Union members sound alarm on threats to Postal Service, mail-in voting

July 28, 2026 by

APWU members march outside the Eagan Post Office during a nationwide day of action.

EAGAN – Twin Cities postal workers rallied today to raise awareness about threats to Minnesotans’ mail service coming out of Washington, D.C.

Joining a nationwide “Protect Our Public Post Office Day of Action,” local members of the American Postal Workers Union demonstrated outside the U.S. Postal Service distribution center in Eagan, along busy Lexington Avenue.

Union members warned of multiple threats to mail service, including President Donald Trump’s latest nominees to the USPS Board of Governors and the president’s increasingly aggressive attempts to curb mail-in voting.

“This is a critical time for the USPS, and we need leaders at the top who understand this important institution and are committed to public service,” Dave Cook, president of the APWU’s St. Paul local, said.

The Senate is likely to vote soon on four nominees to the Board of Governors who, union members say, are unqualified to oversee the agency, particularly at a time when it is under financial pressure and attempting to modernize.

Not only do the nominees lack experience with the post office or the logistics and delivery industry, but all four are Republicans, prompting concerns from Senate Democrats that Trump may be looking to consolidate his power over a historically bipartisan board.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) aired those concerns in a letter to GOP leadership earlier this month, warning that an “imbalance in representation would be unprecedented and would undermine public confidence in the Board’s ability to serve the public interest above any partisan political aims.”

At the rally, APWU members urged Minnesota’s senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, to vote against Trump’s nominees. Cook said he worries that the administration’s ultimate aim is greater privatization of the Postal Service.

“The deck is being stacked against us politically,” Cook said. “If we keep getting leaders who want to privatize it, then that’s the way it’s going to go. They will take the services that we provide, jack up the prices and make big profits.”

Supporters of privatization point to the Postal Service’s financial woes, and the agency – which operates without taxpayer support – recently leveraged its retiree-benefit funds to cover operating costs.

Workers say a better approach would be to allow the USPS to diversify its pension investments, limited by law to U.S. Treasury securities, to seek higher yields. The alternative, Cook said, is cutting hours and services at postal counters, raising prices for mail and packages and closing post offices.

“We are not a business,” he said. “We are not designed to run as a business. And trying to run us as a business is a big part of what’s gone wrong.”

Workers also blasted efforts by Trump and some congressional Republicans to undermine public trust in voting by mail. Despite voting by mail himself, Trump has long spread misinformation and debunked conspiracy theories that connect voting by mail to election fraud.

Passing the SAVE America Act, which would limit mail-in voting, has become the administration’s top legislative priority. And Trump signed an executive order in March – since tied up in a legal challenge – that creates roadblocks for mail-in voters and seeks to expand federal access to states’ voter information.

Cook said USPS employees consider mail-in balloting a “core service that week provide” and one that is growing in popularity locally and nationally.

“Every postal worker takes pride in serving postal customers and we clearly have a stake in protecting the USPS, but we’re not in this alone, everyone has a stake in what happens to the USPS in coming weeks,” said Cook. “We need people to reach out to their members of Congress, regardless of what side of the aisle they are on.”

The APWU represents about 200,000 postal employees nationwide.

– Michael Moore, UA editor

Filed Under: Labor Voices, Politics, Union Events Tagged With: , , , , ,

Union members rally in support of ‘People’s Post Office’

October 1, 2024 by

Postal workers held informational picketing outside the main post office in Eagan.

Postal workers rallied in Eagan and around the country today, ratcheting up their fight for a fair union contract and better customer service – two aims that go hand in hand, members of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) said.

“The American people deserve better,” Dave Cook, president of the St. Paul Area APWU local, said. “They deserve their public postal service back.”

Widespread complaints of slow mail delivery and long lines at the post office – including in Minnesota – are, in part, a result of staffing shortages at the USPS, Cook and other postal workers said.

The APWU has made staffing a top priority in contract negotiations covering 200,000 postal workers this year, demanding fair pay and benefits to retain and recruit workers. Union members also want the USPS to reverse a new policy that loosened its own “on-time” delivery standard from three to five days.

“They’ve cut staff because they don’t feel like they have to process every piece of mail every day,” Cook said of postal administrators’ new approach, known as “Delivering for America.”

But many post offices are so short staffed, union members said, that they are struggling to meet even the newly relaxed delivery standard.

Denise Jensen, an APWU steward at her Duluth post office, said workers are “doing their best to make it work with less,” but they are tired of bearing the brunt of public frustration. Meanwhile, the Postal Board of Governors recently adopted a policy that restricts public comments before the board to one time per year.

