APWU member Julia Maye-Leggett cheers during a rally outside the post office where she works as a clerk.
Postal Service employees aren’t sitting back and waiting to see how their agency’s new partnership with Elon Musk’s “DOGE” team plays out.
With rallies in Minnesota and across the U.S. this week, workers are saying “hell no” to any attempt at dismantling the public post office.
On Thursday, the Postal Workers union (APWU) staged a rally outside the downtown Minneapolis post office on a nationwide “U.S. Mail is Not for Sale” day of action, with events in over 100 cities.
On Sunday, March 23, local chapters of the Letter Carriers union (NALC) will hold a “Rally to Save USPS” at 11 a.m. on the Capitol steps in St. Paul.
Postal unions have been warning about the threat of privatization for years, but their sense of urgency ratcheted up in February, when President Donald Trump floated the idea of dissolving the independent agency’s leadership and putting it under the Commerce Department’s control – a move widely considered illegal.
Last week, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy delivered more concerning news for unions, announcing an agreement with DOGE to assist with “identifying and achieving certain efficiencies.”
Service cuts, massive layoffs and lawsuits over privacy concerns and executive overreach have followed DOGE’s infiltration of other federal agencies. Minnesotans at the rally in Minneapolis yesterday said they are worried the same will play out at the Postal Service.
“I’m very concerned that they are trying to rip the post office apart slowly but surely,” Julia Maye-Leggett, a lead sales and service clerk at the downtown post office, said. “But the mail is not for sale. It is for the people, and the people’s voice needs to be heard.”
“We have to start small and work big,” retiree Jean Brown (middle) said of pushing back against DOGE overreach.
Jean Brown, whose husband is a retired APWU member, joined the rally to raise her voice in support of workers like Maye-Leggett.
“It feels really good to be out here, especially because all the people working here have their jobs being threatened,” she said. “It means they’re getting the message that we support every one of them and want them to have a living-wage job with job security.”
The noon rally drew over 150 postal workers and retirees, members of other unions and activists eager to protest Trump’s agenda.
Several signs and chants took aim at Musk, Trump’s billionaire campaign donor who has amassed his private fortune, in part, on public-sector contracts and federal aid worth an estimated $38 billion over 20 years, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
Earlier this month, speaking remotely to an investors’ conference, Musk floated “privatizing” the USPS, even though the executive branch has no legal authority to dismantle the agency on its own, unions say. Its oversight spreads across the Office of Inspector General, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Board of Governors and congressional committees.
Devin Brown, a member of APWU Local 647, traveled to the rally from St. Cloud.
But Kendall Smith, who joined the rally in Minneapolis, said he worries Musk and Trump will test the legal limits of their power over the USPS, “just like they are at all the other federal agencies that have had the people laid off by DOGE, even though they don’t have the authority.”
An Army veteran, Smith carried a handwritten sign that read, “73,000 Veterans Work at the Postal Service.” Military veterans who apply for postal employment automatically receive extra points in the hiring process, a practice known as “veterans’ preference.”
“I know a lot of people who finished up their service to our country, going from the military to the Postal Service,” Smith said.
Marlys Fox, who retired seven years ago after a 32-year career as a letter carrier in Columbia Heights, saw the importance of veteran’s preference firsthand.
“I watched the Vietnam veterans come in when I started as a letter carrier, at the same time as the Korean War veterans were retiring,” Fox said. “Then I watched the Gulf War veterans come in and so on. Each time they helped us fill the gaps.”
That tradition of service, Fox and Smith agreed, stands in contrast to what Musk and DOGE are doing to the federal government.
“We took pride in our work, and we worked our butts off,” Fox said. “Musk and DOGE are looting our country.”
– Michael Moore, Union Advocate editor
Union Advocate 