won us collective bargaining, binding arbitration, which is a process that I think most people within unions know what they mean. But to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance. And eventually we call in a third party, an arbitrator, to decide for us, and those are generally lawyers.
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On top of binding arbitration, it gave us a new pay scale and set in motion, I think, over... It's got to be hundreds of raises between the COLAs and the new pay table. It used to be 21 years for you to reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Yeah. So the post office was forced to reorganize and so was the union. This is where the American Postal Workers Union was born. And from this strike, we were able to settle on the national agreement. So there's the national agreement, which is our binding contract.
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There's the JCAM, which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual, which is what the post office and the union use as the interpretation of the contract. That way we are not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean. We can just focus on whether or not someone broke our agreement.
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So after this, one would imagine that a quasi-federal institution would honor the contract that was created, bargain in good faith, and treat their employees fairly.
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Yeah, absolutely not. Before we get into issues that we face today... I do want to say that one of the main goals of our contract negotiations or of this episode really is to create public knowledge of how our contract is not being adhered to. If there was one main goal that I'd have in mind is just to have the post office honor what they signed and agreed to do.
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Which just kind of circles back to one of the big issues that we face is that if we were to do that, that would be a willingful delay of mail. And we could be charged for it just for trying to enforce the contract. Yep.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, by and large, labor laws in America are set up in favor of the businesses, of the employers. If you're familiar with workers' comp or any of the systems involved in the Federal Employees Compensation Act, It's not enforced. We have cases that are pending arbitration where someone's been run over by a worker, has been run over by a postal vehicle while they were working. The post office...
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effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the damage done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes, we will pay this individual and the post office is liable to pay them. But now they are off the rolls, which means there's a greater period of time before this individual gets their money.
Behind the Bastards
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And there's a certain form that within the post office, the managers need to fill out. I you know, all these forms have some numbers associated with them, that they just refuse to fill out. And there's no recourse. There's no path for us to take to make them hurry or make them get this individual the money that they're owed.
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And some people, this doesn't ruin their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever. But I imagine for many, many working Americans, that's... That's their livelihood immediately down the drain.
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What this does is it means that before you go career, you're spending all this time, you're effectively a fully trained, full employee, completely capable person. of doing everything that's required of you. You're just not getting any of the career benefits, making a minimum wage. And on top of that, the way our benefits work is it does come out of your paycheck.
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It's not like other jobs where it might be a separate package or already calculated in, for instance, a lot of the trades, uh, They'll say, hey, you get 23 an hour, but the reality is you're making around 29 or 30 because you're not paying into your health insurance or your retirement or anything like that. You're effectively making less than minimum wage.
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You're almost paying to go to work as a CCA. And just to be yelled at and told that you're not going fast enough, even though there's no street standard. But that's getting into a little bit of nitpicky contract stuff about language. But yeah. Yeah.
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The tentative agreement, we spoke about the post office's strategy for dealing with our grievances or how to combat the union last episode. And so for the people that didn't listen to it or just need a refresher, the post office has found this extremely effective strategy that if they just don't agree at any point in our agreement,
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in our grievance procedure, which is if they violate the contract and we want to be made whole, whatever that may look like, they can just keep on saying no and push it up to arbitration because there is a grievance procedure that ends up with a third party intervening as well. And if they push enough of those grievances up,
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we have a major backlog on this process because our final resort is now just the standard of operation. And what that means is that there's nothing to force the post office to comply with the contract. If someone wasn't paid correctly or was missing a whole day of pay, got sent home or was put on emergency placement, which is
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a process where they they say you did something dangerous and so they can take you off the clock it could be months or even a year before your case is even looked at they do have a process of course where they try and prioritize it but it's obviously not working
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The other thing that the contract doesn't really touch on is our uniform situation, where the companies that make and manufacture the uniforms for our letter carriers, and actually for all the positions in the post office, are effectively trying to sell you a shirt for like $80. Oh, Jesus Christ.
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The most egregious one is like your winter parka is close to $400, and your allowance that you're given is, I think, $380. I don't know.
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I think it's, like, four out of five of the approved manufacturers or the distributors are owned by the same people. So, yeah.
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And a quick shout-out to any letter carriers that are listening to this. If you...
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don't use your entire allowance look out for the ccas look out for the pts the the non-career and the fresh faces on there if you don't use the entirety of your uniform allowance to the way that they view it is that they can give us less money so use all of it don't protest by not spending that money it's not even yours so spend it give it to someone do something you know
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, we have a joint statement on violence in the workplace, which I think you were about to get into of like, Yeah. They're just not complying. It's a very one-sided thing. Effectively, management has qualified immunity.
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So there's even more convoluted ways that the management finds to effectively steal from the employees. And one of them, huge problem, is changing the metrics on what a route looks like. And so they can alter the times of, hey, how long you were in the office packing your truck when you got back to the office and started unloading and cleaning. What?
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And so what they do is they make it look like the street time took you, let's call it five hours, and you were in the office for four hours.
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That way they can make a route look smaller than it actually is and have an excuse not to hire another person, which makes it so that this poor carrier who was assigned to this route now has a 10-hour day, 11-hour day, just by default on a light day, on a regular day. Jesus Christ.
