The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’re talking about the United States Postal Service and the people who work there. In an age where we have frankly become so divided on so many issues, it’s astounding that poll after poll year after year continues to show that one of the only federal agencies that the vast majority of Americans actually like and want and don’t want to see privatized is the US Postal Service. And I mean, like right up there with achievements like the Hoover Dam or the Moonlanding, the creation of a public, affordable, reliable mail system that guarantees universal access and delivery to everyone across this massive country is honestly one of the most impressive things that America has ever accomplished.

And for years now, we have watched as that incredible accomplishment. That entire public postal system has been repeatedly and deliberately stabbed and slashed and throttled in broad daylight by people who openly want to kill it or privatize it and make lots of money in the process. And this is not a new problem. So much of the damage that has been done to the USPS was set in motion like 20 years ago with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which passed with bipartisan support, by the way. But it was really a disastrous product of all the bad faith budget deficit hawkery of the George W. Bush era. And apparently we had endless money for endless illegal wars, but at the same time, we were passing bills like the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which among other things, required the postal service to prefund retiree health costs, which resulted in just a massive transfer of money from the USPS back to the federal government.

No other entity, public or private, has been forced to prefund the cost of retiree benefits under such conditions, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And the USPS has basically been limping on ever since. But I got to tell you guys, things sure as hell haven’t gotten any better of late. During the first Trump administration, the board of governors of the USPS appointed Lewis DeJoy as US Postmaster General. DeJoy was the founder and CEO of the logistics and freight company, New Breed Logistics. He was a major Republican Party donor and a fundraiser for Donald Trump, surprise, surprise. And he was the first postmaster general since 1992 without any prior experience in USPS, and also the first postmaster general in United States history to come directly from the board of a privately owned competitor of the USPS. And DeJoy actually fell out of Donald Trump’s favor, not because of what he did to the US Postal Service, but because Trump connected him to his big lie about the 2020 election being stolen and mail-in ballots having something to do with it.

So DeJoy basically held on and kept doing damage and causing delays with his restructuring plans during the Biden years. And then he stepped down when Trump came back into office. And now the USPS Board of Governors, once again, with Trump’s hand obviously on the scale, has chosen former FedEx board member, David Steiner, to be the nation’s 76 postmaster general. Now, Steiner did tell USPS employees last July, “I do not believe that the Postal Service should be privatized or that it should become an appropriated part of the federal government.” But Steiner has also been in the news recently, you guys may have seen it. As the Associated Press recently reported, “The US Postal Service will run out of cash within a year unless Congress lifts a decades old cap and allows the agency to borrow more money,” the new Postmaster General warned in an interview. If it doesn’t, the Postal Service might not be able to pay its employees or vendors by February of 2027 with potentially dire consequences for mail delivery.

Okay, so what the hell is going on with the United States Postal Service? What is it like to work for the USPS under these conditions and what impact are these constant attacks on the public mail system having on the working people who depend on it? So to talk about all of this, I’m really grateful to be joined on the show today by Connor Mosch. Connor is a letter carrier in New York and he serves as a shop steward for branch three of the National Association of Letter Carriers. And I want to give the disclaimer that Connor is speaking here on his own behalf, not on behalf of the USPS or the NALC. Connor, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And I want to just ask you to pick up where we left off in that introduction and just describe for our listeners from the good to the bad to the ugly, what is it actually like to be a letter carrier in America in 2026?

Yeah,

Connor Mauche:

No, thank you, Max. Appreciate you having me here today. So A, like any job, especially like a union job rep, having the ability to enforce a contract is the biggest thing anybody could ever have. Now the problem is people, if they don’t know the rules, if they don’t know what to be doing, they can easily be taken advantage of by management that we’ll have from doing things that will also steal time from other carriers or having people stay out and work past their work limits and do things they shouldn’t be doing. The biggest thing also that you don’t see, I guess, reported as much with the signers saying they’re going to run out of money. Yeah, it’s a legitimate threat. However, we see this happen every time our contract goes up. So this is always a scary tactic because right now we’re going back into negotiations at the national level and ALC is the largest … Letter carriers, we’re the largest force within the service.

