The publication has been around since 1986—with a couple of pauses along the way—and has been revived this month to continue providing additional resources to assist in educating and informing local NALC representatives.

The NALC Activist is designed with the needs of NALC representatives in mind, addressing issues and problems that arise in our everyday work lives. Over the years, the publication has proven to be a good training tool and NALC is proud to bring it back to life. With the goal of giving practical advice and skills on such topics as how to effectively run a branch meeting, how to conduct a training, or how to create a branch publication, branch representatives should find the articles useful. 

The Winter 2024 edition of the NALC Activist covers topics on NALC local negotiations, a shop steward’s right to information, our right to have union bulletin boards in the post office, workers’ compensation-related grievance advice, managing stress, health benefits and mutual benefits representatives, MDA fundraising, and the many roles shop stewards play.

Moving forward, the NALC Activist will be published quarterly and will provide representatives with the tools and knowledge needed to build and maintain strong and effective branches. Each issue will feature articles that will improve your knowledge of the contract and help you better understand the grievance procedure. You will see articles suggesting new ways in which NALC representatives can approach the problems they face while performing their duties. We will cover workplace issues, contract questions and the latest information for local leaders.

The Winter 2024 edition of the NALC Activist can be found here. A downloadable PDF is available here. A copy will also soon be mailed to branch and state presidents, arbitration advocates, Step-B representatives, and NALC’s 15 regional offices. Previous editions of the NALC Activist dating back to 1997 are also available online at nalc.org/activist.

As a result of these recent incidents, the Postal Service has once again temporarily disabled the ability for employees to make allotment and net-to-bank changes online while this fraudulent activity is investigated. USPS states that employees can still cancel net-to-bank and make allotment changes through the Human Resource Shared Service Center (HRSSC) Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. The Postal Service is working with HRSSC to implement a process for these changes moving forward. 

If you identify any activity with your account that looks suspicious, contact ISCCU@usps.gov. NALC will communicate any updates received by the USPS regarding this fraudulent activity.

A mandatory 60-day mediation period will follow, as required by statute. NALC will continue to work towards reaching a negotiated agreement with the Postal Service during this 60-day period. Issues that remain in dispute after the mediation period would be addressed through an interest arbitration process, which would result in a final and binding decision on the contents of a new national agreement. The parties will select a neutral arbitrator to chair an arbitration board that would also include one management and one union arbitrator.

Further updates will be provided as the process moves forward.

Click here to watch NALC President Brian L. Renfroe's opening statement or read it below.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you Postmaster General DeJoy and Deputy Postmaster General Tulino for hosting this opening ceremony for NALC’s sixteenth round of collective bargaining with the Postal Service. I am honored to be here today representing the nation’s city letter carriers for the first time as NALC President. We are eager to work in good faith to reach a new contract. As we look forward to the negotiations ahead, I see opportunities for both sides of this table.

We meet at a crucial time for the city letter carrier craft. Almost three years ago, the world as we knew it started shutting down due to the rapidly spreading COVID-19 virus. While millions of Americans worked from home and sheltered in place across the country, our work became a lifeline for millions of homes and businesses.

Letter carriers seamlessly kept the economy and our communities running by delivering essential goods and medications, school supplies, stimulus checks, at-home COVID tests, and everything else that the American people needed. For months, we enabled our customers to safely shelter at home, a luxury that essential workers like letter carriers did not have. We proudly rose to the occasion, just like we always have.

We also helped to uphold American democracy in two national elections by working directly and successfully with the Postal Service to ensure that American voters could safely and confidently cast their ballots at home during a time of intense polarization and heightened Congressional scrutiny. During the pandemic, vote-by-mail skyrocketed, and letter carriers and the NALC were proud to play a crucial role in getting tens of millions of ballots delivered securely and on time.

Through all of this, our union and letter carriers across the country led a 12-year effort to finally enact bipartisan postal reform that protected this invaluable network by repealing the pre-funding mandate, which had burdened the Postal Service for over a decade. By achieving this goal, working in concert with you and the other postal unions, we not only put the Postal Service on more solid financial footing, we also demonstrated that productive collaboration is essential to the continued success of our union and the Postal Service.

As everyone knows, our country’s economic landscape is drastically different than it was in 2019 when we last sat at a negotiating table. Unemployment rates are at a 50-year low, and we face the increasingly difficult challenge of attracting sufficient applicants for letter carrier jobs at today’s starting wages. This has significantly affected our ability to properly staff post offices and ultimately deliver the nation’s mail.

