There's Always Work At The Post Office!: African-Americans Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality at the USPS by Philip F. Rubio
This book brings to life the important but neglected story of black postal workers and the leading role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. Prof. Rubio (a former postal worker) integrates civil rights, labor, and left movement history, often written as if they happened separately. In making the fight for equality primary, black postal workers were influential in helping shape today's post office and postal unions. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike when union members defied their own union leadership as well as the federal government ban on employee strikes. That strike – over poor pay, benefits, and working condition – resulted in full collective bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly-established U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
Union publications, oral histories, official documents, and organizational correspondence reveal black postal workers functioning as a kind of transmission belt between the black middle and working classes. Fighting their way into the post office and its unions, black postal workers – frequently military veterans with higher education – became a critical mass for social change. They have also enjoyed social support and status in the black community.
The progressive activism of black postal workers and their allies survived postwar anticommunist hysteria and repression. At work and in the unions they kept fighting white supremacy that Prof. Rubio argues was the chief obstacle to black-left-labor unity even more than the Cold War.
This book focuses on New York City and Washington, D.C. as exceptional sites of struggle and community, but includes other parts of the country since there are postal facilities and postal unions serving every city and town in the U.S. Postal unions have historically included craft unions, independent industrial left unions, and the historically-black National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees (NAPFE). Before collective bargaining they all had to engage in “collective begging” before Congress and postal management.
The book begins with African Americans first allowed entry into postal positions right after the Civil War, and their struggles into the 20th century to maintain those jobs and to enter and integrate unions. The book then concentrates on 1940 to the 1970 strike, out of which emerged the present-day USPS in 1971.
Then came a “white flight” of postal facilities from urban areas to the suburbs, and a corralling of rank-and-file upsurge within the unions, thus revealing the limitations as well as possibilities of rank-and-file militancy. The epilogue brings the story up to the present.
&mdash Vicki Sawicki