Support Veterans by Defending, Not Defunding, Public Sector Jobs at the Post Office and the V.A.
Every year on Veterans Day, businesses offer free coffee and discounts to people who served in the military. But where's the support for their unionized civilian jobs? Two of the biggest employers of veterans are the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Postal Service, both targets of Republican-backed efforts to reduce their staff and outsource their functions. Photo: AFGE
One of the biggest employers of ex-military people is the U.S. Postal Service (USPS)
by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
Our nation’s year-round celebration of former military service by 19 million Americans reaches its apex every Veterans Day. On that occasion, there is no louder “thank you for your service” heard throughout the land than the expressions of gratitude that emanate from businesses, large and small.
Men and women who enlisted in the military—or were draftees before conscription was suspended after the Vietnam War—suddenly become eligible for all kinds of special consumer discounts. As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a military historian, observes, “corporate virtue signaling” on November 11 takes the form of “an abundance of good deals: free coffee, free doughnuts, free pizza, free car washes, and as much as 30 percent off on assorted retail purchases.”
Conspicuously missing from this annual display of appreciation is what military veterans need far more than a less expensive day at the mall. And that is wider understanding of and greater support for their role as providers of essential public services at the local, state, and federal level.
Two of the biggest employers of men and women who served in the military are the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which serves 9 million patients in the nation’s largest public health care system, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), which delivers mail to 163 million homes and businesses. Both of these federal agencies have long been the target of Republican-backed efforts to reduce their staff, downsize their operations, and outsource their functions to favored private firms.
Under President Trump, privatization got a big push from top-level political appointees at the VA and the USPS who were overtly hostile to the official mission of their own agency. Unfortunately, President Biden has yet to make necessary changes in the pro-privatization policies or management personnel his administration inherited from Trump.
As a result, federal workers—many veterans among them—are still mobilizing at both the VA and the USPS to defend jobs and services that benefit all Americans. Their ongoing alliances with other labor and community groups are key to defeating bipartisan assaults on two bastions of public provision in little need of replacement by private sector alternatives.
A CULTURE OF SOLIDARITY
At VA hospitals and clinics around the country, about one-third of the 300,000 unionized staff members are veterans themselves, including many health care professionals, clerical workers, custodians, and other support personnel. As we describe in a new book called Our Veterans, this creates a unique culture of empathy and solidarity between providers and patients, whose service-related physical and mental health conditions often require highly specialized treatment.
Despite his 2020 presidential campaign pledge never to “defund” or “dismantle” this high-quality health care system, Joe Biden appointed a VA Secretary, Denis McDonough, who has deviated little from the path of his Republican predecessor.
Despite appeals from VA union members, McDonough won’t restrict outsourcing that may soon divert half of his agency’s $100 billion-a-year health care budget to reimbursement of for-profit hospital chains and medical practices. Earlier this year, he even recommended that scores of VA facilities be closed and their patients treated, at greater public expense, by the private health care industry instead.
This proposal triggered strong grassroots resistance from VA caregivers, their patients, some veterans’ groups, and elected officials in cities and states threatened with a reduction in medical services. Members of the American Federation of Government Employees, National Nurses United, and other VA unions organized rallies, press conferences, and picket lines which demanded improvements in VA staffing and infrastructure, not layoffs and its dismantling.
Responding to constituent pressure, both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee refused to confirm White House nominees to a VA facility closing commission that was poised to rubber-stamp McDonough’s pro-privatization proposals.
Veterans who belong to the American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers hope to have similar success derailing the latest postal service restructuring scheme unveiled by Louis DeJoy, a controversial holdover from the Trump Administration. DeJoy is a right-wing businessman from North Carolina, worth $110 million, who left his logistics company to become Postmaster General after donating millions to Trump and other conservative Republicans.
Postal workers have been jousting with DeJoy since he received his marching orders from a White House task force created by Trump. That Republican body called for massive contracting out of USPS services, closing many post offices, reducing delivery days, increasing prices, and eliminating collective bargaining by a workforce that is nearly one-quarter African American and includes more than 110,000 military veterans.
The Trump Administration’s goal was to force the USPS into bankruptcy so it could be auctioned off to private companies, putting 500,000 jobs at risk, while conveniently disrupting census-taking and mail-ballot voting for president.
NEW THREAT TO LETTER CARRIERS
Coming together as the Save the Post Office Coalition, members of 300 advocacy groups mounted successful protests against DeJoy’s attempt to cut service and slow election year mail delivery. After Democrats regained control of the White House and the Senate, Congress passed the Postal Service Reform Act, which has put the agency on a sounder financial footing.