Good afternoon brothers and sisters, I’m M. Drezner and I am a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). I want to thank the hard working members of the National Association of Letter Carriers for putting this on not only in Sioux Falls, but around the country. This is not the first time the postal service has come under attack, as brother Justin summed up at the beginning of the event. The working class of this country has sacrificed its blood to establish many standards we enjoy today and have had to fight and claw protections away from the ruling class so that we might all have a better standard of living. But those protections, if not safeguarded with the constant strengthening of a class-oriented trade union movement, are always subject to rollbacks and are always under threat from those with a voracious hunger to privatize and commodify every facet of our society.

A paper was published, or rather leaked, last month detailing Wells Fargo’s thesis for what privatizing our postal service would look like. In this document titled “USPS Privatization: A Framework” Wells Fargo lays out what it believes is a plan that would “enhance parcel profitability” (their words) and when I looked through all the sweeping changes they would make to our postal system, it was borderline horrific. One of the cornerstones of this document were the acquisition of real estate, selling all the land that the postal service occupies which they estimated to be in the realm of $85 billion. Not only that, but Wells Fargo also believes that USPS should raise its rates 30-140% citing that it would be good for FedEx and UPS. USPS has been a constant counterweight to the greed of FedEx and UPS by providing affordable shipping methods.

Another topic that Wells Fargo wants on the chopping block is pensions and what they described as “healthcare liabilities” (because heaven forbid workers use their healthcare that they pay for). Wells Fargo believes that these pensions should be instead offloaded to taxpayers to foot the bill, relieving the company of its obligation to their members and most likely moving to a 401K that is volatile and can make the ruling class even more money.

Currently, USPS provides what is called Universal Service Obligation or USO which requires mail to be delivered to all US address within six days. This ensures that citizens located in Alaska and Hawaii receive their mail in a timely manner. Under privatization, there would be no guarantee when a package would arrive to those states, or any state for that matter.

And rural Americans? It is noted that the rural community has a “strong affinity” for the postal service, but provides no recourse for them under privatization. So essentially, we are leaving rural Americans disconnected from their family and friends, kicking them to the curb because they’re not “profitable”.

The prevailing belief throughout this entire plan is that the ruling class, not content with its vast levels of wealth, wants to continue stripping away all services to Americans at the whims of ever increasing levels of profit. National programs that are privatized often experience poorer service at massively increased rates and that is the threat we are faced with today.

But while the situation may be dark and the road ahead uncertain, the undeniable truth is that this country runs every day because of the working class. Our brothers and sisters in the NALC work long days to ensure the postal service runs and that Americans receive their mail. One of the working class’ greatest tools is solidarity and it’s what has brought all of us here today, because an injury to one is an injury to all. In the face of an attack, the rank-and-file movement is ultimately what can prevent a disaster from taking place. Any union is only as strong as its rank and file.

As Harry Bridges, former President of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union said, “the most important word in the language of the working class is solidarity”. Brothers and sisters in the NALC, the class-oriented trade union movement is with you on this day and we join you in the struggle against privatization of USPS. Solidarity to the working class!

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This coincides with President Trump’s appointment of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE is tasked with “tackling government bureaucracy and streamlining processes” of the US Government. This would put the NLRB in its crosshairs as it is supposed to be a check on the autocracy of corporations in the US. Musk’s role in this proposed initiative is a direct conflict of interest considering Musk’s legal fight against the NLRB.

We must ask the question, who elected Musk? How has an oligarch been put into a position to oversee a government apparatus supposedly aimed at being a check on tyrannical rule? Of course, these appointments have been a consistent feature of the US state apparatus, but the appointment of Musk, who spent over $200 million of his own money to get Trump elected, is in effect doing the quiet part out loud. This is an indication of how the NLRB and workers’ rights in general will fare during Trump’s second administration.

To add insult to injury, the Democratic majority during the “lame duck” session of the last Congress failed to re-confirm NLRB Chair, Lauren McFerran, which would have maintained a pro-worker NLRB for the first two years of Trump’s administration. With so-called “friends of labor” like this, who needs enemies? By design, this failure has handed a hobbled NLRB over to a Trump regime hell-bent on stripping away workers’ rights. Now, Trump has fired other members of the NLRB, including General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and Former Chair Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the Board without a quorum.

The current situation among the misleaders of labor is an over-reliance on the administrative state to protect the rights which militant rank-and-file workers fought and died for. LUEL exists because we see the imperative for the US labor movement to regain its militancy in a class-oriented fight against capital. Only this can ensure a strong future for both the labor movement and the working-class as a whole in the United States.

In solidarity,
Labor United Educational League

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In its decision, the NLRB ruled that going forward companies are no longer able to use the captive audience meeting to force workers to listen to their anti-union diatribes used to convince workers that the bosses “have their best interests at heart”. Unfortunately, this ruling does not go far enough as it still allows so-called voluntary meetings, “so long as workers are provided reasonable advance notice of: the subject of any such meeting, that attendance is voluntary with no adverse consequences for failure to attend, and that no attendance records of the meeting will be kept.”

Given the precedent set by the Supreme Court’s overruling of the 1984 Chevron Decision earlier this year this is likely to provide cover for the bosses to continue this practice with little recourse. The striking down of the Chevron Decision has limited the ability of federal agencies to interpret the laws they are tasked to enforce.

Labor United Educational League stands in solidarity with all worker-organizers who take up the mantel to challenge monopolies such as Amazon. We cannot solely rely on NLRB administrative law to protect us. Only a mass, class-oriented fight can defeat the monopolists.

In solidarity,
Labor United Educational League

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