Even as the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding on July 26, postal unions were sounding the alarm about the new postmaster general and about growing threats to privatize the post office.
David Steiner, who started July 15 as America’s postmaster general, is a former Waste Management CEO who served on the board of USPS competitor FedEx. Postal unions opposed Steiner’s appointment from the moment the USPS board announced he would replace Louis DeJoy, who resigned.
“His selection isn’t just a conflict of interest — it’s an aggressive step toward handing America’s mail system over to corporate interests,” said National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) President Brian Renfroe in a statement released after Steiner’s selection in May.
FedEx is notoriously anti-union, and unlike UPS, it classifies its drivers as independent contractors, not employees. Waste Management, meanwhile, has some union employees, but it’s not willingly a union employer.
In a 2012 interview, Steiner crowed that the union-represented share of Waste Management drivers shrank from 32% to 20% over 10 years.
“We’ve done a spectacular job of helping our union employees understand that being nonunion can actually be better for you in virtually every circumstance,” Steiner told CNN.
Postal unions have been on high alert against plans to privatize USPS ever since President Trump floated the idea at a press conference in December.
On July 21, the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) launched a national TV ad campaign warning against possible privatization plans. The 30-second ad refers to a Feb. 27 internal memo authored by a Wells Fargo equity analyst which concludes that privatization of USPS would be tricky but possible, and proposes a path to do so. USPS would sell off its money-making parcel business and “harvest” value by liquidating buildings and land. Postal employees would be offered a deferred buyout or laid off. In any possible scenario, the memo says, price increases of 30% to 140% would be likely, which would make the higher-cost shippers FedEx and UPS more competitive.
“There’s a lot of problems we’re willing to solve, and there’s a lot of changes we’re willing to go through, just as long as we don’t privatize,” National Postal Mail Handlers Union Local 315 President Bryan Easley said.
To the relief of the unions, Steiner has said he’s NOT for privatization. In a July 17 video shared with USPS workers, Steiner said he supports the current structure of USPS. USPS was historically a cabinet-level federal agency, but a 1970 law made it an independent self-supporting public corporation owned by the U.S. government.
“I do not believe the postal service should be privatized, or that it should become an appropriated part of the federal government,” Steiner said.
That last part refers to talk by Trump about placing USPS under the control of the Commerce Department, which would violate the 1970 law that made USPS independent of the White House. The president appoints members of the Postal Board of Governors, but they appoint and oversee the postmaster general.
“The words are what we want to hear. The actions will speak for themselves,” National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association President Don Maston told NPR.
