USPS workers and retirees on Florida’s Space Coast represented by the NALC Branch 2689, from left to right: Mike Clark, Darren Connors, Sante Zeppieri, Gus Cicala, NALC National President Brian Renfroe, Scott Stanley, Wayne Roberts, Mike Monopoli Credit: photo courtesy of NALC Branch 2689
U.S. Postal Service workers throughout Central Florida are urging the community to stand with them as their agency faces threats of privatization and potential cuts to jobs and mail delivery under the Trump administration.

So far, the talk from President Donald Trump and his appointed allies is just threats. Thousands of federal postal workers, and their unions, are fighting to keep it that way.

As part of two separate days of action organized by two postal labor unions, workers are organizing rallies this week in Orlando on Thursday, and in Port Orange and Melbourne — a majority-Republican city on Florida’s Space Coast — on Sunday.

“We just want to do our jobs like we’ve been doing for the last 250 years,” said Scott Stanley, a city letter carrier from Rockledge and vice president of the National Association of Letter Carriers Local 2689 in Melbourne. “We are looking to get support from the local communities that might not know how privatizing the Postal Service could affect them or the businesses that they deal with.”

A flyer for a NALC union rally on Sunday, March 23, in Melbourne. Credit: via Facebook (NALC Branch 2689)

Stanley, 60, has been delivering mail through USPS since 2013, and has been a union member for just as long. There are four major postal worker unions that altogether represent hundreds of thousands of USPS workers across the country. The agency employs roughly 600,000 employees, 91 percent of whom are represented by a union.

“Members, as they get hired, and others that are retired, realize that without that union, we’re in big trouble,” said Al Friedman, president of the Florida chapter of the NALC. Friedman, a disabled veteran who served during the Vietnam War, has worked for USPS for decades.

Based in the Tampa Bay region, which has also skewed redder in recent years, he’s one of roughly 73,000 veterans in USPS’s workforce. “As far as disabled veterans, this was always one of the biggest avenues for veterans to get a job,” said Friedman, whose daughter works for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

The Orlando branch of the NALC represents about 2,500 mail carriers who live and work in our local communities, according to Stanley, while his local in Melbourne represents about 320 mail carriers and 100 USPS retirees.

That’s not counting members of other labor organizations, like the American Postal Workers Union — representing more than 200,000 USPS mail clerks, maintenance and vehicle service employees. They’re organizing their own day of action this Thursday to uplift the message that USPS is “not for sale.”

“The American people deserve a Postal Service that remains true to its public mission and continues to serve communities across the country, no matter where you live,” an APWU webpage for their upcoming rally reads. “Now postal workers and the communities we serve are standing together to ensure our postal service stays in the hands of the people, not the billionaires.”

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What’s at risk

As the Washington Post reported last month, President Donald Trump is preparing to dissolve the executive leadership board of USPS and absorb it into the U.S. Department of Commerce, currently led by Wall Street banker and “tariff cheerleader” Howard Lutnik. Trump also floated “a kind of merger” with private shipping companies.

As a public agency, the USPS doesn’t ration its mail delivery services. USPS delivers mail and packages to 169 million addresses six or even seven days per week (in the case of packages), without consideration of which communities are most profitable.

Privatization, however — a threat first seriously floated during Trump’s first term in office — could disrupt that. Postal worker jobs could be cut, mail could be delivered less often, and the agency’s universal mandate to service all addresses, regardless of ZIP code, could be on the line.

“It’s not profitable to go to every address every day, like we do,” said Stanley. “We service every address every day in the country, no matter how far it is, where it is, or whatever the situation is. You have private shippers that don’t go to every address every day, because it’s not profitable.”

Rural communities, he added, would likely be hit the hardest. “In a rural community, they might get mail delivery on a privatization maybe once a week, once every 10 days, only when it’s profitable for them to go,” he said.

While USPS has faced its criticisms, it remains one of the most popular federal agencies across party lines. A 2024 Pew Research survey found that the vast majority of Americans, including both Democrats and Republicans, support USPS, as the most favorably viewed federal agency just behind the U.S. Park Service — an agency that is also seeing cuts under the Trump administration.