So our contract is the most expensive for the postal service. Every time our contract goes up, they always try broke because they want to give us the least they can in negotiations. And this happened last time and we had some of the most genuinely, like at the national level, our national president ran from. The incompetence of the last negotiations were so horrendous that we went two years over with our contract expired before they got the new one. And by the time they finished, it was just one more year, now they’re renegotiating again. And the faith we have at the national level is extremely low. And as carriers, we love this job. I feel like I’m a part of the community because I know the neighborhood. And I’ve specifically stayed in a neighborhood that isn’t exactly the nicest in the city, but people, if they get to know you and like you’re a competent and effective letter carrier, they love you because you’re somebody who’s on the block every day and you take care of all the other little things.

And I’ve seen old men fall down the stairs, gas leaks, like call the fire department, stuff like that. That’s not something you get with Amazon, with FedEx. And mail has gone down. Our package rates have gone up. If you talk about how it’s harder as a job because yeah, mail goes down, but then, okay, so we have heavier packages. We have these contracts with Amazon and FedEx that take some of their parcel loads and UPS. And we’re having to take up a lot of the extra work of the private sector and getting the pittance in those contracts. So it’s untenable, but the fact it is, the private market gets so much money because it subsidizes its costs by utilizing us to do the last mile delivery where they won’t go. So the private market would suffer without us also.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. And I mean, any one of us can attest to that, right? I mean, sure, maybe you have UPS guys, the Boys and Brand delivering a lot of your Amazon packages, but I’ve had tons of packages delivered by you guys, by the USPS. And so just, I guess I’m just asking listeners to think about that for a second. The last mile sort of system is so often run through the service that’s built to serve at the last mile, and that’s the USPS. If you’re talking about privatizing all of that, the private carriers don’t have that centuries long infrastructure. They currently utilize and depend on it through the USPS. And I agree with you, Connor. I think that’s one part of the privatization argument that is often just kind of, it should be obvious, but it’s not, but it’s often left out of the discussion. I wanted to just ask if you could paint even more of a picture of your day-to-day working life.

What does that look like? Folks on this show have heard us talk to USPS package carriers and other workers in the sort of freight and logistics industry, and they’ve heard about what it’s like there. But for you as a letter carrier, yeah, what does a typical day, typical week look like, and how has the nature of that work changed in recent years?

Connor Mauche:

Yeah, I mean, the past 20 years, massive changes. In the day-to-day, and also being shop steward, it’s kind of like having to balance two jobs, but you have different abilities to choose between if you want to be a no list, which is like, I would just want to do eight and 40, eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. I can get on the overtime list for the daily. I can get on the overtime list to come in on my day off to work overtime, and we can work up to 12 and a half hours taking the launch out per day. Because the thing about us also is with this, and I think this is a good thing about it, it’s essential mail, it has to be delivered. The only conditions in which we’re going to delay mail is because the weather is just really that bad, or there’s a tornado, that kind of thing.

But if I show up to work, I can be required and forced to work up to 12 and a half hours per day, essentially. And there are long weeks. And some people, I know they work 60 weeks almost every single week back to back. I’m doing usually between 50 and 60 lately. And of course, we have the problems that most other unions also had to in terms of like we had the two tier contract. So the people who got hired before 2013, their rates are better than anyone who got hired past that. And we’re seeing it collapse, so they are collapsing it back into one table. We’re seeing that the kind of middle class life postal service kind of guaranteed back in the 1970s and 80s was slowly decreasing as inflation has hit us. And I mean, when I started, it was only $18 an hour.

