The Postal Service today is 37 percent minority and 37 percent female.
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The Post Office was for many years the nation’s largest employer of black workers in the decades that followed its conversion into the USPS, blacks were at least twice as likely to work for the Postal Service as whites. The Post Office has historically provided an avenue toward middle-class stability for a wide variety of Americans-veterans, new immigrants, rural migrants-but for no group has it been more important than for African Americans. Although the USPS provides a service mandated by the Constitution and federal law, it has received no federal funds since 1982, relying on postal product sales to keep revenue ahead of expenditures.
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The act replaced the Post Office Department with a hybrid government agency and corporation that would provide full collective-bargaining rights to employees, become financially self-supporting, and continue to provide universal service at reasonable rates. The roots of the Postal Service’s current financial crisis lie in the compromise legislation that followed the strike, the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act. On March 18, 1970, the successors of the original post riders revolted against both their employer and their union leaders in an eight-day nationwide illegal wildcat strike, demanding a living wage and job dignity as well as greater union democracy. Today’s USPS is the direct descendant of the original U.S.
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From the start, it was intended to serve as a political and information network, a sharp contrast with European countries’ postal services, which primarily existed to bring revenue into the treasury. If it succeeds, we’ll all be the poorer for it.Ī merica’s post office was a revolutionary idea, born in 1775.
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The Trump administration is now playing a costly game of chicken to get what it sought long before the current crisis: drastic service and facilities cuts, more noncareer labor and outsourcing, and a rollback of employee rights and benefits. Trump’s personal hostility to the USPS-“the Post Office is a joke,” he said on Friday-merges with a long-standing Republican embrace of both postal privatization and the trope that the USPS is a mismanaged business. But the truth is, the Postal Service has been under attack by conservatives for years. Trump’s move triggered a wave of disbelief, with people taking to social media to thank letter carriers and buying stamps to keep the USPS afloat. Read: The postal service is a civic institution, not a business What he finally signed instead included a $10 billion loan that would require approval by the Treasury Department. Yet in late March, as the Postal Service struggled to deal with the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump threatened to veto a version of the $2.2 trillion bipartisan CARES Act stimulus package that contained a $13 billion grant to help the USPS keep meeting its payroll, gassing its vehicles, and paying its suppliers. The USPS delivers 48 percent of the world’s mail to 160 million homes. The United States Postal Service is among the country’s most popular institutions, enjoying approval ratings as high as 90 percent. W hen I carried the mail in Durham, North Carolina-back in the 1990s, before I became a historian-an older man used to greet me joyfully, “Here comes Uncle Sam!” To him, and to others on my route, I represented not just the chance of a letter, but also a connection to the federal government-and to an institution that had probably provided a relative with a steady job, and a path into the middle class. Prior to teaching, he carried mail from 1980-2000 in Colorado and North Carolina.
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He is author of Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Rubio is professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University.