Today, letter carriers are working harder and longer hours than at any other point in our history. The staffing shortages, coupled with the influx of parcel volumes, changing technology and heightened customer expectations, have made our jobs more challenging and demanding.

But that’s not all. Too often, we still struggle with the lack of management’s contract compliance at the local level. This leads to complications on the workroom floor, which affect morale and productivity, while needlessly costing the Postal Service money.

And perhaps most importantly, crime against letter carriers is on the rise. These repeated attacks against our members are horrific, unacceptable and must be addressed through action. No letter carrier should fear for their life or safety while on the job. Candidly, crime is a deterrent in an already difficult environment to attract letter carriers to join the Postal Service.

In this round of collective bargaining, letter carriers have the chance to be recognized, and rewarded, for being the backbone of this beloved American institution, the United States Postal Service. Letter carriers are the face of the Postal Service. We are the ones customers see delivering to their homes and businesses. They know us and rely on us for dependable, consistent service. We are indispensable and directly carry out the Postal Service’s mission.

Through a fair agreement, the Postal Service has the opportunity to strengthen the letter carrier workforce, and in turn, bolster the Postal Service’s ability to achieve the goals in its 10-year plan. One of the goals of the 10-year plan is to invest in and empower employees to create a stable workforce. Other key portions of the plan, like the implementation of Sorting and Delivery Centers, will only be successful if we use these negotiations to build a stronger city letter carrier craft.

As we seek a new agreement, we will aim to preserve and improve the standard of living for the nation’s city letter carriers, as we always have. It is our expectation that we will be able to reach voluntary agreement; however, we will not hesitate to pursue a fair agreement through binding interest arbitration if necessary.

Our goals are simple.

First and foremost, we must address the staffing issue that is debilitating our craft. Nationwide, letter carriers are overworked, and post offices are understaffed. One obvious solution that we seek is increased wages. If the Postal Service wants to recruit and retain letter carriers, it starts with a competitive wage —plain and simple.

The staffing crisis can also be addressed by shifting to an all-career workforce and abolishing the City Carrier Assistant position. The CCA position, in its current form, no longer serves the Postal Service or our craft.

Overwhelming turnover is seriously undermining service.  While we have made positive strides in our recent agreements to convert certain installations across the country to the all-career model, NALC seeks to convert all CCAs to career positions and make the all-career model the standard nationwide.

Lastly, we will insist on practical solutions to address the increasing crime against letter carriers. The safety of letter carriers is our number one priority. We must work together to ensure that letter carriers are safe from the moment they arrive at their stations until the moment they park their vehicles after delivery. We cannot allow these crimes to persist.

If we work together, I wholeheartedly believe that we can achieve these goals and that doing so will ultimately benefit both parties. Together, we have implemented several successful initiatives since our last agreement, including numerous COVID-related Memorandums of Understanding, the development of the New Employee Experience and Retention Program, the conversion to the all-career model in hundreds of installations across the country, and the Technology Integrated Alternate Route Evaluation and Adjustment Process, just to name a few.

We commend your willingness to work with us on these key initiatives. We have long been involved in the bargaining process with Deputy Postmaster General Tulino. I appreciate your commitment and look forward to what we will continue to accomplish together.

Similarly, after years and years of declining service quality, it is refreshing to have leadership that is willing to sit down and maintain regular, substantive engagement to address this problem while promoting the work letter carriers do proudly six-and-sometimes-seven-days-a-week. Your leadership, Postmaster General DeJoy, has fostered that engagement that we look forward to continuing in the future.

I will close by saying, during these negotiations, I believe both parties have a unique opportunity to build something transformative for the nation’s letter carrier workforce and the entire agency. If we can increase wages, appropriately staff our craft, address safety concerns, and enforce managerial contract compliance, letter carriers, in turn, can ensure that the Postal Service remains strong and competitive.

City letter carriers deserve a contract that will enable them to have a dignified, safe, and dependable job that provides a comfortable middle-class working life and retirement. It is my privilege to lead the nation’s city letter carriers in our pursuit of these goals.

Again, NALC is committed to doing all we can to swiftly reach agreement on a mutually beneficial contract. I look forward to working with all of you in the weeks and months ahead. Thank you.

