Labor and Politics in the U.S. Postal Service grew out of concern for the way a large public organization does its work. It reflects my effort to link experience working as a letter carrier and mail collector with subsequent years of study in the field of organizational sociology. The final product is an academic book that certainly reveals great distance from experience in the postal workplace, but I must confess that the book still presents more a view from the bottom than a view from the top of the post office. I hope this view proves beneficial. It turns out that studying the post office has become an ongoing project that has outlived several jobs, relationships, and hairlines. What originated as a historical study of the 1970 reorganization became an analysis of the causes and consequences of an ongoing process of re structuring and technological change in the post office. Fortunately for me, similar restructurings have recently occurred in organizations and industries across the nation and around the world. The competitive pressures, new technologies, and political and class-based conflicts dis cussed in this book are perhaps more relevant today than they were in the late 1970s when I began research on the post office.

This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. Historian Philip Rubio, a former postal worker, integrates civil rights, labor, and left movement histories that too often are written as if they happened separately. Centered on New York City and Washington, D.C., the book chronicles a struggle of national significance through its examination of the post office, a workplace with facilities and unions serving every city and town in the United States. Black postal workers--often college-educated military veterans--fought their way into postal positions and unions and became a critical force for social change. They combined black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike, which resulted in full collective bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly established U.S. Postal Service in 1971. In making the fight for equality primary, African American postal workers were influential in shaping today's post office and postal unions.

For eight days in March 1970, over 200,000 postal workers staged an illegal "wildcat" strike--the largest in United States history--for better wages and working conditions. Picket lines started in New York and spread across the country like wildfire. Strikers defied court injunctions, threats of termination, and their own union leaders. In the negotiated aftermath, the U.S. Post Office became the U.S. Postal Service, and postal workers received full collective bargaining rights and wage increases, all the while continuing to fight for greater democracy within their unions. Using archives, periodicals, and oral histories, Philip Rubio shows how this strike, born of frustration and rising expectations and emerging as part of a larger 1960s-1970s global rank-and-file labor upsurge, transformed the post office and postal unions. It also led to fifty years of clashes between postal unions and management over wages, speedup, privatization, automation, and service. Rubio revives the 1970 strike story and connects it to today's postal financial crisis that threatens the future of a vital 245-year-old public communications institution and its labor unions.

Investigating the essential role that the postal system plays in American democracy and how the corporate sector has attempted to destroy it. "With First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, Christopher Shaw makes a brilliant case for polishing the USPS up and letting it shine in the 21st century."—John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation and author of Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis "First Class is essential reading for all postal workers and for our allies who seek to defend and strengthen our public Postal Service."—Mark Dimondstein, President, American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO The fight over the future of the U.S. Postal Service is on. For years, corporate interests and political ideologues have pushed to remake the USPS, turning it from a public institution into a private business—and now, with mail-in voting playing a key role in local, state, and federal elections, the attacks have escalated. Leadership at the USPS has been handed over to special interests whose plan for the future includes higher postage costs, slower delivery times, and fewer post offices, policies that will inevitably weaken this invaluable public service and source of employment. Despite the general shift to digital communication, the vast majority of the American people—and small businesses—still rely heavily on the U.S. postal system, and many are rallying to defend it. First Class brings readers to the front lines of the struggle, explaining the various forces at work for and against a strong postal system, and presenting reasonable ideas for strengthening and expanding its capacity, services, and workforce. Emphasizing the essential role the USPS has played ever since Benjamin Franklin served as our first Postmaster General, author Christopher Shaw warns of the consequences for the country—and for our democracy—if we don’t win this fight. Praise for First Class: Piece by piece, an essential national infrastructure is being dismantled without our consent. Shaw makes an eloquent case for why the post office is worth saving and why, for the sake of American democracy, it must be saved."—Steve Hutkins, founder/editor of Save the Post Office and Professor of English at New York University "The USPS is essential for a democratic American society; thank goodness we have this new book from Christopher W. Shaw explaining why."—Danny Caine, author of Save the USPS and owner of the Raven Book Store, Lawrence, KS "Shaw's excellent analysis of the Postal Service and its vital role in American Democracy couldn't be more timely. … First Class should serve as a clarion call for Americans to halt the dismantling and to, instead, preserve and enhance the institution that can bind the nation together."—Ruth Y. Goldway, Retired Chair and Commissioner, U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission, responsible for the Forever Stamps "In a time of community fracture and corporate predation, Shaw argues, a first-class post office of the future can bring communities together and offer exploitation-free banking and other services."—Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen

