To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
November 6, 2020
Re: Postal workers and the elections
The situation in postal at this moment is dominated, understandably, by issues of the presidential election. Generally speaking, immense quantities of ballots have been processed through the mail. There has been little harassment as the ballots were cast, even at the polling places on November 3. But once the counting began, and especially after Trump took an early lead based on direct voting and then Biden surged past him largely based on mail-in votes, incidents grew. Right now, on November 5, the direct role of the post office is over and everything is in the hands of the election boards, the media, legal battles launched by Trump, and possible physical attacks that he may launch.
Massive overtime everywhere. Fort Street, one of two Detroit processing centers, announced eight consecutive days of mandatory overtime: 7 days, 12 hours for the workers on the overtime-desired list, and six days, 10 hours for those not on the list. This means no days off for the list and one for the non-list. Activists in the Labor Notes Postal Organizing Committee (POC) report even heavier overtime in Oregon, involving violations of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) contract. The role of COVID-19 in depleting the postal workforce has been recognized in some of the media.
According to activists, the activities of the management-labor Task Forces in local areas in facilitating mail delivery has been a mixed bag. The local president of the Denver area APWU reported to the POC strong cooperation between local management and the union in handling the huge mail flow. But another activist, from Baltimore, reported the opposite: as of last Sunday, no Task Force had even been set up for the major Baltimore processing facility. However, the fact that counting the ballots is proceeding swiftly in controversial areas and no major protests of late mail delivery have arisen seems to indicate that mail delivery has been generally successful.
However, on Election Day U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia issued an order to Postmaster General DeJoy to conduct sweeps of processing facilities for unprocessed mail. There were reports of 300,000 mail-in ballots that had been scanned as entering the mail process but had no scan for leaving it. DeJoy refused to conduct the sweeps, leading Sullivan to declare that DeJoy will appear before him . What of the ballots? Essentially, DeJoy claims that the ballots were delivered and only lacked exit scans because they had been taken out of the mail flow and delivered directly to the election offices or drop boxes. But 300,000 is a lot of ballots to do with this with! It is well-known that diligent postal employees everywhere were removing ballots received from the mail flow as the deadlines approached and delivering them directly, but DeJoy's defense seems a stretch. DeJoy also announced that postal inspectors had been alerted and made an investigation that showed only 13 ballots undelivered.
The local picketing of DeJoy's fellow members of the Board of Directors is in abeyance until after the election. At the same time. APWU president Dimondstein's plan to take action against DeJoy on November 17 has not been announced on the union's web site.
The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) is again working entirely through the Task Forces and, according to president Rolando, all is going swimmingly.
At the same time, while apparently the APWU is also working with Task Forces where they function (not in Baltimore), the APWU leadership, which likes to appear more activist than the NALC, has been silent. There is nothing about union protest events on the web site. After refusing to call for any mass actions between the APWU's micro-rallies of August 28 (the "Postal Workers Day of Action") and the election of November 3, when the APWU could have made a great impact, Mark Dimondstein has whispered to local leaders about a November 17 action. Interestingly, some of the POC activists now say they are frustrated with Dimondstein for not pushing the November 17 action harder. One of them said it is hard to make plans for November 17 when you don't know who won the election yet (a point that I had made the week before). Recently Dimondstein made a phone call to the Detroit local president, praising him for the leaflet that a local union activist had assembled calling for people to prepare for mass action if Trump refuses to leave after losing. This praise is not impressive. After the leaflet's author told me of this phone call, I asked, why doesn't Dimonstein issue a national call? He leads one of the biggest unions, and if he agrees with the leaflet, it is just shameful that he will not issue a call for action. I raised the issue in the POC meeting but got no support; the most anyone could say was that the fate of the election may still be unsettled on November 17th and the union could deal with it then.
In addition to the leaflet that a few local APWU leaders distributed
at the Fort Street processing center here last week, reportedly
hundreds of groups and organizations around the country made plans to
fight to get the ballots counted. In connection with my criticism of
Dimondstein for not calling for action, I urged the POC activists to
keep up with the local mass actions and I asked what they were doing in
this regard. Someone said we can deal with this on November 17th
(showing the low level of interest in the POC for the anti-fascist
struggle outside postal). Throughout the country, various groups have
gone into action, and there have been a few clashes with the rightists.
In Detroit, the rightists attempted to attack the election vote
processing center but security kept them out. But on the same day,
elsewhere in Detroit, a march of about 100 election defenders took
place, followed by another later in the day of about the same size.
Sizable clashes took place in Portland and a few other places. Trump is
now focusing on legal challenges to the mail-in ballots now being
counted, which seem to be bringing Biden to victory. It does not look
likely that he can bring down enough votes by these means. At the same
time, it is possible that there will be more clashes on the streets,
but it is hard to see how this could change the process underway. But
Trump is a mentally disturbed white supremacist rightist and anything
is possible from him. And even if he is officially defeated there is
also the matter of actually removing him from office. Those fences
around the White Supremacist House did not go up for nothing. But for
now, his threats of Armageddon look like cowardly and empty bluster.
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