Monday, March 18, 2024

Rank and File Postal Workers Whipped Bosses, Union Leaders, and Richard Nixon in 1970

 

A wildcat strike by New York City postal workers quickly spread in 1970 bring mail service to a halt in much of the country.

The day after St. Patricks Day in New York City was often little more than an intense, city-wide hangover.  But on March 18, 1970 residents of the Big Apple awoke to more than just a headache.  Thousands of local Postal workers were on the picket line in defiance of both Federal Law which prohibited strikes by government employees and their own union leadership.  Within days business in the commercial and financial center of the nation ground to a halt in those pre-electronic communications days and the strike spread to more than 30 cities with 200,000 off the job.  It was a big deal.  A very big deal.

But chances are unless you were one of the strikers or a member of their families, you have forgotten or never heard of one of the biggest—and ultimately most successfullabor battles of the Post-War era.  Maybe that’s because of all the other turmoil in the country that year.  With the Vietnam War dragging on, protests were growing bigger and attracting more than just students and hippies. Major cities were tinderboxes, exploding regularly in Black riots that seemed more and more like insurrections.  Even middleclass womenwives, mothers, and secretaries—were taking to the streets and shaking their fists.  Draconian drug laws fueled an underground economy, gang warfare that was wider spread and pervasive than between rival bootleggers with Tommy guns, and ordinary street crime.

So, the Postal workers had a beef?  Big deal, seemed the attitude in Washington.  Take a number and wait your turn. And the Posties did have a beef, a very big beef.

It hadn’t always been that way.  In the old days Post Office jobs at all levels had been political plumbs and handed out according to the rough justice of the spoils system.  Every time the Presidency flipped to a different party, there was a general house cleaning, and fresh armies of patronage workers.  Civil Service in the early 20th Century had ended that for all but local postmasters and other muckety-mucks.  During the Depression working for the Post Office meant not only unheard of job security but came with an array of benefitspaid holidays and vacations, health insurance, and pensions—that industrial workers in the private sector could only win by wearing out shoe leather and risking busted heads on the picket line.  During the deep Post-World War II recession, the Post Office offered preferential hiring to veterans, and many leaped at the chance for secure employment.  In fact, the large cohort of former veterans in New York would provide the core leadership and rank-and-file muscle for the strike.

Despite the security and the benefits, Post Office pay had been drifting down in comparison to the civilian workforce throughout the boom years of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s.  Workers had not had a pay raise since 1967 and that raise had failed to keep up with inflation.  Entry level worker were laboring at wages below the poverty line if they were supporting families, as most of them were.  In addition, conditions in crowded urban postal facilities were poor and dangerous.  Morale was low and anger growing.

The situation was even more frustrating because the law not only forbad strike action, but it banned any kind of collective bargaining.  National unions of postal workers, mainly the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) representing clerks and mail handlers, and the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) could do little but lobby the administration and Congress for better pay and conditions.  The inherit weakness of such a position had made that leadership both timid and cautious.  But rank and file anger was festering.

In 1968 the Kappel Commission, established by Congress to review the current state of the Postal Service, had recommended that postal workers be given the same rights as private sector workers to collective bargaining. When recommendation was rejected by Congress, union leaders could not be stirred beyond issuing disappointed press releases.

Black workers brought the spirit and disciplined non-violence of the Civil Rights Movement to the Postal Strike of 1970.

It was too much for the rank-and-file, especially in New York.  Not only did Postal Workers there have ties to the traditionally militant unions of the city and included many members with Socialist, Communist, and radical backgrounds, but a huge infusion of Black workers over the previous decade brought with them the spirit of the civil rights movement, familiarity with direct action and non-violent protest, and cultural and political connections to the Black empowerment movement.  

Agitation for strike action began among rank-and-file militants after newly elected President Richard M. Nixon proposed only a flat 4.1% wage increase in his 1969 budget.  The proposal was angrily shouted down at New York union meetings and pleasure for a strike grew.  NALC President James Rademacher scurried to the White House with word that he might not be able to control his members. Rademacher and Nixon reached an agreement in December 1969 that tied a 1970 5.4% raise to the creation of an independent postal authority and collective bargaining.   When a Congressional committee finally moved on the agreement in early March local leaders at New York’s NALC local Branch 36 were hooted from the platform.

                                  Vincent Sombrotto, Rank-and-file leader of the strike.

Rank-and-File leader Vincent Sombrotto and others demanded an immediate strike vote.  Union leaders refused and called such a vote illegal and against the union’s own constitution.  Over a series of acrimonious meetings union leadership was able to delay a vote until March 17 as the city was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.  The strike was overwhelmingly approved and pickets went up after the stroke of midnight.

