Why Postal Workers Can’t Legally Strike

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On the night of March 17, 1970, letter carriers packed a union hall in Manhattan and did something a lawyer had just warned them was a federal crime.

The warning was blunt: a strike against the Postal Service could mean immediate discharge and prosecution. The members voted anyway, 1,555 to 1,055, on a motion from a rank-and-file carrier named Vincent Sombrotto. Within days, the walkout spread to more than 200 cities and pulled in over 200,000 federal workers. It remains the largest illegal strike by federal employees in American history.

Here is the strange part. That strike worked. It won postal workers the right to bargain collectively over their pay for the first time. And it did not win them the right to strike.

More than half a century later, the roughly half-million people who move America’s mail still cannot legally walk off the job. The prohibition is not a clause buried in their contract. It is written into federal criminal law.

So why the ban, and what happens instead when postal workers and management genuinely disagree? The short answer: two federal statutes make striking against the government unlawful, and a court upheld the core of that ban. Congress paired it with a system of binding arbitration that resolves deadlocks. A neutral third party decides, not a picket line.

The Two Statutes Doing the Work

Start with the law itself, because everything else grows out of it.

The first piece is 5 U.S.C. § 7311, part of federal employment law. In plain terms: you cannot hold a job in the federal government if you strike against it. The statute’s own language bars anyone who “participates in a strike, or asserts the right to strike, against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia.” A court later narrowed that “asserts the right to strike” language on First Amendment grounds, as explained below, though the words still appear in the Code.

Postal workers, for this purpose, are federal employees.

The second piece adds teeth. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1918, violating that no-strike rule is a felony: the statute authorizes a fine, imprisonment of up to one year and a day, or both. Because the maximum runs past a year, the offense counts as a felony under federal classification.

Read those together and you get something unusual. A private-sector worker who breaks a no-strike clause faces discipline or civil liability. A federal worker faces criminal prosecution.

There is a wrinkle worth knowing, because the ban is broader than picket signs. The Merit Systems Protection Board has held that striking includes any group refusal to work. Because labor law focuses on participation in a stoppage rather than its form, coordinated sick-outs and slowdowns can count as prohibited strike activity too, not just a visible walkout.

The Case That Tested the Ban

The letter carriers’ union challenged this framework in court, and the ruling was narrower than most people assume.

In National Association of Letter Carriers v. Blount, 305 F. Supp. 546 (D.D.C. 1969), the union did not argue that Congress lacked power to ban strikes by public employees. What it attacked was the extra language: the parts of the statute that punished merely asserting a right to strike, or belonging to an organization that asserted one. The union’s suit argued the ban violated the First Amendment.

The court agreed on the speech point, holding those provisions facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment. It struck down the words “or asserts the right to strike,” along with the membership clause, as unenforceable — though, as a matter of housekeeping, that language still appears in the printed U.S. Code today.

But the court also ruled the pieces could be separated. The core survived: the no-strike prohibition itself remained valid. You cannot be punished for saying strikes should be legal. You can be punished for actually striking. A companion decision upholding that core ban, United Federation of Postal Clerks v. Blount, 325 F. Supp. 879 (D.D.C. 1971), was summarily affirmed by the Supreme Court the same year.

The 1969 ruling also preserved a small leftover from that era: the employment oath the old Post Office Department once required. Workers had to swear, “I am not participating in any strike against the Government of the United States or any agency thereof, and I will not so participate while an employee of the Government of the United States or any agency thereof.” The oath is gone; the underlying prohibition on the conduct is not.

Why the Mail Stopping in 1970 Rewrote the Rules

To understand why postal workers accepted a system without strikes, you have to see the world they were escaping.

Before 1970, postal unions had almost no bargaining power. They functioned mostly as lobbying groups, and pay depended on the whim of Congress.

Then came the insult. The American Postal Workers Union reported that from 1967 to 1969, postal wages did not rise at all, while Congress raised its own pay 41 percent. A blue-ribbon panel had already concluded that postal workers deserved the same bargaining rights private-sector workers enjoyed under the National Labor Relations Act. Congress did not act on it.

So the workers acted instead.

For the first time since 1792, the mail simply stopped. That detail landed hard, because uninterrupted delivery was practically the Postal Service’s brand.

President Richard Nixon called it an illegal stoppage and reached for the military. He issued Proclamation 3972 on March 23, 1970, declaring a national emergency and invoking a statute that let him direct the Secretary of Defense to move the mail. More than 18,000 troops were assigned to New York City post offices. They proved largely ineffective at moving the mail, and normal postal service was not restored until the strike itself ended.

It did not work. Sorting and delivering mail turned out to be skilled labor, and soldiers dropped into unfamiliar routes could not do it at scale. Unable to route around the workforce, the administration had to negotiate.

And here is the ending that shaped everything after: not a single postal worker was fired. The government had felony statutes on the books and chose not to use them. The strike became a catalyst for reform rather than a mass prosecution.

Teddie Days, a St. Louis retiree who took part in the walkout, has described in a union video what that victory felt like.

The 1970 Bargain

The settlement produced a statute, and the statute produced a trade.

Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act, signed August 12, 1970. Its official title reads, in the flat cadence of statute books: AN ACT. August 12, 1970. To improve and modernize the postal service, to reorganize the Post Office Department, and for other purposes.

The Act dissolved the old cabinet-level Post Office Department and created today’s United States Postal Service as an “independent establishment of the executive branch.” More business-like. Able to set rates, sign contracts, run its own operations.

For workers, it delivered the thing the strike had been about. Postal unions could now bargain collectively over wages, benefits, and working conditions. The economic gains were real and immediate: a 6 percent raise retroactive to the previous December, then an additional 8 percent under the first contract. That first contract set a starting salary of $8,488, slightly more than a 21-year veteran had been earning just three years earlier.

