The Washington Post broke the news February 20 that Trump was on the verge of issuing an executive order to dissolve the independent leadership of USPS and move it into the executive branch under the Department of Commerce, now led by enthusiastic privatizer Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street banker. Trump confirmed the next day that he was “looking at” this option. The other shoe hasn’t dropped yet.
“These are not idle threats,” said Seattle letter carrier Virgilio Goze, sergeant-at-arms of [National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC)] Branch 79. “Trump might be fickle, but the people around him are not. They’re outright privatizers, and they will do illegal stuff.”
Some workers are enthusiastic that DOGE might crack down on inefficiency at the post office, like do-nothing managers. “But the people around Trump do not think that way,” Goze said. “They’re going to come after our benefits, our wages. Our working conditions are already bad, but they’re going to get worse. They’ll turn us into Amazon—they want us to be timed at everything we do.”
Looming large over any discussion of illegal federal worker strikes is the memory of President Reagan’s 1981 mass firing of Professional Air Traffic Controllers—during another illegal strike—which cast a chill over the whole labor movement.
“PATCO is always brought up as a sort of gotcha,” [Tyler Vasseur, a letter carrier in Minneapolis Branch 9 and a leader in Build a Fighting NALC (BFN)] said. “Yes, there’s a huge potential for this to be our PATCO moment. But I think we can win this time, because what happened was the air traffic controllers were fired and the labor movement backed down. The way to fight back would have been the rest of the public sector and then calling on the private sector to come out in defense of workers, and it would have been a real challenge to Reagan that way.”
“As a true unionist in my blood, withholding labor is always an option,” [Mike Bates, president of the Des Moines Postal Workers [American Postal Workers Union (APWU)] said. “I’m not scared of it. A general strike of all federal workers and
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