Timely session provides answers, raises questions

2013 National Rap Session

Feb. 11, 2013 — On Jan. 10, a three-person board of arbitrators issued its award setting the terms of a new, four-and-a-half-year collective-bargaining agreement between the National Association of Letter Carriers and the U.S. Postal Service. Within days of that announcement, NALC President Fredric Rolando called a national meeting of the union’s leaders—better known to letter carriers as a “rap session”—to discuss this final and binding settlement.

“Under normal circumstances, a new contract would give us more than enough to talk about during a rap session,” NALC President Fredric V. Rolando said.

Recent circumstances, however, have been far from normal.

Three days before the union’s branch, state and regional leaders were set to meet on Feb. 9 in Las Vegas, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe announced in a news conference that, starting in August, the USPS no longer would deliver mail on Saturdays—this despite the fact that Saturday mail is both the law of the land and the will of Congress. He then went on to stage a media blitz in a clumsy attempt to jam the decision down the throat of an unsuspecting Congress.

The postmaster general launched his surprise attack with a sophisticated media plan and with little advance warning to the employees and mailers whose jobs and businesses depend on the Postal Service. President Rolando learned of the plan from a telephone call from Donahoe less than 24 hours before the planned announcement, weeks if not months after the radical decision was made.

Rolando relayed that Tuesday night conversation to the 1,400 rap session attendees, noting how Donahoe made it clear that he intended to go forward with the plan even if Congress renews the mandate for six-day delivery in a new continuing resolution (CR) at the end of March.

“I told him that we considered his move a direct attack on the nation’s letter carriers, the Postal Service’s customers, the American people and the Congress of the United States,” the president reported. “I also told him that the NALC would direct its lawyers to take the most aggressive legal action possible to stop this plan.”

Rolando promised those at the rap session that “we will spare no expense and use every available resource to mobilize our grassroots, lobby our legislators in Congress and seek every media avenue available to us to get the job done.” But he emphasized that the leaders in the meeting hall had to do their part to mobilize the members in their branches to fight back if we are to succeed.

The PMG’s media blitz added a new urgent topic to the rap session’s agenda, the president said, but he called the announcement’s timing, so close to the meeting, “fortuitous.”

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