Letter carriers rally against privatization amid sweeping job cuts at Postal Service
Dozens of letter carriers rallied in Federal Plaza Sunday afternoon to protest the Trump administration’s latest threats to the U.S. Postal Service.
They chanted and held signs reading “Fight Like Hell” and “Apartheid Elon Keep Your Nazi Hands Off Our Mail.” Earlier this month, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy agreed to work with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to make sweeping cuts to the postal service’s workforce and budget. President Donald Trump has also repeatedly called for the privatization of USPS.
“We are out here in rain, sleet, snow, gunshots,” Wendy Woodward, a letter carrier who works on Chicago’s West Side, told the Sun-Times. “We are proud to be letter carriers. And we’re here today to fight to keep our jobs.”
DeJoy agreed to cut 10,000 jobs through a voluntary early retirement program. The postal service employees around 640,000 workers who make deliveries from inner cities to America’s most remote areas.
“The postal service is worth fighting for,” Mack Julion, assistant secretary-treasurer of the National Association of Letter Carriers, told the Sun-Times. “It’s not just a matter of saving our jobs; this is a service that belongs to the American people.”
The postal service binds rural and urban America, Julion said. If the postal service was closed or privatized, remote communities would go without their mail, he added.
“We're talking about taking service away from the American people. Constitutionally, we deliver to every address,” Julion said. “There's 51 million American households that private delivery services does not service. We are the last mile. They drop it off at the post office. There aren’t any brown trucks out there making deliveries.”
State Sen. Ram Villivalam was among the public officials who spoke at Sunday’s rally. He is sponsoring a resolution in the Illinois General Assembly to show support for the postal service.
“We had a lot of people in this world that called essential workers, like yourselves, essential during the pandemic,” Villivalam said. “So if they called you essential then, they should be calling you essential now, thanking you now, standing in solidarity with you now.”