And you start off as a temp. So you have two years, up to two years before you can get into the career position. And at that point, you are just like a glorified runner, a dog basically for the postal service. They max you out of 11 and a half hours and I would work 10, 12, 13, 14 days in a row without a single day off because now we do Sunday delivery also. And it’s gotten better. We’ve gotten to the point where now we’re mandating one day off per week for those carriers, the new ones. But I had to work 14 days and I heard horror stories of guys who worked 30 days in a row without ever having a day off. And a lot of that happened during the pandemic era because a lot of people retired. 1995, there was a huge hiring surge.

And so in 2025, that was a massive year for people retiring also. So it’s a lot of work, but the gratification you feel from being like somebody where it’s like, I have a route, a neighborhood that I’m responsible for. When I have a day off and I come back to work, everybody knows I wasn’t there the day before because they notice, “Hey, why did my neighbor get my mail?” And little things like that. And the conversations I can have with people on the street, sure that they monitor us and they use GPS nowadays to follow you. That was something that 20 years ago didn’t exist on top of that digital service so that our mail … I love talking to the old-time carriers because the things they got away with before GPS, before they had to … They used to spend three hours in the morning casing all their mail.

Now I’m lucky if I get an hour to case by mail and magazines, flats, that kind of thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And could you just say what that means, casing your mail?

Connor Mauche:

Yeah. So you have essentially, not like a desk, but a standing case in which your whole route is in order and each one slot is, whether it’s for a cluster box or it’s for an individual house. And if you get a magazine, I’m the guy who in the morning gets that and then I put it in its slot and I go through the whole thing, any mail that can’t be digitally read by the machines or some … Sometimes people put in a no such number kind of address and it’s actually, they’ll put 51 this street, but it was supposed to be 52 across the street. I’m the one who will know the names and where it’s actually supposed to be going kind of thing. And then you take that all down, you already have mail a digitally process in order, which back in the day, well, that was time I used to be able to have in the mornings to work in the office, which is the better time because now you’re on the street for longer.

So back then, they’d spent four hours on the street, maybe two and a half in the office. Now you spend maybe an hour in the office and then six and a half on the street. My office went through the adjustment and mail volume has declined, but almost 50%, I think since 2006. Parcels obviously gone up, but what they’ve done is extend and make routes longer. So if you also think about in terms of like, well, now there’s more stairs and I’m outside for longer. So the job has gotten harder on the body. I don’t know a single mailman who’s made it 30 years in his career without a hip replacement or a knee replacement or a shoulder. I mean, and especially depending on the neighborhood. Some areas are flatter than others, but my neighborhood has a lot of stairs. If you do that for 30 years in a row, your knees are going to be gone.

It takes a huge toll on the body in the long term.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I hadn’t even thought of that, right? I mean, but just the connections of the repetitive motions depending on the terrain you’re on and delivering to the… like you said, traditional mail has decreased, especially since the 2008 crash. And then again with COVID, you just have more stuff being digitally sent than you used to with paper. But at the same time, you have a lot more people ordering a lot more shit online in the form of packages and parcels. And so you’re carrying heavier stuff and you’re out there for more time because you have digital sorters going through the mail in the morning. So I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but it makes a lot of sense. And I wanted to just sort of ask, are there other work hazards or conditions that folks don’t see like we learned about from the UPS near strike a few years ago, like with the heat in those trucks and we were learning about people dying in those trucks from heat strokes. I’m not saying it’s that bad, but I’m asking if there are other sort of aspects to the job like that that you think your average person just doesn’t see.

Connor Mauche:

Yeah, no, even me personally, so I’m a city delivery city carrier, so I don’t have vertebral where you can stop and open the window and put mail in the box. So I walk, but my vehicle was built in 1992. It has a little rotary fan. It gets up to 110, 120 degrees in there in the summer. But on the other side of things, some of these new vehicles that they’ve implemented are not adequate either. One of them, it’s called the Metress. It’s the Mercedes fleet vehicle. You can’t turn off the traction control. So if it’s just a little bit icy, I can’t even move the thing. I’m in upstate New York. I prefer actually the older vehicle because at least it was built to last and it’s also mechanical. It doesn’t have all these digital problems. And some of the new ones, like guys told me, yeah, I got it right off brand new.

