Union leaders recall 1970 postal strike

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_4410

By Mark Gruenberg
26 March 2010

WASHINGTON - Imagine your faithful Letter Carrier, braving “rain, snow, sleet, hail and gloom of night” – to quote the old Post Office motto – for so little pay that he, and it was almost always a “he,” could draw welfare and apply for food stamps.
It was low pay like that, and impossible working conditions to boot, that led the nation’s post office workers, then members of nine unions, to stage their first and only nationwide strike in late March 1970.


Letter Carriers picket during the 1970 postal strike.


That protest, which began as a walkout in New York City, quickly spread across the U.S., said retired Letter Carriers President Vincent Sombrotto – a leader in the uprising – and current Postal Workers President Bill Burrus. And its success led to wide-ranging changes in the workers’ lives, and even to the creation of the Postal Service as a quasi-independent U.S. agency, with the aim of turning a profit.

But the win didn’t come easily, the two union leaders said at a March 20 symposium at the Postal Museum in Washington to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the strike. Indeed, there wasn’t even unanimity within unions at the start of the struggle, Sombrotto admitted. One old-line leader charged the strikers “were incited by the SDS,” referring to the radical Students for a Democratic Society.

“But we really started to take off when the leadership of our branch didn’t show up” at a meeting the workers called, Sombrotto told the standing-room-only crowd, which included several other veterans of the struggle besides Burrus and himself. A non-partisan ballot-counting group ran the strike vote, and the tally was 1,550-1,005 to walk out, he said. Eventually, some 200,000 workers, including clerks and carriers, did.

FULL story at link.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Sadly Postal Workers MIGHT have to do this again

and SOON.