The next day an emergency meeting called by the rank and file at other New York locals of both the NALC and APWU forced their own votes and joined the strike.  Over the next few days it would be repeated in city after city.  In Chicago more than 3000 members literally chased their leadership out of the hall and down the street.

Instinctively defiant, Nixon went on national TV to order employees back to work immediately, threatening mass dismissals if they did not.  He vowed that the government would never negotiate under duress.  The speech only aroused the ire and determination of the strikers and helped spread it even faster and further.

The national media, including the influential weekly news magazines helped whip up hysteria about the walk-out.

By the end of the week more than 200,000 were out in most urban population centers and the strike was even spreading to conservative small cities and towns.  Newspapers became semi-hysterical as business paralysis set in and the stock market plunged on low volume because trades could not be executed without mail orders and confirmations.   Scare stories of violence, all false, circulated.  Picket lines were noisy but disciplined and models of non-violence.

After a week the administration went to court to seek an emergency injunction, which was quickly granted, against the strike and threatened individual strikers with jail for contempt of court if they did not comply.  That only backfired, not only stealing the resolve of the strikers, but bringing from other Federal employees that they would join the strike if the injunction was enforced.

On March 23 a desperate Nixon again took to the airways.  He announced the proclamation of a National Emergency—just a step short of martial law—which authorized the use of Federal troops to move the mail.  He followed up the speech with Operation Graphic Hand which mobilize 24,000 members of the Regular Army, National Guard, Army Reserve, Air National Guard and Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps Reserve of which 18,500 were deployed to 17 New York City Post Offices.  Tens of thousands of others were put on alert for possible deployment to other cities.

Workers were outraged and fearful that the introduction of troops would lead to the violent suppression of the strike in the tradition of the Pullman Strike in which the Army moved the mail at the point of bayonet and machine gun.  Strikers allowed the military to move into the Post Offices without opposition.

Federal troops brought in to move the mails were untrained and overwhelmed.  They could do little to unjam the system.

Once inside, however, the untrained troops had no idea what to do.  The mail was still snarled.

The desperate administration now entered secret negotiations with union leaders after vowing never to do so.   With no third TV appearance and as little fanfare as possible, Nixon capitulated to virtually all  the strikers’ demands on March 25.  He agreed to recommend an 8% wage increase and the right of collective bargaining, albeit without the right to strike.  Amnesty for the strikers was guaranteed.

Workers went back to work after an eventful, but peaceful 2 week strike.

Richard Nixon, Post Master General Roy Blount and national union leaders in a photo op before trying to hammer out a wage agreement to end the strike.

Congress enacted the terms of the agreement in the budget and in the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 which went into effect on July 1, 1971 and transformed the Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service. an independent establishment of the executive branch to be operated like a private corporation.  Rank-and-file militants rightly feared that this hybrid creation would come back to bite them in the ass and become a path to privatization

The logo of the APWU after four other postal unions merged under its banner.

To prepare themselves for collective bargaining that summer the four smaller postal unions merged with APWU.  The new union, retaining the American Postal Workers name, was, like its components, an affiliated member of the AFL-CIO and at the time of its creation, the largest union of postal workers in the world.

Sombrotto was elected 16th president of the National Association of Letter Carriers between in 1978 and served until retiring in 2002.  He retired in 2002 and finished with over 300,000 members.

 

Sunday, March 17, 2024

How Americans Hijacked St. Patrick’s Day—Not a Quiet Catholic Feast Day Any More

 

                                      An elegant late 19th Century American St. Patrick's Day card.

Note:  For those of you unaware, this is my natal anniversary.  Turn 74 today—a personal Jubilee for the Old Man.  Bet you wondered how I got the name.  Anyway, I am rerunning a  classic post. Meanwhile to the Irish and wan-a-be-Irish, enjoy the day.  Have fun but try not to live down to some unfortunate stereotypes.   And for Christ’s sake don’t drink the damn green beer, an abomination and insult to the soul!  Have a dram or two of Jameson’s with a Guinness back for me!

Greeting card publishers quickly cashed in on Irish American sentimentality for the Auld Sod--a sentimentality that often erased the grim realities of the Potato Famine which sent so many landless peasants to American shores.

Acknowledging the elephant in the room—today is the Feast of St. Patrick, originally a low-key religious celebration in the Auld Sod.  In the U.S. it’s St. Patricks Day, which is, as they say, a whole other kettle of fish.  For better or worse this quasi-holiday is an Irish American phenomenon.  Let’s trace the metamorphosis from religiosity, to ethnic muscle flexing, to Irish nationalism, to partisan political display, to equal opportunity public drinking festival.

It all began on March 17, 1762 with the very first St. Patrick’s Day parade anywhere in the world.  Irish soldiers in a British regiment headquartered in New York City marched behind their musicians and drew cheers from the small local Irish minority, both Catholic and Protestant—mostly Protestant in those days.  It became if not an annual event, one which was observed most years.  When the Redcoats left the city at the end of the American Revolution various local Irish mutual aid societies like the Hibernians and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick held often competing events which, if they happened to intersect, sometimes devolved into brawls.  

