Life and Death at the Post Office

(Letter)

2 December 2015

Dear Workers Vanguard,

As a letter carrier for 25 years (now retired), I had plenty of experience with the callous indifference to the lives and health of the workers that was the trademark of postal management. But even I was appalled by a recent column in October’s Postal Record, the monthly journal of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) entitled “The brutal summer behind us.” In this article the NALC Director of Safety and Health details a long list of carriers who collapsed on the job due to heat-related illnesses. He explains that this year there have been 23 heat-related illnesses reported to him, the majority of which required hospitalization.

Here are several of the examples that he lists:

“On May 22, a career letter carrier was hospitalized as a result of heat illness for a period of four days, and then almost two months later, the USPS issued her a letter of warning for failing to work in a safe manner.” He reports that this discipline was later thrown out after a grievance and OSHA complaint were filed.

Further:

“On July 15, a letter carrier called his supervisor to report that he was vomiting and cramping due to the heat. The supervisor did not immediately call 911, causing a one hour delay in providing medical attention that resulted in hospitalization. Two months later, this employee has not returned to work.

“On July 29, during a 105-degree heat index day, a carrier tried to call his supervisor, but was unable to speak. A customer took the phone to speak to the supervisor, who first asked how much mail does he have left? The customer told the supervisor that she would take the carrier to the hospital. The supervisor told her not to and that he would go to the route to take him. The supervisor then picked up the carrier, delayed taking him to the hospital, and instead took him to the office to get paperwork while leaving the injured carrier in a hot vehicle.”

These gross examples are confirmed by my own experience. When I was working in the Oakland area in 2002, a carrier in a nearby town who was on light duty due to a kidney ailment was forced to deliver mail on a very hot day. He collapsed from massive heat stroke and subsequently died. My local felt compelled to send a small donation to his family—we could all imagine the same thing happening in our Post Office.

After recounting these horrific examples, the NALC article goes on to tepidly recommend that carriers: “Take this issue up at your safety (or labor management) meetings so that you can jointly develop a plan to have in place before next year’s heat waves.” The sell-outs running the NALC may imagine that working jointly with management will get you somewhere, but this is a lie and a delusion. It took class struggle (like the massive postal strike of 1970 which defied the government’s anti-strike laws and won!) to win any gains for postal workers. Today, facing cut-backs, post office closures and lay-offs, all the NALC leadership offers is to endlessly beg the class enemy in Congress, wooing sympathetic Democrats whom they sell to the membership as “friends of labor.” What’s needed is hard class struggle by the multiracial working class as part of the fight to build a revolutionary workers party fighting for a workers government. Those who labor must rule.

In Struggle,
D.C.,
retired letter carrier