Countless Black workers may be at risk following reports of President Donald Trump’s plans for the United States Postal Service (USPS), per The Guardian.
According to the Washington Post, Trump is expected to take control of the USPS, signing an executive order to privatize the agency under the Commerce Department.
The USPS employs roughly 640,000 people, 29 percent of whom are Black. That percentage is more than double the 12 percent of Black people that make up the national workforce as a whole.
“The privatization definitely would require less employees,” Arrion Brown, the national support services director for the American Postal Workers Union, said of Trump’s reported plans for the USPS. “That would cut down on the number of postal jobs.”
Trump’s plans threaten the USPS’s rich legacy of employing the Black middle class. Due to federal protections, the post office, like other government agencies, has historically had less discrimination in hiring compared to the private sector. Anti-discrimination rhetoric in USPS’s collective bargaining agreements has also promoted employee diversity.
Geographical diversity has also played a role in the postal service employing a higher percentage of Black people. Many of the 33,000 post offices across the U.S. are heavily concentrated in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other urban areas where Black people are more likely to live.
Black employment in the USPS dates back to 1865, when Congress passed a law allowing Black people to be employed as postal workers. The move reversed an 1802 bill that stated mail carriers could only be “free white persons.” In 1865, formerly enslaved people started “taking advantage of what was a patronage job”, Phillip Rubio, a history professor at North Carolina A&T State University, said.
“The way the postal service opens up to African Americans is [that] they open the door,” he added. “The post office [was] attractive when so many private sector jobs were closed to [Black people].”
Postal service employment gives Black families access to solid benefits and financial security.
A reduction in these jobs through Trump’s privatization plan would mean “less middle, good paying, benefit jobs in Black communities,” Brown said.
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