Up until the mid '60s St. Patrick's Day remained a religious festival in Ireland and the annual parade in Dublin, seen here in 1905, was mostly a religious procession, often led by the St. John's Total Abstinence and Benefit Society.  Today the parade is an American style extravaganza awash in Kelly Green, dancing leprechauns, shamrocks, and scantily clad girls.  General rowdiness is the rule of the day, largely due to the large annual pilgrimages to the Auld Sod by Irish Americans, now generations removed from the island.

After the United Irishman uprising of 1798 was crushed by the British imposing a harsh repression including the banning of the wearing o’ the Green, a new wave of Irish refugees flooded New York, Boston, and other eastern cities.  They inoculated the annual St. Patrick’s Day observances with a new political significance and wearing green (instead of the traditional Irish colors of blue and gold) became a protest against British rule in the homeland and a call to action to overthrow that rule. 

The Potato Famine unleashed yet another wave of immigration bringing throngs of displaced peasants to the already growing slums of the city. Competing Irish aid societies finally decided to unite behind a single, massive demonstration in New York in 1848.  The theme of independence for Ireland was mixed with an act of aggressive defiance by the now largely Catholic masses against the nativists from Tammany Hall who controlled the city government, the Know Nothings, and street gangs who harassed and bullied them

In trying to market to Irish Americans, not everyone got it right.  This tone deaf greeting card featured the pug-nosed Irish stereotypes featured in Know Nothing and anti-immigrant publications.  The figure on the left has a sash identifying him as a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.  The one on the right supposedly is from a competing organization that had frequently brawled with the AOH for supremacy on St. Patrick's Day.

In 1858 the Fenian Brotherhood was organized in the United States in support the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a secret oath society agitating for the establishment of a “democratic Irish republic.”  The St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York and other cities became powerful recruiting tools for the Fenians. Social events around the day annually raised thousands of dollars, much of it to support fantastic plots and buy arms.  On more than one occasion Fenian plots to attack Canada brought the U.S. and Britain perilously close to war, which, of course was the objective.  

By the second half of the 19th Century New York's St. Patrick's Day parades had become elaborate celebrations of Irish nationalism and a display of raw political power in the city.

The failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 in which labor leader James Connolly, fresh from several years in America as an IWW organizer, and an Irish-American unit of Hibernian Rifles were both involved, led to a fresh round of frenzied support for independence back home.  The campaign of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the Irish Civil War between the Free State government and republican rebels were both largely financed by Irish Americans.  Even after the establishment of the Republic in 1937, Irish-Americans continued to fund rebel groups aimed at uniting Ulster to the rest of the island, including support for Sein Fein and the Provisional IRA in their armed struggle through The Troubles.  All of this was reflected in the parades and other celebrations of the day which had become dominated by Rebel songs.

St. Patrick’s Day celebrations also were important displays of Irish culture.  Traditional Irish music and dance was so suppressed at home that both nearly disappeared.  Irish-Americans like Chicagos Police Chief Francis ONeill collected and preserved the songs and began schools to teach it and traditional Irish step dancing.  Both were re-introduced into Irish culture as a result of these efforts and put on display in St. Patrick’s Day parades, banquets, and concerts

Hizzonor da Mayor, Richard J. Daley steps off with his blackthorn stick and green fedora at the head of the 1963 Chicago St. Patrick's Day joined by officials of the sponsoring Plumbers union, the Irish Consul General, Cardinal Alber Meyer (second from left} and actor Pat O'Brien to the Mayor's left and a bevy of politicians in the second row jockeying for position.  Then Republican Cook County States Attorney James P. Thompson can be spotted just over Daley's shoulder.

The Irish also excelled at political organization in this country.  Unlike other ethnic groups with large concentrations like the Germans, they were able to create viable political organizations with alliances with other ethnic groups that allowed them to control many city governments for decades.  In Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley brought the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, previously a South Side neighborhood event, to the heart of the Loop and dyed the Chicago River green every year in a display of political power.  Politicians of all ethnicities jockeyed to be as close as possible to Hizonor in the front ranks of the parade.  

"Everybody's Irish!"  is the new equal opportunity slogan of American St. Patrick's Day promoted by breweries, bars, and bottle peddlers of all sorts.  The message seems to be working.

By the late 20th Century St. Patrick’s Day had spread well beyond its ethnic roots.  Everyone is Irish on St. Paddys Day became a byword pushed by breweries, bars, and distilleries making it one of the biggest party days of the year.  Green beer and vomiting teenagers have become new symbols of the holiday.  


And what about St. Patrick?  Well, what about him!