“They won’t give us the tools to make it work better,” Jensen said. “We’re always behind, and I feel bad for our customers. We have to face them, and it’s hard because we live in the communities we work in.”

Jensen said full-time workers who retire from her post office are often being replaced by part-timers, and postmasters are increasingly doing work that falls under clerks’ jurisdiction, prompting the union to file grievances.

“They don’t care,” she said. “Upper management knows it has to cut corners to make it work, but I’m still handing out refunds for guaranteed, two-day deliveries when it doesn’t happen, which is a lot.”

The rally at the main post office in Eagan came on a national day of action in support of “The People’s Post Office,” organized by the APWU. The union’s contract was set to expire Sept. 20, but the two sides agreed to extend the agreement while bargaining continues. Contract negotiations began in June.

Learn more about the campaign at peoplespostoffice.org.

– Michael Moore, UA editor

Filed Under: Organizing, Union Events Tagged With: , , ,

Union calls on Postal Service to address high turnover

May 18, 2023 by

Local members of the Postal Workers union held an event in Eagan to support a nationwide campaign for better staffing and service across the USPS.

Two local chapters of the American Postal Workers Union rallied together last month outside the Eagan Post Office, helping launch a nationwide campaign to address staffing shortfalls that, union members say, are driving down morale, creating unsafe working conditions and threatening the Postal Service’s reputation.

Union members want the agency to hire more workers and take steps to improve retention of new recruits. That means curtailing abusive treatment from management and finding ways to make workloads more manageable, St. Paul Area APWU President Dave Cook said.

“We get them in the door and they’re working six or seven days a week, sometimes 10-, 12- or 14-hour days,” Cook said. “And at that point they burn out and decide it’s not worth it.”

Cook’s union represents workers who sort mail and staff the counters of local post offices, as well as those in the regional processing plants like the one nearby in Eagan. The local planned the rally in partnership with APWU Local 7019, which represents employees at one of four Postal Data Centers nationwide, based in Eagan.

Postal union leaders recently issued a call to action, hoping to ramp up public pressure on Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and members of Congress to address the staffing crisis, which has resulted in service delays and long lines at many post offices.

“Service problems are widespread, and no corner of the country has been spared,” American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein.

That is a direct result, union members say, of the agency’s inability to retain newly hired workers.

An audit by the USPS Office of Inspector General found that so-called “non-career” postal workers – the agency’s term for new hires – had a 58.9% turnover rate in 2022, up from 38.5% in 2019. The top reasons workers cited for quitting were a lack of respect from supervisors and too many hours on the job.

Dave Cook is president of the St. Paul-area branch of the APWU.

And if it seems like lines at your local post office are getting longer, you’re probably right.

The number of retail counter clerks and workers who distribute mail to letter carriers has dropped by over 12% since 2006, from roughly 79,000 to 69,000 nationwide. At the same time, the number of labor-intensive packages delivered by the USPS has skyrocketed, and the number of delivery points served by the USPS has increased by 12.8%.

“Constant turnover, constant training, the short staffing has created such a morale problem in the back of your local post offices, your processing facilities that the public doesn’t even see,” Cook said. “That hurts the service.”

But more customers are beginning to take note.

Although an overwhelming majority of Americans still have a favorable opinion of the USPS, the most recent poll released by the Pew Research Center in March 2023 found the agency’s favorability rating had slipped to 77%, down from 91% in 2020.

“We are in a snowball effect right now, and it just gets worse by the month,” Cook said. “We need to turn that tide.”

Union leaders have little faith DeJoy, appointed postmaster general by former President Donald Trump, will act on their allegations of widespread abusive behavior among management in the agency.

Aaron Young

“You’ve got some bad apples in management, and we have some people who walk in every day feeling like they’re walking on eggshells,” Local 7019 President Aaron Young said.

But Young and other labor leaders are holding out hope that Congress will act. They have been pushing federal legislation that would hold the Postal Service to more rigorous service standards, hoping to force the agency to recruit and retain staff necessary to meet them.

“They need to restore the service standards that they had back in 2012,” Young said. “Unfortunately, we have a postmaster who came from the private sector. So he’s trying to treat it like a business and look only at the bottom line. He’s not taking into account the service to people who have depended on it for so many years. It’s really disheartening.”

Cook said the Eagan rally was “just the start” of a larger, nationwide campaign.

“Postal workers across the country have taken a stand, and we are working with our congressional leaders to hopefully get laws that will create better staffing,” he said. “The public wants the post office, and we want to give them a better post office.”

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