New union contract ensures pay raises, COLAs for postal workers

By David Thornton

July 12, 2016

If you meet a postal clerk who seems particularly cheerful today, it’s because more than 200,000 employees of the U.S. Postal Service began this week with a slew of new benefits. The American Postal Workers Union concluded a two-year contract negotiation, securing pay raises, cost of living adjustments, job security commitments and more for its members.

“We, as a union, should be proud of the results,” APWU President Mark Dimondstein said. “We made some real progress on most of our major goals.”

Career employees covered by the union will receive a 3.8 percent pay increase in three installments before 2018. The first installment of 1.2 percent is retroactive, effective Nov. 14, 2015, and the next two installments of 1.3 percent each will come in November 2016 and 2017.

Career employees will also maintain their current COLA formula. Dimondstein said in a June 8 press release that postal management had sought the elimination of COLA for career employees.

Postal support employees — to whom the COLA does not apply — will receive larger pay raises. They will follow the same schedule as the career employees, but will be 2.2 and 2.3 percent each. In addition, support employees will receive additional increases of fifty cents per hour in installments. The first, $0.09 per hour, is retroactive, effective Nov. 14, 2015. The second and third will be in May 2017 and 2018, and will be $0.20 and $0.21, respectively.

Support employees will also receive six paid holidays and access to a USPS health plan, to which the agency would contribute $125 per pay period.

The contract also includes several job security provisions, including no lay-off protections, embargoes on subcontracting of driving work for the Postal Vehicle Service, and a guarantee not to close or consolidate plants before April 2017.

In addition, all maintenance and motor vehicle support employees were converted to career employees, and the PSE category was eliminated in these crafts.

The union was forced to make one main concession.

“We were unable to stop management’s demand that employees pay a greater share of health insurance premiums,” Dimondstein said.

The portion of health care premiums paid by employees will increase 1 percent per year for the next three years.

However, he did say that the union “successfully fought back the main concessionary demands of postal management — for increased percentages of non-career employees, a new tier of lower-paid career employees, the elimination of COLA and the weakening of our no layoff protection.”

This new contract replaces one that expired on May 20, 2015.

We support you

We here in why did you join the union and on behalf of the members of the TWU Local 100 support the American Postal Workers Union AFL-CIO (APWU) and National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRLCA). We are with you in seeking a just contract for the benefit of the membership.

It is always the blue collar workers who get the short end of the stick and we here in why did you join the union see the similarity of your situation with ours. We both have executives who have secured send away golden parachutes coupled with unimaginable and unfathomable benefits, while the blue collar workers have to fight to get a 2% or 4% raise. The blue collar workers are living from paycheck to paycheck and have to make ends meet while the prices are soaring upwards. It is a real privilege in siding with our fellow brethren APWU & NRLCA in this day and age when unions are challenged like never before by the executives and republicans who run amok.

We here in why did you join the union and on behalf of the members of the TWU Local 100 believe in you, and we know and have heard the executives when they utilize rhetoric of the dire financial status in the hope of denying the blue collar workers their rightfully and deserved raise. We the blue collar workers have serious different points of view from the executives with regard to our pay, work rules, health benefit, pension and numerous other issues.

We here in why did you join the union and all other unions couldn’t tolerate the thought of being denied the right to ask for a raise. Since we the blue collar cannot earn the luxurious pay coupled with the golden parachutes that the management earn we will not be deterred until the day when the ratio of compensation between a blue collar worker and the executive is balanced. We here in why did you join the union do not agree with the current discriminatory compensation method that views the management compensation as quasi-fixed cost and the blue collar worker as a variable cost. We refuse to be paid on an hourly basis, whereas the white collar receive monthly salaries.