This pioneering work of political history recovers the central and largely forgotten role that petitioning played in the formative years of North American democracy. Known as the age of democracy, the nineteenth century witnessed the extension of the franchise and the rise of party politics. As Daniel Carpenter shows, however, democracy in America emerged not merely through elections and parties, but through the transformation of an ancient political tool: the petition. A statement of grievance accompanied by a list of signatures, the petition afforded women and men excluded from formal politics the chance to make their voices heard and to reshape the landscape of political possibility. Democracy by Petition traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent. Indigenous tribes in Canada, free Blacks from Boston to the British West Indies, Irish canal workers in Indiana, and Hispanic settlers in territorial New Mexico all used petitions to make claims on those in power. Petitions facilitated the extension of suffrage, the decline of feudal land tenure, and advances in liberty for women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Even where petitioners failed in their immediate aims, their campaigns advanced democracy by setting agendas, recruiting people into political causes, and fostering aspirations of equality. Far more than periodic elections, petitions provided an everyday current of communication between officeholders and the people. The coming of democracy in America owes much to the unprecedented energy with which the petition was employed in the antebellum period. By uncovering this neglected yet vital strand of nineteenth-century life, Democracy by Petition will forever change how we understand our political history.

First class postage rates have risen from six cents in 1971 to 25 cents in 1988. This rapid increase might be justifiable if service had improved commen-surately, but in fact postal service has steadily deteriorated. The Postal Service concedes that it takes ten percent longer to deliver a first class letter than it did in the 1960s, and one recent postmaster general admits that delivery may have been more reliable in the 1920s. In this volume, Adie reviews the failures of the U.S. Postal Service - an inability to innovate, soaring labor costs, huge deficits, chronic inefficiency, and declining service standards. He blames most of these problems on the postal service's monopoly status. Competition produces efficiency and innovation; monopoly breeds inefficiency, high costs and stagnation. He also examines the experiences of other countries and other industries that may be valuable in prescribing reform for the postal service. The breakup of AT&T provides lessons that may be applied to postal reform. The long-run effects of deregulation on the airline industry are also examined. Since the postal service has serious union problems, Adie looks at the air traffic controllers' strike and other evidence on pay and labor relations in government unions. Finally, Adie examines the experiences of Canada and Great Britain with privatization of government companies. He then offers a comprehensive - and controversial - reform plan for the U.S. Postal Service, with no further monopoly privileges or taxpayer subsidies. He argues that private companies should be free to compete with the Postal Service, and it, in turn, should be free to compete in all phases of the communications business. Without privatization and deregulation, the Postal Service is doomed to continuing inefficiency, rising costs, worsening labor relations, and an increasing loss of customers to more innovative and efficient service providers. Competition would give the Postal Service a chance to enter the 21st ce

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

History is not made by kings, politicians, or a few rich individuals--it is made by all of us. From the temples of ancient Egypt to spacecraft orbiting Earth, workers and ordinary people everywhere have walked out, sat down, risen up, and fought back against exploitation, discrimination, colonization, and oppression. Working Class History presents a distinct selection of people's history through hundreds of "on this day in history" anniversaries that are as diverse and international as the working class itself. Women, young people, people of color, workers, migrants, indigenous people, LGBTQ people, disabled people, older people, the unemployed, home workers, and every other part of the working class have organized and taken action that has shaped our world, and improvements in living and working conditions have been won only by years of violent conflict and sacrifice. These everyday acts of resistance and rebellion highlight just some of those who have struggled for a better world and provide lessons and inspiration for those of us fighting in the present. Going day by day, this book paints a picture of how and why the world came to be as it is, how some have tried to change it, and the lengths to which the rich and powerful have gone to maintain and increase their wealth and influence.