Union leaders recall 1970 postal strike
http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_4410
By Mark Gruenberg
26 March 2010
WASHINGTON - Imagine your faithful Letter Carrier, braving "rain,
snow, sleet, hail and gloom of night" to quote the old Post Office
motto for so little pay that he, and it was almost always a "he,"
could draw welfare and apply for food stamps.
It was low pay like that, and impossible working conditions to boot,
that led the nation's post office workers, then members of nine
unions, to stage their first and only nationwide strike in late March 1970.
That protest, which began as a walkout in New York City, quickly
spread across the U.S., said retired Letter Carriers President
Vincent Sombrotto a leader in the uprising and current Postal
Workers President Bill Burrus. And its success led to wide-ranging
changes in the workers' lives, and even to the creation of the Postal
Service as a quasi-independent U.S. agency, with the aim of turning a profit.
But the win didn't come easily, the two union leaders said at a March
20 symposium at the Postal Museum in Washington to commemorate the
40th anniversary of the strike. Indeed, there wasn't even unanimity
within unions at the start of the struggle, Sombrotto admitted. One
old-line leader charged the strikers "were incited by the SDS,"
referring to the radical Students for a Democratic Society.
"But we really started to take off when the leadership of our branch
didn't show up" at a meeting the workers called, Sombrotto told the
standing-room-only crowd, which included several other veterans of
the struggle besides Burrus and himself. A non-partisan
ballot-counting group ran the strike vote, and the tally was
1,550-1,005 to walk out, he said. Eventually, some 200,000 workers,
including clerks and carriers, did.
The ball really started to roll "when leaders of Branch 36, who were
meeting across the street" heard about the vote and pledged their
support, as did the rest of organized labor. "We're a labor union. We
belong to the AFL-CIO. We won't cross a picket line. That's good
enough for me," one other leader said, Sombrotto recalled.
Out in Cleveland, Burrus, a sorting clerk in mid-career he'd
already been toiling for the post office since the early 1950s was
trying to decide whether to leave for another occupation. Then the
strike came along, Burrus said.
"Our members were in front of our leaders, who were nowhere to be
found. But we would not return until we were satisfied and our needs
and those of our families were met," he declared.
They were. After nine days of the mail piling up including vital
things like paychecks and bills the Nixon administration negotiated
a settlement with the strikers: A 14% raise, a pension plan, and
arbitration to solve future disputes.
"And not one striker was fired," Burrus pointed out.
.
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