The door slid right off the rails and just broke the first day. The quality from Dodge and from the Mercedes fleet vehicles, they’re just not built like they used to be. And so my vehicle’s over 30 years old now. It works, turns on every day. At least I have some consistency

Maximillian Alvarez:

With it. Well, and I’m also thinking about the emergence of these Ring cameras and everyone putting in these special boxes that they want you to unlock a code for to put their packages in. I guess as I told you before we started recording, I’ve been doing this show for years. We’re in our ninth season. I’ve interviewed so many different types of workers across so many different types of industries, but I’ve never spoken directly with a letter carrier or, fun fact, a firefighter. And so part of this is just me nerding out and getting a chance to talk to you, but I’m also, it’s making me realize that yeah, actually the nature of your job has changed a lot as society itself has changed over the past 10 years.

Connor Mauche:

Yeah. And we see automation. I think same thing you’ll see with a lot of new jobs with AI kind of entering the market. It’s making our jobs harder. It’s not making them, they’re not being used to our benefit. It’s putting more work onto us, if anything. I mean, one major thing is also, so I mean, I love the old school nature of, we don’t use any of those electronic lockboxes, but we still have the old-fashioned key that opens up everything. And I keep it strapped in my belt. The problem, of course, that we’ve seen is that the level of violence against letter carriers on the street has been astronomical in the past 10 years, and just in terms of theft, in terms of violence against us also. And so people are trying to steal those keys because of the aspect that they can get into, whether it’s collection boxes to steal checks and wash checks or to get into parcel lockers also.

And they’ve talked about ways to try and work on a two-factor kind of key system and they’ve slowly, everything they talk about, they have slowly implemented to the point where, I mean, it’s important because the security and the confidence the public has in the mail is one of the most important parts because if you think you can’t send a check without it getting washed, well, then you’re not going to send a check. And there’s a lot of people I know who rely on … There’s old women who can’t leave their houses because they’re infirm now. And if I don’t show up to their mailbox and take that check out of their mailbox, they can’t pay for whether it’s their fuel bill or whatever they need. So it is an essential service still, especially for Americans who are getting older now and they still rely on us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it really makes me think back to something you said earlier about just the old days and what you’ve heard from veteran letter carriers, retired folks. And just like, I don’t know, I’m thinking about all of the sort of cultural archetypes that we have from the English Postman Pat to here in the States. The Postman’s just such a figure and such an identifiable figure with, I don’t know, that kind of humdrum working of daily life in different types of communities, they’re one of the few sort of non-family figures that you see every day and that actually have a repeated connection to the community. It’s not just a random Uber delivery driver here and there or that kind of thing. It’s got me thinking about the fact that as our society over the course of our lifetimes has gotten more and more repressed and people have gotten more and more isolated and alienated.

The very sense of community, I don’t even know what community means in 2026, but there are still little hints of it, like the fact that we have a postman that we know by name in our neighborhood. So I wanted to just ask, from a worker’s eye view, as someone who gets more interaction with people than I think most people in this country do ever, how does American society look through your eyes? What are you seeing on the street? And yeah, what do you think will happen to our communities if we don’t have even that presence of the USPS in our neighborhoods anymore?

Connor Mauche:

It would be such a massive loss to have that. I mean, there’s still pockets of community that exist. And there’s tenants associations. My apartment buildings has a tenants association where they go have meetings and I know who the president is and I introduce myself and know him and I talk to him and shout out Mr. Stevens. But little things like that are tying people together. And also when anyone has a problem with their mail, it happens all the time, but they have that ability to go right to you and talk. An older gentleman came up to me today and he asked me how to ship his father’s ashes because he has to send them to his siblings. And I let them know what’s the best way to do it, what I would recommend in terms of express and signature verification. And that’s one old man who wouldn’t know better.