To further protect employee’s accounts, the Postal Service also temporarily disabled allotment and net-to-bank changes in LiteBlue. As of Feb. 1, the Postal Service reported that only 62 percent of all postal employees had set up MFA and at that time the ability to make allotment and net-to-bank changes remained disabled until a greater number of employees did so.

As of Monday, Feb. 6, the implementation of MFA reached a participation threshold across the organization warranting reactivation of net-to-bank and allotment transactions within PostalEASE for all employees. To make changes to current net-to-bank or allotment settings, employees can visit LiteBlue.usps.gov, verify their identity via MFA, and navigate to PostalEASE.

For awareness, the ability for employees to make changes to their net-to-bank or allotment settings via the PostalEASE interactive voice response (IVR) system has been disabled, effective immediately. The IVR system for other employee actions can still be used.

Employees who have not set up their MFA preferences on LiteBlue, should visit the MFA LiteBlue site by navigating to LiteBlue.usps.gov and clicking on Multifactor Authentication under the login. If you identify any activity with your account that looks suspicious, contact ISCCU@usps.gov. For additional information about MFA and related topics, visit the MFA LiteBlue site by clicking on the MFA banner on the LiteBlue login page.

To improve the security of LiteBlue, on Jan. 15, the Postal Service implemented multifactor authentication (MFA) when logging in. MFA provides an extra layer of security and may already be familiar to most through online accounts at financial institutions by confirming a code received via text message or through an app. Now, unless already done so since MFA was implemented, when employees sign in to LiteBlue they will be required to reset their Self-Service Profile (SSP) password, verify the last four digits of their Social Security Number (SSN), and set up their MFA preferences. On Jan. 17, a mandatory stand-up talk about multifactor authentication for LiteBlue should have been given in all stations and offices throughout the country. That stand-up talk can be found here. Additionally, instructions and videos to help set up MFA can be found here.

To further protect employees' accounts, the Postal Service temporarily disabled allotment and net-to-bank changes. Although many have secured their account by setting up MFA, the Postal Service reports that 38 percent of all postal employees have yet to do so. The ability to make allotment and net-to-bank changes will remain disabled until a greater number of employees have protected their accounts. In the meantime, employees can still use a postal computer to access PostalEASE to make allotment and net-to-bank changes. All letter carriers should set up MFA on their accounts as soon as possible. 

It is reported that employees are using Google and attempting to access PostalEase. Over several recent days, approximately 119 postal employees attempted accessing PostalEase using Google; however, Google’s routers redirected their searches to third-party criminally run websites that mirror the look and access of PostalEase.  Unfortunately, their logon credentials were hacked, and some accounts were compromised.

The USPS Corporate Information Security Office (CISO) is working with the Postal Inspection Service to facilitate notice to the impacted employees. Formal notification to all postal employees is forthcoming. 

USPS reports that representations have been made at the district level confirming Postal Inspectors are contacting impacted employees, as well as employees who may have unknowingly been compromised, and requesting their EINs and passwords.

Postal Inspectors have not contacted postal employees and requested their EINs and/or passwords. Employees should never provide usernames and/or passwords to anyone.

USPS has informed NALC that PostalEase has not been breached by any third party. Employees accessing PostalEase via the official postal website have not experienced security breaches.

Specific banking industry standards require financial institutions to provide relief in certain situations. However, several third-party websites were criminal scams, and likely, some of the lost monies will not be returned.  USPS does not have the total dollar loss currently available. USPS states liability for the hacking, bank account breaches and lost monies remains with Google.

Financially impacted employees should immediately contact the Eagan ASC Helpdesk at 866-974-2733. Staff members are available to assist.

If you become aware of any employee experiencing access issues to PostalEase, they should immediately contact 877-477-3273 to request assistance.

Additionally, to assist USPS with identifying our affected members, NALC has created a section on the NALC Members Only portal of the NALC website that will allow affected individuals to identify themselves as victims of this scam. NALC members, after logging into the Members Only portal, will see in the upper right-hand portion of their Member Information page a check box with the words “Check here if you have been a victim of the fraudulent PostalEase Access” in red lettering.

NALC will then provide this information to USPS to assist in identifying those who may have been affected.

The MRS is a prime resource for all NALC representatives who enforce and administer the National Agreement. While the format has changed to allow for an easier search experience, the document still contains both a table of contents and a detailed index.

The MRS is still located under the Workplace Issues tab and Resource section easily accessible from the main page of the website. 

Click here to see the new format.