There are about 60 letter carriers who work out of the Monterey post office, and who are members of the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 1310. They might be relatively small in number, but they are joining thousands of letter carriers across the country in planning a rally on Sunday, March 23, in support of keeping the U.S. Postal Service staffed up as a public agency.
"Privatization would be bad for everyone—not just for our jobs, but everyone," says Phil Padick, president of Branch 1310. "Urban areas where there are a lot of consolidated deliveries would be profitable, but in rural areas [they] would raise the price.
"We have universal service, that's what makes the post office what it is. We are mandated to deliver to every address."
Padick worries about a potential future where rural areas don't have service at all, or costs would soar. "There are ways to save money, but privatization is not the answer," he says.
Like other federal employees, Padick and other mail carriers know only about their job prospects what they read in the news out of Washington. He says at first, things looked secure despite the Trump Administration creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But then came news reports in mid-March that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy plans to cut 10,000 workers from USPS and to shave billions of dollars from its budget.
That prompted NALC members to start organizing.
"The NALC stands firmly against dismantling a nearly 250-year-old public institution that serves the public in every location in all 50 states and U.S. territories, that is older than the country itself, and that is based in the Constitution," according to a press release announcing the rally.
Daily, some 200,000 letter carriers around the U.S. deliver 376 million pieces of mail.
The rally in Monterey is scheduled to take place from 11am-2pm on Sunday, March 23 at Window on the Bay. It's the first large, coordinated action by federal employees locally in reaction to DOGE's actions.
Padick is hopeful that letter carriers from other sites and other NALC branches—as well as members of the public—will join in as well.
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