The Postal Wildcat Strike of 1970 and the Bargaining Rights It Won

On the evening of March 17, 1970, St. Patrick's Day, members of Branch 36 of the National Association of Letter Carriers packed a hall in Manhattan to vote on something their own national union said they could not do. Federal employees had no right to strike. Doing so could cost them their jobs, and federal law made it a crime. The carriers voted to walk out anyway. On the morning of March 18, picket lines went up outside post offices in Manhattan and the Bronx, and the mail of the country's largest city stopped moving. Within days the strike had spread to cities from Boston to San Francisco, and by its peak something like two hundred thousand postal workers had left their jobs. It was the largest wildcat strike in American history, and it was against the United States government.

In short: In March 1970, underpaid postal workers struck illegally, starting in New York and spreading nationwide; President Nixon sent troops to sort the mail. The strike ended within about a week with no one prosecuted, and it led directly to the Postal Reorganization Act, which gave postal unions the right to bargain over wages that most federal workers still lack.

Carriers who qualified for welfare

The first thing to understand about the 1970 strike is how badly postal workers were paid. A full-time letter carrier in New York could earn so little that a family man with several children might qualify for public assistance. Pay was set by Congress, not bargained, and it moved when Congress felt like moving it. Raises came slowly, and the pay scale was built so that reaching the top step took many years of service. Carriers in high-cost cities were paid on the same scale as carriers in towns where rent was a fraction as high.

The work itself was demanding and old-fashioned. Mail volume had grown enormously after World War II, but sorting was still largely done by hand at cases, and the buildings and equipment were aging. In October 1966, the Chicago post office, then the largest in the world, became so clogged that the mail there nearly stopped for weeks. That breakdown persuaded people in Washington that the Post Office Department needed to be rebuilt. It did not, by itself, persuade anyone to pay the workers more.

The workers had unions, but those unions operated under strict limits. Since 1962, an executive order signed by President Kennedy had allowed federal employee organizations to be recognized and to consult on some working conditions, but wages were off the table. The national leaders of the postal unions spent their energy lobbying Congress. To many rank-and-file members, especially in New York, lobbying had become a polite way of waiting.

The vote in Manhattan

In the spring of 1970, Congress was debating both a postal pay raise and a plan to reorganize the Post Office. The Nixon administration wanted to tie the two together. Postal workers, watching their raise get folded into a larger fight, concluded that they were being used as leverage.

Branch 36 was big and restless. The membership meeting on March 17 turned into a revolt against caution. The carriers voted to strike, and the next morning they did. Clerks and other postal workers in New York, many represented by different unions, refused to cross the carriers' lines. One of the clerks' leaders in Manhattan, Moe Biller, would later become president of the American Postal Workers Union. One of the carriers in the rank-and-file movement, Vincent Sombrotto, would later become president of the letter carriers' national union. In March 1970, though, they were not running anything. The strike was being made from the bottom.

The national union leadership urged members back to work. The government went to court and got an injunction. Neither made much difference. Over the following days, postal workers walked out in New Jersey and Connecticut, in Philadelphia, in Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago, and as far away as San Francisco. Some locals voted formally; others simply did not show up. The country's financial system, which in 1970 depended on paper checks and paper securities moving by mail, began to feel it within days.

Operation Graphic Hand

On March 23, President Richard Nixon went on television, declared a national emergency and ordered federal troops into New York's post offices. The deployment was called Operation Graphic Hand. Soldiers, National Guard members and reservists, numbering in the tens of thousands, were mobilized, and a large contingent went into the New York facilities to sort and deliver mail.

The operation is one of the stranger episodes in the history of the American military, mostly because it did not work very well. Sorting mail is skilled labor. A carrier knows the case for his route by heart and can distribute a day's letters with speed that looks like a magic trick. Troops who had never stood at a case could not replicate it. They moved some mail, and the government could say the post was not completely shut down, but they could not replace the people who had walked out.

What the troops did accomplish was to raise the stakes. Sending soldiers against a strike is a move with a long and unhappy history in this country, and the postal workers understood that the government had reached for its heaviest tool. Yet the government also had reasons not to press further. Firing or prosecuting a couple hundred thousand workers would have destroyed the postal service it was trying to protect. Labor Secretary George Shultz and Postmaster General Winton Blount negotiated with the union leaders, who had little choice but to represent a strike they had not called.

By around March 25, the workers in most places had returned, on the promise that serious negotiations would follow. They did.

What the deal gave, and why the strike won it

The settlement had two parts. First, Congress approved a pay raise for postal workers, applied retroactively, and extended a raise to other federal employees. Second, and more lasting, the negotiators agreed on the outline of a new postal system with collective bargaining built in.

That system became the Postal Reorganization Act, signed by Nixon on August 12, 1970. It abolished the Post Office Department as a cabinet agency and created the United States Postal Service as an independent establishment of the executive branch, which began operating in 1971. It took the postmaster general out of the cabinet. And it gave postal unions something no other large group of federal employees had: the right to bargain over wages, hours and working conditions, with disputes that reached an impasse sent to binding arbitration.

There was a trade. The law did not give postal workers the right to strike. Instead, arbitration became the substitute for the strike, a final step that ends a dispute without stopping the mail. Postal unions have bargained under that system ever since. In 1971, several clerk and craft unions merged to form the American Postal Workers Union, which became one of the largest unions in the federal sector.

