I Have a Dream, You Have a Dream, and Dr. King Had a Dream

(This article first appeared in the September/October 2018 issue of the American Postal Worker magazine) 

By Vice President Debby Szeredy 

My dream would be to help make APWU truly a movement of members fighting to save the USPS from privatization. Everyone needs to take responsibility and get involved. There is plenty of work to do. It will only get better when everyone joins in making it happen. We all want a safe, non-hostile, good paying, enjoyable workplace! We all are under attack and without all of us in this fight we could lose everything.

My dream may not be your dream but we spend many of our waking hours working for the Postal Service. Our families rely on our postal wages and our community depends on our service. I hope I can inspire you to take an active role and make a difference at work and for the people we serve!

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired people to make a dream come true. But he didn’t do it alone. Ralph Abernathy, his close mentor and one of his best friends, helped by showing how to give the dream structure. Ralph would say “let me tell you what that means for tomorrow morning.”

Dr. King was the leader who inspired and moved people to get involved, but it required organizing and mobilizing and that takes many people and many activities.

APWU needs members who want to make our dream a reality. It takes many members working within the union across the country.

In a great movement there is always a person or small group that takes the vision and makes it a reality. We should all feel the outrage with the attacks made on postal workers:

• to privatize the Postal Service, violating our constitutional right to be a service to the people;

• to consolidate/close, degrade services, cut hours, failing in services to the community;

• to continue to have three different pay scales for workers who are doing the same job causing disparate treatment, and then subcontracting our work to private companies;

• to deny new workers the right to a career job with good benefits after probation;

• to work in a hostile, unsafe work environment that is discriminatory and understaffed;

• to abuse, excess, and overwork postal workers, with no regard to family and health.

Together we can stop this privatization scam and take back the work we lost.

The message to our communities is that postal workers do make a difference and we love serving the people with our work.

History has shown that over the last 20 years the Postal Service, big corporations, right-wing think tanks, and others have been working hard to privatize our work, dispose of post offices and plants giving our work to private businesses to make profits to put in their overstuffed bank accounts.

How can you be a part of our Dream to stop them?

It starts with giving your local union your e-mail and your cell phone number, and offering your willingness to help. You can get involved with union activities, union meetings, and union conference calls to help fight this privatization attack. Many of the activities don’t take much time to do and with everyone’s help it can make a difference. Visit the APWU website at least once a week. Contact your congressional members, get to know them, and let them hear about the value of our work.

This is a dream that we all can make happen together.