APWU says Louis DeJoy should resign or be removed

By Bill McAllister, Washington Correspondent

The largest postal union in the United States has called for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s ouster.

The American Postal Workers Union’s vote on the anti-DeJoy resolution “overwhelmingly passed” at its biennial convention held Aug. 15-18 in National Harbor, Md., the union said.

The union published the resolution in a Sept. 17 news release. The resolution criticized DeJoy’s actions which “in the name of ‘efficiency’ delayed mail and undermined public confidence in the Postal Service.”

DeJoy’s actions, the resolution said, “sound like the preliminary steps to privatization and the weakening of unions that the Trump White House has supported.”

The resolution also cited DeJoy’s “massive political donations just prior to his appointment,” allegations of campaign finance violations and charges of conflict of interest regarding ties to postal competitors.

A well-known Republican financier from North Carolina, DeJoy was appointed postmaster general in May 2020 by the Postal Service’s board of governors, which at the time was composed entirely of members appointed by then-President Donald Trump.

The American Postal Workers Union’s resolution called for DeJoy to either resign or be removed and replaced by a successor “who is committed to a strong, public postal service and who will defend it from attack rather than attacking it.”

The resolution sounded a different tone than a March 2021 statement by Mark Dimondstein, the union’s president, who welcomed DeJoy’s 10-year Delivering for America plan for the USPS.

The union leader described DeJoy’s Delivering for America plan as creating “a strategy for making the postal service more modern and financially sustainable, a worthy goal.”

Dimondstein said the plan “contains some positive attributes, but also includes proposals that should be of concern to postal workers and customers.”

Asked by Linn’s Stamp News to comment on the union’s action, USPS spokesman David Partenheimer said: “The Postmaster General and the Executive Leadership Team are committed to improving and investing in our employee’s working environment, developing effective supervision, promoting diversity in leadership, and stabilizing our workforce, all of which is laid out in our Delivering for America 10-year plan.

“The actions being undertaken are designed to improve employee morale and productivity, and ensure that we will be a vibrant and thriving organization that provides the country with the high quality service they expect and deserve for decades to come,” Partenheimer said.

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