And that’s one little thing you can help with. And even just small things. I walk into a business and I get to talk to the secretary and ask her how her family is and little things like that. And you see kids grow up. There’s so many little things that go into the job that makes it a very personable. And yeah, you can get a mailman that doesn’t care about any of that kind of stuff, but it’s hard not to when you’re there every single day talking to the same people. And I’ve been in my route for, I bid it, I want it, and I’ve been in it for over a year now. So I know everybody’s name. If you hand me a letter for somewhere on my route, I’ll know exactly where it goes and who I am to give it to. And there’s certain aspects of there’s been car accidents, crime that has happened.

And for the most part, I take the edge of like, I don’t want to involve myself too much because A, I got to walk this block the next day. Don’t be a snitch. I see a drug deal happen, I don’t care. And I’ve had that. I’ve had guys, there’s this one, and I can’t say where, but I know what they’re doing and they look at me suspiciously all the time. And one day I just talk to them because like, “Guys, I don’t care. That’s not my job. I’m not the police. I’m not going to talk to the police.” And we do have that, and as a union, for instance, we have it on the books. We do not collaborate unless you get a court order. I don’t tell you, if ICE shows up, I don’t know anything. If the cops show up, if you don’t have a court order, I have no idea who you’re talking about.

I’m not talking to you, leave me alone because I have to actually serve the community here and I can’t be seen as some sort of snitch interfering with it. But even on my route, ICE and Border Patrol has become more of an issue. If you saw this story of Norlamin Shah, the man who was, “That happened on my route.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

And can you just remind listeners about it? It’s a horrifying story, but I’m even more horrified to know that that was on your route. But yeah, please just for listeners, catch him up real quick.

Connor Mauche:

Yeah. So Noralmansha, he was a refugee, partially blind. I believe he had three feet vision in one of his eyes and blind in the other. He accidentally went trespassing on my route and got arrested for it. They eventually brokered a deal so I just wouldn’t detain him and wouldn’t remove him. They get that, but then Border Patrol for some reason drops him off at a closed Tim Horton’s coffee shop after 70 PM. They’re closed. I mean, they had the drive-through of operating, but they closed the inside of it. And he wandered away and they found him five days later unresponsive and had passed away miles and miles away, not even close to home in the downtown city.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Wandering around basically froze to death.

Connor Mauche:

Oh yeah, they left him in flip flops. This is upstate New York winters here, not fun. And they left him out in the cold. Then what, five days later? Yeah, it’s the negligence and just the complete incompetence of this. And I started seeing the posters. By the time I saw his family found out and I saw the posters for him being a wanted person, missing person, I mean, it was too late. He was miles and miles away by the time I even knew he was missing or his family.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I just have a chill running through my spine because it’s a story I read. It’s a story I’m sure many people listening to this heard, but it hits different knowing that it literally happened on the route that the person I’m talking to right now is on every single day. Makes it feel a lot more real.

Connor Mauche:

Yeah. I park at that coffee shop every single day. It’s a surreal feeling, but Border Patrol is thinking it’s just, I have no idea. It’s also this pattern of deterioration, the incompetence of this administration and everything else going around us. It’s just falling apart, I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Think. Well, and speaking of things falling apart, I kind of wanted to ask you about that. And again, with the preface that I don’t want to get you in trouble, and I know that only speak on what you’re comfortable speaking on, but when this kind of top-down crap happens, like when Louis DeJoy gets put in or when he steps down and David Steiner steps in and they do this kind of restructuring, and how is that felt for you and other rank and filers? Does that translate to changes on the day-to-day job? Is it more just kind of like dark clouds on the horizon, but your day-to-day job is largely the same?

