Hundreds of postal workers rally against privatization outside Orlando City Hall

A couple hundred postal workers and allies rallied outside of Orlando City Hall Monday to protest ongoing concerns about the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service under the corporate-friendly Trump administration. One of four USPS unions, the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, is hosting its annual convention in Orlando this week, and organized the rally. Union members wore red shirts emblazoned “Protect Our Letter Carriers” and held signs that read “Enough Is Enough” and “Stop Privatization — Protect the USPS.”

According to the union, nearly 2 million Floridians live in rural areas that could be disproportionately affected by privatization. That’s because delivering mail to rural communities, while arguably necessary and a net positive, is less profitable. “We service every address every day in the country, no matter how far it is, where it is, or whatever the situation is,” Scott Stanley, a city letter carrier from Rockledge, told Orlando Weekly earlier this year. “You have private shippers that don’t go to every address every day, because it’s not profitable.”

The threat of privatization was similarly floated during Trump’s first term in office, and remained an unresolved, if dormant, concern during the Biden administration.

U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner, who in effect leads USPS, denied plans to privatize the postal service in a video message sent to postal workers last month, but his background still has workers concerned. Steiner, a businessman who formerly served on the board of directors for FedEx, a private shipping competitor, was selected by the USPS Board of Governors to lead USPS in May, after former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced plans to step down.

“I do not believe that the Postal Service should be privatized or that it should become an appropriated part of the federal government,” Steiner said in last month’s video message. “I believe in the current structure of the Postal Service as a self-financing, independent entity of the executive branch.”

Don Maston, president of the NRLCA — a union representing 130,000 rural letter carriers — told NPR in response, “The words are what we want to hear. The actions will speak for themselves.”

U.S. Congressmen Maxwell Frost and Darren Soto, both Democrats who represent parts of Central Florida, joined postal workers at the rally Monday evening, despite rain showers. Both have cosponsored U.S. House Resolution (H.R.) 70, opposing the privatization of USPS. Leaders of other USPS unions that represent letter carriers in cities, as well as mail clerks, maintenance workers, and mail handlers, similarly joined the NRLCA in solidarity. USPS employs roughly 600,000 employees nationwide, 91 percent of whom are represented by a union.

This post has been updated to clarify that Steiner was selected to become U.S. Postmaster General by the USPS Board of Governors. A previous version of this story stated that Steiner was appointed to the position by President Trump.