Jacqueline Dormer/Republican-Herald via AP
U.S. Postal Service letter carrier Greg Andregic, of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, loads his truck with mail for the day on March 1, 2022.
It’s been a rough year for rural letter carriers. Beginning in May, the U.S. Postal Service adopted a new payment system known as the Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System (RRECS), reducing base pay for almost two-thirds of rural letter carriers.
“I took a $15,000 pay cut overnight,” said Jamie King, a rural letter carrier from Florida, in an interview. King described how the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRLCA)—the union that represents him and 107,000 other members—made initial predictions of RRECS route changes that downplayed the true total number of hours that would be cut for most rural letter carriers.
Before RRECS’s adoption, the union estimated that two-thirds of all rural letter carriers would lose an hour off their route each week, and 44 percent would lose four hours or more. Meanwhile, 14 percent of carriers would gain hours on their routes. But King and other rural letter carriers say the loss of route hours, and therefore wages, has been worse than the NRLCA’s leadership estimated.
“Personally, my route lost 12 hours,” King said. “It’s already been tough as it is with COVID, the economy, the inflation … and to now take a huge pay cut.”
Angered by what they view as the NRLCA’s inability to protect their interests, a growing number of rural letter carriers inside the union are running a signature collection campaign to decertify the NRLCA’s status. Led by Johnny Chandler, a rural letter carrier in Tennessee, they call themselves “Decertify NRLCA.”
So far, the group has collected almost 11,000 signatures. In order to put a decertify vote before the NRLCA’s membership, the campaign needs to collect signatures from 30 percent of the union’s membership. In the NRLCA’s case, that means about 33,000 verified signatures.
Once the signatures are collected, the next step would involve submitting the signatures for verification; then the vote to decertify would be put before the NRLCA’s membership at the contract’s next expiration date in May 2024.
The decertification campaign faces legal challenges and unclear hopes about what would come next. But it is an expression of discontent with the union leadership’s handling of the pay cuts, which has led some to question the value of the organization.
THE RRECS SYSTEM, INSTITUTED THROUGH BINDING ARBITRATION in a prior contract negotiation, calculates how many hours it takes per week for a rural letter carrier to complete their route, and uses that to determine their pay. An independent engineer tracked rural letter carriers for a year to make the estimates, at a time of declining mail volume.
After a back-and-forth saga lasting more than a decade, RRECS was officially put into effect on May 6. Some carriers have claimed that there were errors in the calculations, leading to reduced pay. The NRLCA tried to get ahold of the data and algorithms used in RRECS, to no avail.
King acknowledged the NRLCA’s calls to delay RRECS’s adoption, but said that rank-and-file members like himself still felt betrayed, because the implementation was worse than what they were led to believe. “[NRLCA] were adamant,” he said. “‘You’re going to be all right. You’re not going to feel it too badly.’ Even though we knew that mail volume was declining.”
Attempting to delay RRECS’s implementation, six senators wrote to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Among their foremost concerns was that RRECS amounted to a black box of software feasting on massive reams of data, carrying immense financial consequences for workers.
At time of writing, the NRLCA has not responded to the Prospect’s request for comment. But in an interview with VICE, NRLCA president Don Maston said he “knew there were going to be some winners and some losers” with RRECS’s adoption. Maston told VICE that he had no intention of meeting with the members collecting signatures for a decertification vote.
The decertification campaign faces legal challenges and unclear hopes about what would come next.
So far, the Decertify movement’s biggest challenge has been communicating to rank-and-file members about the exact process. In addition, the movement’s organizers have struggled to explain that they would not submit the signatures unless they secured a guarantee from another union taking on the membership. “We definitely don’t want to be without a union,” King said. “We understand people are afraid to be left without a union, but that is not our intention with the decertification process.”
They have their eyes set on the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. According to King, attempts have been made to reach the Teamsters, after a conversation between Chandler and Moses Darden, a local Teamsters representative in North Carolina, regarding the national acquiring the NRLCA’s membership.
Shortly thereafter, however, Darden took a different note with Chandler, citing the possibility of violating a “no-raid” clause. In 2005, after the Teamsters and other unions left the AFL-CIO, unions inside and outside the federation forged the no-raid pact, which prevents unions from poaching other unions’ members. [After publication, a Teamsters spokesperson told the Prospect, “We are not in talks with the rural letter carriers.”]
I asked the AFL-CIO if the “no-raid” pact applied to the four of them acquiring union members outside of the four, but they did not respond in time for publication.
While disappointed about the no-raid concerns from the Teamsters, King said that he believed the law was on their side. His evidence was that, while the National Association of Letter Carriers, another letter carrier union, is a member of the AFL-CIO, the NRLCA is not. Therefore it should not be subject to the terms of a “no-raid” agreement. “We believe that we are a candidate for takeover,” King said, referring to the Teamsters. He added: “We are being told that the Teamsters’ legal department is looking into it.” [After publication, a Teamsters spokesperson denied King’s account, stating, “Our legal department is not engaged on this topic.”] Still, unions have been wary of these kinds of raids in recent years.
The NRLCA’s leadership has seized upon the legal ambiguity of whether decertification is feasible. In a late-August Facebook post, the NRLCA told its membership: “The NRLCA National Board is aware of the efforts to decertify the NRLCA … We take any and all attacks against this union seriously and we will not sit idly by to see what happens.”
An attached PDF tells NRLCA members that decertification would erase five decades of contractual gains. The document states: “Every right and term or condition of employment currently guaranteed by the Agreement must be re-negotiated without any assurance that it will be reinstated … There is no guarantee that you will be represented by another union.”
The NRLCA’s countereffort has appeared to quell the Decertify movement’s momentum. The Decertify NRLCA website currently says, “We're getting fewer signatures in the last few weeks … due to the scare tactic post that NRLCA made. I can’t stress this enough … IF WE DON’T FIND A NEW UNION I WILL NOT ASK FOR AN ELECTION and we will stay with NRLCA (sadly).”
According to King, the most frustrating aspect has been how the NRLCA has responded to decertification threats. “Instead of addressing our concerns and offering empathy and a solution,” he said, “[the NRLCA is] only telling members what they will lose if they decertify the union. They have offered no solutions [for RRECS’s implementation] and instead lie and downplay the matter.
In the meantime, even if the rate of signatures collected has slowed down, there are still several months ahead of the next contract expiration. If the current sentiment lingers and the Teamsters give a positive final decision, the Decertify movement might seize what “feels like the opportunity where we have the most disgruntled workers,” said King.