Connor Mauche:

It really doesn’t affect us at the station level. I would say that people will read news, we’ll talk about certain things like that. Occasionally, and DeJoy would do this all the time, and I skipped it every single time, he would send these videos to your scanner in the morning where he would give us a little update and I’d be like, “I’m not listening to this. Absolutely not. ” At least-

Maximillian Alvarez:

I am not getting paid enough to watch this fool every day.

Connor Mauche:

No. And thank God you can’t skip them. They’re not mandatory. But what we will see is management will give mandatory standup talks. For instance, I know this week they’re going to be doing one about mail service regarding election mail. We have special rules about how we handle that if it’s a vacant house or something like that, let’s say. So we’ll occasionally get mandatory standup talks being like everybody gathers around and management will tell us some things. The union also has the ability to also put their side forward also. So if we disagree, at least the union has ability to also put forward its version of events or … Managers aren’t always the brightest or know everything either. They’re not always just malicious that a lot of it’s just new incompetence. And I have a manager or a supervisor that’s 25 years old, carried for two years.

I mean, it’s just like the fat within management, because that has balloon. If we want to talk about cutting jobs within the Postal Service, I mean, they need to start with the overabundance of supervisors who beside one hour in the morning, they get on telecoms most of the rest of the day where they just complain about, “Oh, this carrier took too long doing this, this carrier, this one’s a problem, this route’s a problem.” And then they put targets on people and then they try to manipulate or move them from whatever practice they think is going on. And it’s absurd how much they get paid. They get paid, I believe right now, around 85,000 per year off the get- go. And that’s right around top step is, I think, 89,000 for letter carrier right now, and it takes 13 years to get to top step.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The proliferation of middle management dweebs and MBA holding monsters who just come up with their spreadsheets and make their decisions in these corporate offices that translate to misery on the shop floor level. And again, I’ve heard this from so many different people. I’ve heard from dollar general workers who can’t even control the AC in their own stores. They’re controlled in a corporate office in another state. And that was a cost. That was a calculation made by one of these middle management or office pencil pushing little douchebags who thought this is going to look good for the bottom line and don’t have to think about what it looks like for the workers who are sweltering in some Dollar General in Georgia and can’t control the AC Or whatever it is, whether it’s the crisis on the railroads and these Wall Street Fat Cats and these corporate executives are saying like, “Hey, why do we need two people on those massive three mile long trains?

Let’s get it down to one person and try to automate more of the process.” Anywhere you look, it’s just the same sickness of pushing more work onto fewer workers, the quality of life for the workers and the quality of service for the customers. All of this gets eaten up and all the while the profits, the stock quotes, these things keep going up. Now, obviously the USPS is a little different as a public service that since the ’70s has been operating more as an independent agency that has to make its own revenue or survive on its own revenue. And I wanted to circle back to that for a second, because I know I can’t keep you for too much longer, but so when people hear that the USPS is going to run out of money, I think you gave us really helpful context earlier where you’re like, “Yeah, they do this every contract negotiation.” So let’s talk about that for a second.

What’s really at the center of the new contract negotiations for the union and for workers, but also for the public that keeps getting scared and keeps hearing that the USPS is getting privatized. Trump has said that he’d like to privatize it or that it’s not the worst idea in the world. It just feels like there’s a lot of ominousness surrounding this beloved agency. So if you could talk straight to your average listener here, tell him a bit about the contract negotiations and the sort of core issues there for workers, but also how people should be understanding the state of the USPS right now.

Connor Mauche:

Yeah, I mean, they have given us terrible offers back and forth, and we do have a significant problem with leadership at the national level at NALC. This is also a year that … Yeah, it’s a contract here. It’s also we’re going to be voting on a new NALC president where I’m going to be going as a delicate also and trying to vote for the alternative slate. They offered in the last contract, I believe in the negotiations around 1.2, 1.3%. Just looking at inflation, impossible to keep up with this. So we ended up getting, I think, up to 1.5 metered out. And then with that, we have a COLA cost of living adjustment, which is still fractions. And depending on your step along the way, if you’re 13 years in, you get the full call. You’re a year or two in, you don’t get the full COLA also.