“I think it’s a uniting issue because, regardless of whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you rely on the Postal Service,” Stanley argued. People rely on USPS for medication, Social Security checks, tax returns and other necessities.

“We deliver audiobooks and audiotapes for the blind who can’t read,” Stanley added. “That might not seem important to some, but to someone who gets free books on tape from the library because they can’t see — that’s a vital necessity to them that’s going to be taken away from them if they privatize the Postal Service.”

”Someone who gets free books on tape from the library because they can’t see — that’s a vital necessity to them, that’s going to be taken away from them.”

They can also serve as first responders and watchdogs of sorts. In communities of older people, this can be particularly important. “I’ve had elderly people who don’t pick up their mail on a regular basis, who always pick it up every day, and they don’t pick it up for two or three days,” Stanley explained. In those cases, “We have well checks done where they go out and make sure that the customer is OK.”

Friedman said he once found an older, widowed woman on his route who’d fallen in her home. He’d noticed her mail piling up, and made inquiries around the neighborhood.

They said, “Oh no, we haven’t seen Lucy in a couple of days,” he recalled. “But, you know, she stays to herself.”

The reassurances didn’t sit right with him. He finally looked into the window of her mobile home, “and there she was on the floor,” he said. “Thank God she was still alive.”

Cutting corners and costs

Dozens of federal agencies and departments have been scrutinized by Trump and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency — led by tech billionaire Elon Musk — over allegations of government waste and a broader effort to downsize the federal government.

The U.S. Postal Service specifically has been criticized by Republicans in the past, not just under Trump, for repeatedly losing billions of dollars annually.

Under the Biden administration, Congress finally got rid of an extremely costly pre-funding mandate for USPS retiree health benefits that drove years of financial losses for the service. The mandate, first adopted through a 2006 postal reform law, required USPS to “pre-fund” health benefits for retirees 75 years in advance, costing the agency roughly $5.5 billion annually. Labor unions such as the APWU point out the mandate basically required USPS to pay for the benefits of people who haven’t even been born yet.

Friedman, a USPS employee of 44 years, thinks the agency is “too massive” and “too complex” to privatize. He also believes they offer a fundamental service, and they build relationships with communities in ways that private companies like Amazon and the United Parcel Service — which have their own service limitations — just don’t.

He recalled one summer where a bunch of kids on his route started trying to jump on his truck, to ride along as he went about his way down the block, from mailbox to mailbox. “I said, ‘Come on, guys, you’re gonna get me in trouble. You get hurt, I get fired. That’s how this works, you know?’”

They didn’t listen. “They jumped on my truck. I said, ‘Listen, Patrick.’ ‘How do you know my name?’,” Friedman recalled the kid asking. “I said, ‘I know your mother’s name is Barry, your father’s Harry, and you live on Sea Breeze Drive.’

“And the other kid goes, ‘He knows your parents!’,” said Friedman. Joke was on him: “‘I know where you live, too!’” the postal worker recalled telling the other kid, with a laugh. “I delivered the route for 18 years. I was delivering mail when they were born.”

Through an agreement with the e-commerce giant, USPS delivers Amazon packages to addresses that just aren’t as profitable for the company to service itself — in rural communities, for instance.

Both Friedman and Stanley worry it’s those communities — and the reliability of USPS that Americans broadly rely upon — that would suffer from deep cuts to their budget, or attempts to privatize the agency.

And they’re asking for the public to join them in speaking up.

Especially those in red districts, like Stanley’s. (Lest we forget, USPS delivers hundreds of thousands of political mailers during campaigns, after all.) “We need them to reach out to their member of Congress and say, ‘Hey, I’m a Republican. I voted for you. Please don’t privatize the Postal Service.’”

“Can there be some improvements to the Postal Service? Absolutely,” Stanley admitted. “But we really want the community to let Congress know, and the White House know: Leave us alone. We just want to do our jobs like we’ve been doing for the last 250 years.”

Here’s a list of rallies that USPS unions are organizing in Central Florida:

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This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2025.

General news reporter for Orlando Weekly, with a focus on state and local government and workers' rights. You can find her bylines in Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, In These Times, and Facing South.