American Postal Workers Union

Background

The American Postal Workers Union is one of four main postal workers’ unions. It represents clerks, mail handlers, mechanics, and maintenance employees in post offices, sorting centers, and other “indoors” facilities, while the National Postal Mail Handlers Union represents workers handling bulk mail shipments in mail centers and sorting facilities, the National Association of Letter Carriers represents postal delivery workers in urban areas, and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association represents rural delivery workers. ⁴

The APWU was founded in the aftermath of the postal strike of March 1970.  ² Defying the illegality of a federal workers’ strike, a group of postal workers in New York City went on strike after the U.S. Congress capped pay raises at just over 5 percent for postal workers.  ² The striking New York postal workers were joined shortly thereafter by workers in 30 other cities, and the resultant chaos crippled the nation’s mail system, forcing then-President Richard Nixon to deploy the National Guard to distribute mail.  ² The strike eventually resulted in a retroactive six percent raise for postal employees, and one month later, the passage of the Postal Reorganization Act guaranteed another raise, collective bargaining privileges, and a binding arbitration clause “in lieu of the (already nonexistent) right to strike.”  ²

On July 1, 1971, five smaller union organizations (the United Federation of Postal Clerks, the National Postal Union, the National Association of Post Office and General Service Maintenance Employees, the National Federation of Motor Vehicle Employees, and the National Association of Special Delivery Messengers) merged into the APWU.  ²

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the APWU is an affiliate of the national AFL-CIO labor federation and its president, Jonathan Smith, sits on the AFL-CIO’s executive committee. ^{1  5}

Collective Bargaining

Unlike most federal employee unions that are only legally allowed to collectively bargain with federal agencies regarding “conditions of employment” and not wages or retirement benefits, the American Postal Workers Union and the other postal unions have the power under federal law to negotiate national agreements with the USPS that include compensation, benefits, and other contract provisions that are barred to civil service employees. ⁶

In its 2024 national contract with the USPS, the APWU negotiated the redefinition of the contract’s prohibition against sex discrimination to include “childbirth and related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity, or transgender status.” ⁷

Leadership

As of 2026, the president of the American Postal Workers Union is Jonathan Smith, who had previously led the APWU’s largest local, the New York Metro Area Postal Union. ⁸  In this role, Smith was also a member of the executive board of the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Smith was elected the APWU president in 2025 after the retirement of Mark Dimondstein, who had been the union’s president since 2013. ⁹ Diamondstein had previously helped co-found the Greensboro, NC chapter of Jobs With Justice and was a coordinator with Labor Against War. ¹⁰ During his 2013 leadership campaign,  Diamondstein had sued the APWU for allegedly being unresponsive to requests for union member email addresses ahead of his election. ¹¹

Activism

The American Postal Workers Union supported the “Delivering for America” plan by Biden administration’s U.S. Postal Service management to hire 11,000 more USPS employees to staff sorting centers, open 46 new regional facilities, retain Saturday deliveries, and consider adding Sunday deliveries beyond its existing delivery services for bulk customers such as Amazon and Walmart. ¹² Some of these policies ended up in the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, which significantly loosened the USPS’s responsibility to fund its pension and retiree health care programs.  ¹³ Then-APWU president Mark Dimondstein called the bill’s signing “a tremendous victory for our union.” ¹³

Political Campaign Spending

The American Postal Workers Union is politically active, and reported spending $1.1 million on political activities and lobbying in 2025. ¹⁴ It supports the Democratic Party and aligned committees such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well as individual candidates. ¹⁵

The APWU’s donations to candidate campaigns have favored more radical-left candidates. In the 2024 election cycle, the only individual U.S. Congressional campaigns to receive direct APWU donations were Democratic Socialists of America-aligned and “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), who was also on the ballot under the socialist-aligned Working Families Party.  ¹⁵ The APWU also donated $10,000 each during the 2024 cycle to the U.S. Senate campaigns of then-Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI).  ¹⁵

The APWU also operates the APWU COPA (Committee on Political Action) PAC. ¹⁶

Black Lives Matter

In 2016, the 2,000 delegates of the APWU’s national convention unanimously backed a “Black Lives Matter” resolution, which declared that “the APWU will encourage its members to participate in any rallies, petition drives, or other actions pursued by the campaign against racial discrimination and for transparency in policing”; the union reaffirmed that commitment in a statement following the police-custody death of George Floyd in 2020. ¹⁷