And that’s only 1.2% and it only comes around once a year. So the way that wages have just completely not kept up with the workload, the demands of the job, and then on top of that, just mismanaged negotiations. Our national president during the last contract negotiations went on a vendor and disappeared during pre-negotiations. And we still have that guy and the incompetence of … Before the contract ends, they should have a set of pre-negotiated points and they just completely didn’t do any of that last time around, just disappeared and left it on the table. And so we went two years without a contract, no raises. I didn’t get my back pay until August this past summer for those two years I worked without a new contract. And we can’t keep having that go back and forth, really bidding on this being a year that we can actually turn around because there are genuine leaders within the union.

And like every union, it’s got problems. But if you go from branch to branch around the country also, I love my branch. I think that the leadership we have is solid and sometimes you’ll have a local where it’s not as solid. I think people shouldn’t get into and with other people’s unions. When you’re looking at it from the outside, it looks like a hot mess. But take the time if you have a union to actually work with it and improve it and not just pretend like it’s a barrier to you. It’s a sword and a shield. It’s not just going to be perfect all the time. But if you don’t engage in it and you don’t have any part in it, it’s like a democracy that’ll fall apart. So I would say I’m not afraid. I don’t think that postal service is going anywhere because of the detriment it would cause this nation.

Even a Republican president knows how much this would hurt him too. The amount of rural America all up across America, the terrible, I think, outcome it would come to the public would make it such a mistake that I don’t even think a Republican administration would have the temerity to do that. Now, does that mean there won’t be a fight? It’s happened before. In 1970, the Wildcat strike happened. It was an illegal strike. It’s illegal for us to go on strike and that’s in our contract and that’s something we should get rid of. But if we want to do that, there are ways to get around that. And if we have to have a public pressure campaign, it’s happened before without just having to rely on the most essential power we have is our labor and striking with it. It’s a possibility that what we will see, and they’re saying it would be in February of next year, we’re going to have to have massive raalies.

We’ve done it before. They tried to close … In my city, they tried to close down the main processing facility. Our local union got the entire courthouse packed from the public to every local legislator. People will not, I think, let public service like this just go under without a fight.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what would you say, and as a final kind of message to fellow Americans out there, just leave us with that sort of sense of what we would actually be losing if we did lose the USPS and why this is such an essential service that we need and that we’re going to really, really miss if it ever goes away.

Connor Mauche:

Yeah. I mean, that’s the key word. It’s a service. And I think a lot more people nowadays are kind of understanding that just like the fire department, the idea of privatizing a public service like this would hurt. Even if you directly only get a couple of mail pieces a year, things like passports, things like government documents. When I had to vote in an election and get mail from the labor board, there’s very … And I mean, just mail in ballots for the national elections, right? There are so many essential services that it covers that for it to just disappear overnight, you would feel an effect. And with the way that technology, AI and all these other things are going, do you want to put your chips in that? Does anyone really feel that that’s going to be a net positive for society? I certainly don’t.

And the postie, that’s a guy on your block who can take care of your grandfather when he falls down the steps. That’s a guy who’s going to know, hey, and this happens all the time. I haven’t seen Ms. Carroll touch her mailing a couple days now. I knock on the door and check on her. How many times have I heard stories in my own office from my own guys that they’ve saved people’s lives by just taking that little extra effort just to say, “Well, I’ve noticed she always gets her mail and she’s been laying on the floor with a broken hip for two days.” That’s a very common story that you will find with guys like us who will walk the block and we’re there as a public service, not just to make revenue.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guest, Connor Mauche, a letter carrier in New York and a shop steward for branch three of the National Association of Letter Carriers. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. Now we’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network on YouTube, on our podcast feeds, on our website, and our social media pages, we’re doing grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. And help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys like I do every week, it really makes a difference.

I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.