The reason the strike won so much is worth stating plainly. Postal workers were not asking for a favor. Their work was essential, they were organized across the country and they were willing to accept a large personal risk. A government that could not do without them had to deal with them. No one was prosecuted for the strike. That outcome stands in sharp contrast with what happened eleven years later, when President Reagan fired more than eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and their union was decertified. The two strikes are often taught together for a reason: one shows what solidarity can win, and the other shows what happens when the government decides to break a federal union and the public does not stop it.

The fair objection: should public workers ever strike?

There is a serious argument against strikes by public employees, and it deserves a hearing. It goes back at least to Franklin Roosevelt, who wrote in 1937 that militant tactics had no place among government workers, and the argument has never really gone away. The case runs this way: government is not a business with profits to share; its services are often essential; and a strike against the public puts citizens, not shareholders, in the middle. When the mail stops, a retiree's check stops too. Elected officials, not union leaders, should set pay, because voters hold officials accountable.

Here is an answer. The 1970 strike happened precisely because the system that argument describes had failed. Congress set postal pay and let it fall so far behind that full-time federal workers could qualify for welfare. Workers had petitioned and lobbied for years. The settlement that ended the strike did not make strikes legal. It created bargaining and arbitration, a process that respects the public's interest in continuous service while giving workers a way to be heard. That is the real lesson: when you take the strike away from workers, you have to give them something that works in its place. A ban with no alternative is not neutral; it is a decision that workers' wages will be set without them.

It is fair to add that progressives have not always made this case well. Public-sector unions have sometimes defended rules that were hard to explain to the taxpayers who fund them, and the debates over pensions in some states left real distrust. The way to answer that distrust is with transparency and good service, not by pretending the questions are illegitimate.

The postal service the strike built

The Postal Service today looks very different from the department of 1970. It delivers to every address in the country, six days a week, under a universal service obligation that private carriers do not have. Its workforce has been among the more diverse in the federal government, and for generations of Black Americans in particular, a postal job was one of the few routes into stable middle-class work when other employers kept them out. Bargaining rights helped make those jobs good jobs.

The institution has had real troubles. A 2006 law required the Postal Service to prefund retiree health benefits far into the future, a burden that drove large reported losses for years, until Congress largely repealed that requirement in the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, which passed with support from both parties. Mail volume has declined as letters gave way to email, while package volume grew. Debates about service cuts, delivery standards and privatization come back again and again.

Through all of it, the bargaining system the 1970 strikers won has endured. Postal contracts are still negotiated by the unions that came out of that March, and disputes are still resolved by arbitrators instead of by troops at the sorting cases.

Why a fifty-six-year-old wildcat strike matters now

In 2026, federal workers have watched agencies cut, reorganized and in some cases dismantled, and many have seen their bargaining rights narrowed by executive order. The postal unions sit in a slightly different position because their bargaining rights were written into statute in 1970, not granted by a president's order that another president can revoke. That difference is a direct inheritance from the strike. Rights that rest in law are harder to take away than rights that rest on someone's signature.

The deeper lesson is about who changes things. The national union leaders of 1970 were not villains; they were working the system they had. But the system moved when the people at the bottom of it decided that waiting was costing them too much. The people who walked out on March 18 were letter carriers with families, many of them veterans, some of them recent hires who could barely make rent. They took a risk on behalf of one another, and the people who deliver your mail today still benefit from it.

Arbitration instead of the picket line

It is worth pausing on how the substitute for the strike actually works, because it is the least dramatic and most durable thing the 1970 walkout produced. When a postal union and management sit down to negotiate a national contract, they bargain over pay, raises tied to the cost of living, schedules, the rules for assigning routes and the procedures for discipline. If they reach agreement, members vote on it. If they do not, the dispute goes first to mediation and then, if needed, to a neutral arbitration panel whose decision binds both sides.

That last step changes the incentives at the table. Management knows it cannot simply wait out the union, because an arbitrator will eventually set terms. The union knows it cannot demand the moon, because an arbitrator will look at what is reasonable. Over the decades, many postal contracts have been settled by agreement and some by arbitration awards, and the mail has kept moving through all of them.

There is a grievance system too, a process for individual workers who believe they were disciplined unfairly or that the contract was broken, which ends in arbitration as well. For a letter carrier who is accused of something on a route, that system is the difference between a supervisor's word being final and a neutral person hearing both sides. None of it would exist if a few thousand carriers in Manhattan had decided, that St. Patrick's night, to keep waiting.

What you can do

If the strike makes you think about the workers who serve the public, here are practical steps:

• Keep an eye on federal workers' rights. Our topic page on the government being gutted follows the cuts, layoffs and bargaining fights at federal agencies, including the ones that affect postal and other public employees.
• Ask your members of Congress where they stand. With find your representatives, enter your address to get your representative's and senators' phone numbers and contact forms, and see their latest votes before you call about postal service or federal workers.
• Look for bipartisan wins. The common-ground page lists bills that both parties passed together, a reminder that postal reform in 2022 was one of them.
• Watch the newest union elections. The labor page shows the National Labor Relations Board's latest counted elections and who won, plus membership trends. Postal workers bargain under their own law, but the same impulse to organize runs through every listing there.

And the next time your carrier comes up the walk, consider saying thank you. The pay, the rights and the stability behind that job were won by people who once stood outside a post office in the cold and decided not to go in.