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This is a really big problem for the rural carriers their contract is a little bit different Effectively they get paid by the job not necessarily hourly or that's the case for a lot of them And so if you're adjusting their times, they're gonna be paid out for an eight hour
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our day, but the route has just been stretched out through this method of just dishonest scanning and dishonest entries, and they get free labor. I'm not even well-versed on the RCA contract. That's a whole another... There's only nine unions that go into the post office, which means there's probably nine different contracts. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Yeah. So when I first saw bad mouth talking and what his posts were on Reddit and stuff like that, I got really excited because I remember when I was speaking to my local president and talking to the stewards in my area across like a couple of different stations. The kind of big question was, what do you do when the union breaks your heart?
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And I guess the answer is everything that Badmouth has just talked about. You build a better one. You remind people that there is an alternative, that everything started somewhere. And if you go to his first episode on the From A to Arbitration podcast, he has something called the CCA Corner where he's educating the newcomers, the fresh faces. He's just talking about horizontal power.
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And I was listening to that episode before we had spoken. I got so excited just to hear what this person was up to.
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To hell with Ben Franklin, too. I wonder why they didn't teach us that in school.
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Yeah, Tommy, you want to take that one? Yeah, so just going back to the 1970s, the working conditions for letter carriers were so bad that... Most of them couldn't afford the cost of living. They found themselves in a position where they are working for a quasi-federal position and are finding themselves on welfare, struggling just to find the means to get to work.
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So on that note, that's, uh, one of the big pushes for the union, uh, recently has been to reach open bargaining where the membership is actually a part of it. And that's what, uh, to my knowledge, it's one of the major issues that the building of fighting NILC or the building better union, uh, talks are going towards, um,
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It's a thing that should be the standard for all unions, but... Yeah, I mean, open bargaining is effectively the bottom-up structure of having your members or even the representatives put forward motions that are open to the public and open to the membership so that you can effectively ask for more or get a different variety of...
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opinions and strategies, you know, the duality of power kind of structure. But what the Post Office currently has, it's not open bargaining or what Postal Union has, it's not open bargaining. They have their own team that they send in. They don't talk to the membership.
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You kind of just elect your officials and then they come back with whatever they ended up with and they don't consult with any of their bottom line, which is problematic for obvious reasons, including this one where someone can go missing for 50 days and most of the membership has no idea.
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I've even talked to people, I think it was like two or three weeks ago, I went to a bar and I ran into a letter carrier from the next city over. I was like, oh, did you vote no? And he's like, what are you talking about? He doesn't know that there's a vote going on. The agreement is out there. Yeah, yeah. But yeah.
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Oftentimes having to work a second job, if they even have time for a second job, because the post office has and still is very good at skipping around a lot of labor laws. I think nowadays people probably work around 60-hour weeks. I think probably at a minimal around 50-hour weeks, especially around the holidays. And it's not just letter carriers. This is
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Yeah, so we touched briefly on it last episode. The NALC actually can't really use a lot of the money and funds from the union itself to lobby or to push Congress or anything like that. So there are separate organizations. There are facets of our organization that do that. You can find that at NALC.org.
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Specifically, they do have a link where you put in your zip code and it gives you the appropriate Congress member to write a letter to and really push them on that. what to do there. You can also donate to their fund if you see so fit and are able to do so.
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If I have one thing, it's just help your coworkers. You don't have to be a steward. You don't have to be anything. Just find someone you don't think deserves it. Help them too. I guarantee you that they do.
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People inside of the distribution centers, inside of the warehouses, things were not good. And on top of the actual working conditions themselves, the environment was incredibly toxic. There was a long history of abuse. You're dangling people's livelihood over their head, Gary. like holding a carrot over them, you know, and it really pushed people to an edge.
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You saw a lot of violence on the workroom floor, not only from supervisors, but from carriers that just snapped. Yeah, it was a time of great disparity.
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They won't. And my girlfriend thinks I've lost my mind.
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Right. So a tentative agreement is effectively the first draft. When you are going through and negotiating, you will reach a contract where management and the union kind of agree and they put it before their union members. And the idea is that your union members are able to vote on whether or not this tentative agreement passes.
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And again, like Adnav was saying, if it gets rejected or if it gets turned down, then it goes back to the drawing board or we get an arbitrator and it goes through a lengthy process. Our specific contract has been under negotiation since before I was in the post office. The amount of back pay that they're going to have to pay on some of these races is kind of insane.
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And I imagine that a lot of people won't see it for a long time. But yeah, that's what a tentative agreement is. A lot of people think that it's a bad thing to go back to the drawing board or a bad thing to renegotiate or be put before an arbitrator. I largely think that is a myth. If you think about any sort of negotiation, the first... The first offer is never the best one.
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I think a lot of people are just afraid that somehow you would end up giving more than you're getting. And I think that's just the way that the rhetoric has gone for unions lately. And I guess I need to adjust that a little bit because the Teamsters, even like the Servers Workers Union, they're all really doing well. The Communications Union, the...
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in a little bit of a different age, but a lot of the post offices, old heads, military veterans, that kind of sort, who just come from a little bit of an earlier time when the labor movement was really starting to plant their feet on the ground.
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So touching on that, if people are really quitting before they reach a point in their career where they're educated and can stand up for themselves, or stand up for each other on the workroom floor. That's one of the major reasons that our union is failing. And like you said, you used the exact example that I would have. The Amazon model is working really well.
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If you can just make it so that people are so miserable they quit their job before they understand what their rights are, how they can protect each other, what even the contract says on the basics of when can you call out, when are you required to come in, can they send you home early without your pay. That's massive.
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And while we were talking about the conditions of the 1970s and how long it takes you to get to the top of the pay scale, this third tier actually increases that time by sometimes three or four years. I've known people who have been CCAs for three or four years. I don't think I've seen beyond that, but it wouldn't surprise me.