From Bellingham to Las Vegas: Unity Is Strength

(This article appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of The American Postal Worker magazine)

We write this A Grand Alliance column from Las Vegas, where APWU members came together at the All-Craft Conference to continue the work to build our great union.

A Grand Alliance participated in the conference exhibit hall with a U.S. Mail Not for Sale booth. We provided information about the local proclamations campaign, distributed information about the privatization threat, and asked for feedback on the campaign against a corporate takeover of our public Postal Service.

Thank you to everyone who visited. If you would like to share your thoughts on the U.S. Mail Not for Sale campaign, complete our survey at: usmailnotforsale.org/ survey.

One highlight of the conference was the presentation given by Laurie Masterson, an Amazon worker in Bellingham, MA, who attended with APWU organizers Rich Shelley and Lori Cash.

In 2024, Amazon became the largest private-sector delivery company in the United States. While the Postal Service remains the country’s largest delivery service, a recent report by Pitney-Bowes predicted that Amazon could surpass it by 2028.

Union membership in the United States has been in decline since the 1970s, when the “Powell Memo” launched corporate America’s all-out attack on working people, our living standards, and our right to organize a union. The confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, written by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, urged companies to fight back against a “broad attack” on the free-enterprise system. That long-term decline impacts us all – pushing down wages everywhere and hurting unionized workers’ ability to bargain for good contracts.

So why is union membership declining? It is not because people do not want unions. While seven out of every 10 people in the United States have a favorable opinion of labor unions, only one out of every 10 workers is a member of a union.

The truth is, corporations are more powerful than ever. Companies spend billions of dollars on targeted psychological pressure campaigns against their own workers and aggressive legal strategies against those workers’ unions. They are willing to spend big to block workers’ right to a shared voice because it allows them to keep wages down and corporate profits up.

In Bellingham, the psychological pressure started almost immediately when workers first showed their public support for a union. “They started two hours after we openly wore our shirts,” explained Masterson. “In every bathroom stall, we have this little plastic screen that they can put updated news and resources on, and everything in that bathroom was all anti-union.”

The anti-union propaganda machine includes messages in the break room. Every TV screen in the facility was churning out anti-worker messages, increasingly focused on distortions about the APWU.

Workers started forming a union because, as Masterson describes it, Amazon has a “corporate structure that is consistently trying to push us to produce more for less money every chance and opportunity they get, while making it sound like they’re doing us a benefit.“

The human toll of Amazon’s style of anti-worker attacks is terrible. “I have worked with four people who are working [at Amazon] homeless, not due to drugs or alcohol addiction, but due to the economic depression that they’re in.” Masterson revealed. “They’re not earning enough to afford an apartment … It is just crazy. It really is.”

But the answer to the greed of giant corporations like Amazon is organized labor, and Masterson is confident that workers will come out on top in the end – not just in one plant but in facilities across the region and the country. The company will fight but as she says, “They can’t afford to fight us all once we join forces.” ■