Post Office Workers Can Be Defenders of Key Public Goods
Melissa Rakestraw, a postal worker in Schaumburg, Illinois, grew up in a tiny rural town and didn’t plan on becoming a radical. But “I guess the short version," she says, "is, 'I got a job at the post office and became a socialist.'”
An activist holds a USPS envelope while protesting in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. (Alex Wroblewski / Getty Images)
Last month, Jacobin spoke with fifty-one-year-old Melissa Rakestraw, a letter carrier and shop steward with the National Association of Letter Carriers. Rakestraw, who delivers mail in Schaumburg, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, has been organizing her fellow postal workers around the country through the Labor Notes network of trade union militants. It’s been a busy time for her.
Although the post office has been persistently threatened with privatization and austerity (a bipartisan agenda) throughout the past decade, President Trump’s appointment of Louis DeJoy has brought the visibility of a Dickensian villain to the struggle — a vicious, greedy worm of a fellow.
DeJoy, a Republican mega-donor, is not only the first postmaster general in decades without experience as a letter carrier, recent Congressional testimony showed that he doesn’t even know how much a postcard stamp costs. (For historical context, the first person to hold this job was Ben Franklin.)
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