CHICAGO – U.S. Postal workers across the state are demanding action as union leaders say 140 letter carriers have been attacked in Chicago alone since 2022.
Some of those attacks were even deadly.
In the latest round of contract negotiations, measures to improve safety are among the top demands being made. Union leaders even said their letter carriers feel under-appreciated, working without a contract since May 2023.
“They don’t understand what we face in our day. Each and every day as we go out there in fear!” Elise Foster with the Illinois State Association of Letter Carriers said at a rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza.
USPS proposes changes to save $3 billion per year, starting in 2025 “We’re getting assaulted in the neighborhood just for doing our job. Having guns pulled on us while we’re delivering the mail,” Mike Caref with the National Association of Letter Carriers added.
Letter carriers also claim they also never got the hazard pay they expected while working during the pandemic.
They’re now demanding better pay, maternity leave and an allowance to pay for respectable uniforms. Most importantly, they want better safety measures to prevent the kind of tragedy that happened in July when 48-year-old letter carrier Octavia Redmond was shot and killed while delivering mail to the West Pullman neighborhood .
“We don’t want our postal workers to feel like they have to carry guns to be safe,” Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Illinois) said.
Representatives with the Illinois State Association of Letter Carriers provided few details on precisely what kind of measures can be deployed to improve safety, but they said that’s being worked out in negotiations.
The new USPS mail trucks are coming: Why do they look like that? The United States Postal Service told WGN News it could not comment on negotiations, but sent the following statement:
“We respect our employees’ rights to express their opinions and participate in informational picketing while off the clock. Through our Delivering for America investments, we have built capacity into our processing, logistics, and delivery infrastructure to meet customers’ evolving mail and package needs. We are executing on strategies to pull together the people, technology, transportation, equipment, and facilities into a well-integrated and streamlined mail and package network. We have worked hard in past 3 years to stabilize our workforce. We have converted more than 191,000 pre-career employees to career status since January 2021.”
Postal service managers, however, did not mention any measures to boost security for vulnerable letter carriers.
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