Conflicts with Trump administrations

The American Postal Workers Union repeatedly opposed the postal service policies of the first Trump administration which it charged with trying to drive the USPS “into oblivion.” ^{18  19}

During the first Trump administration, the APWU regularly criticized Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, despite DeJoy having been secretly recorded calling union members “Comrades” and telling them that he planned to “insource” some operations that the USPS had previously outsourced. ²⁰

Disputes with DeJoy and the first Trump administration included how much relief to grant the USPS in response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic,  ¹⁸  reorganization plans to prevent USPS insolvency, ²¹  and the degree to which mail-in voting should be prioritized during the 2020 presidential election. ²²

Then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reportedly blocked a $13 billion grant to the USPS, compromising instead on a $10 billion loan as part of a larger COVID-19 relief package.  ²¹

The APWU pursued an additional $25 billion in aid for the USPS as part of its “U.S. Mail is Not for Sale Campaign,” objecting to DeJoy’s proposed solvency reorganization for the postal service. ²³ In a memo leaked to the Washington Post, DeJoy called for cutting late-in-day additional deliveries, temporarily delaying mail delivery until the next day rather than making extra trips. ¹⁹

In a video response to these and other conflicts, Dimondstein said that President Donald Trump was trying to drive the USPS “into oblivion.” The APWU also gathered 2 million signatures for a petition to the U.S. Senate to urge the passing of the “Heroes Act,” a projected $3.4 trillion stimulus package backed by House Democrats and containing a number of left-wing policies. In the same video, the APWU advocated for a presidential election conducted by mail-in voting in 2020. ²³

In the second Trump administration, the APWU participated in organizing or supporting protests branded under the “#NoKings” banner, national days of demonstrations positioned as a defense of democratic norms against President Trump. These events were part of a larger mobilization involving over 70 Democratic Party affiliates and allied organizations across at least 19 U.S. states and multiple international locations, according to publicly available event listings on Mobilize.us, a Democratic Party-aligned organizing platform. ^{24  25}

The APWU opposed the second Trump administration’s efforts to make the federal government more efficient through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and other mechanisms.  ²⁶ In 2025, then-APWU president Mark Diamondstein spoke at a Washington, D.C. rally against DOGE. ²⁶

Opposition to Staples’ USPS Program

In 2014, then-American Postal Workers Union president Mark Diamondstein criticized a pilot program that allowed office supply company Staples to offer USPS-branded in-store postal services staffed by Staples employees. ²⁷ The APWU argued that the program was a method of privatizing federal postal work and reducing the need for unionized postal workers at USPS post offices.  ²⁷

The APWU’s opposition to Staples included a campaign to bring political pressure against the company’s proposed merger with Office Depot in 2015 through lobbying, a letter-writing campaign, and an attempted boycott.  ²⁸

The companies abandoned their plans in May 2016 after the Obama administration’s Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger and successfully obtained a preliminary injunction from a federal judge. ²⁹

Staples ended its postal services program eight months later. ²⁸

Postal Banking Project

The American Postal Workers Union has long supported the USPS’s expansion into providing banking and related personal-financial services such as check cashing and short-term payday loans, which would both create more jobs for APWU members and improve the USPS’s fiscal stability by creating another revenue stream. ³⁰ Many left-wing activists see postal banking as a “public option” that would create a government-operated competitor that could undercut and diminish the power of privately operated banks and other financial industry institutions. ³¹

At a rally with Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) on December 17, 2015, the APWU delivered more than 150,000 signatures to then-Deputy Postmaster General Ronald Strowman asking for permission for USPS to expand into banking services.  ³⁰

In 2021, the USPS quietly piloted postal banking services in D.C., Baltimore, the Bronx, and Falls Church, Virginia. ³² APWU president Jonathan Smith was the president of the APWU’s New York City local at the time and was one of the leaders of the effort to have the Bronx included in the test sites. ³³

The USPS postal banking program was criticized for charging higher fees than private-sector alternatives and being accessible only during normal post office business hours, and it reported zero customers for its services between April 1, 2022 and December 21, 2024. ³⁴

Finances

In 2025, the American Postal Workers Union reported $140,134,951 in revenue, $144,875,082 in expenses, and $197,328,763 in net assets in its annual report to the U.S Department of Labor. ¹⁴

The national union’s largest source of revenue is a biweekly per-capita tax on its locals of between $12.78 and $13.14 per member, which generated $50,844,633 in 2025.  ¹⁴