But Congress kept the strike ban. In its place, the Act built a binding arbitration process “in lieu of the right to strike.” When bargaining deadlocks, a neutral panel decides the terms, and both sides are bound by the result. That is the bargain in one sentence: collective bargaining, yes; the strike weapon, no; a neutral referee to break ties.

What Happens Instead When There’s a Dispute

Take away strikes and you need somewhere for conflict to go. In the Postal Service, it goes into two channels: grievances over the existing contract, and interest arbitration over the next one.

The distinction sounds technical but it is worth thirty seconds. Grievance arbitration handles rights disputes: the union claims management violated the contract already in force. Interest arbitration sets the terms of a brand-new agreement when negotiators cannot agree. Same neutral-decision-maker idea, aimed at different questions.

The day-to-day channel is grievances, and the volume is staggering. A recent audit by the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General, titled Grievance Management, found that the U.S. Postal Service paid out more than 866 million dollars to resolve almost 3.5 million grievances from fiscal years (FY) 2022–2024. Disputes over overtime and improper work assignments were among the most frequent and costly.

That is what labor conflict looks like without strikes: millions of paper disputes, resolved while everyone keeps showing up for work.

When a grievance reaches a hearing, it looks a lot like court. Per APWU guidance, arbitration hearings are held when the union claims the Postal Service has violated a provision of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) or that it has improperly disciplined or discharged an employee, and has filed a grievance.

That guidance coaches witnesses not to lose their temper even if a cross-examiner turns obnoxious, to answer only the question asked and then stop, and to wait for the arbitrator to rule when the union’s representative objects.

That is good witness advice in any courtroom. It also tells you how thoroughly the strike has been replaced by procedure.

The bigger fights, over pay and benefits, run on a published clock. According to the National Association of Letter Carriers, “Negotiations with the Postal Service will officially begin in February 2026, as the current National Agreement is set to expire on May 22, 2026.” Subcommittees are already assigned specific contract articles to draft proposals. Because neither side can strike or lock out, the emphasis falls on starting early enough to reach a deal, or an arbitrated result, before the old contract lapses.

How often does it reach arbitration? Often enough that it works as a routine backstop rather than a rare emergency: postal contracts have repeatedly gone to binding arbitration when negotiations deadlocked, including several of the most recent national agreements.

Layered on top of the statutes are the Postal Service’s own rules of conduct. Its Employee and Labor Relations Manual opens its standards section by requiring that “Employees must not engage in criminal, dishonest, notoriously disgraceful, immoral, or other conduct prejudicial to the Postal Service.” The same section bothers to prohibit on-duty gambling and the selling of numbers slips, which gives you a sense of how granular the behavioral code gets. Participation in an illegal strike, a felony under § 1918, would sit comfortably inside that “criminal” and “prejudicial” language.

Is Arbitration a Fair Trade for the Right to Strike?

This is where thoughtful people genuinely split, and the argument is worth laying out honestly.

The Postal Reorganization Act required that postal wages be comparable to the rates and types of compensation paid in the private sector, giving arbitrators a fairness standard to hit.

According to one study of New York’s interest-arbitration system, police and firefighters covered by it had zero complete work stoppages over thirty years, while the state’s teachers, who lacked arbitration, ran 33 strikes over the same period.

Interest arbitration is designed to be a conservative process — one meant to preserve settled practices rather than impose sweeping change. And the awards stick. Postmasters General John Potter and Patrick Donahoe both instructed managers that compliance with an arbitration award is not optional. Courts enforce that: an award cannot be vacated so long as it “draws its essence” from the collective bargaining agreement, meaning the award has to be grounded in the contract.

Now the other side.

There is a wrinkle that complicates the rosy version. Because an arbitrator cannot be pressured by the threat of a walkout, critics argue the process can entrench management-favored structures over time — notably the spread of lower-paid entry tiers and non-career positions that hold down wages for newer workers even when veteran pay stays competitive. Higher pay on the surface, in other words, can sit atop a slower climb underneath.

The Federal Ban Is Stricter Than Most States’

One thing that gets lost in the debate: the federal criminal ban is not how American public employment generally works.

Most public-sector labor law lives at the state level, and it is a patchwork.

A Knight First Amendment Institute report by Columbia law professor Kate Andrias surveyed the landscape. It found that 42 states plus the District of Columbia grant at least some public workers collective bargaining rights, and about a dozen states give some public employees a legal right to strike.

The pattern is worth seeing side by side.

Sources: OnLabor state-by-state analysis, Washington State Attorney General opinion, and 18 U.S.C. § 1918.

Look at Washington. Its Attorney General has said that public employees have no legally protected right to strike, yet the state’s statutes establish no specific penalties for unlawful public employee strikes. A judge can order strikers back with an injunction, and defying that order can bring contempt sanctions — but no criminal strike statute puts people behind bars the way federal law does.

That is the gap. Many states forbid strikes; the federal government criminalizes them. On the economic worry that strike rights blow up public budgets, research from the Economic Policy Institute has found that laws enabling public-sector bargaining and strikes have a real but modest effect on public wages — hardly the budget catastrophe critics warn of. Whether that makes the postal ban excessive or prudent is a judgment call, but it is a policy choice, not a law of nature.

The 2026 Contract Will Test All of This

The abstract argument is becoming concrete right now.

If history holds, there is a better-than-even chance the pay questions land in front of an arbitration panel rather than a negotiated deal.

What makes this round pointed is money. Labor makes up roughly 75 to 80 percent of the Postal Service’s total operating costs, according to the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service’s Postal Primer 2025. When an institution under financial strain has that much of its cost tied up in wages, and its workers cannot strike, the arbitration panel becomes the room where the fight happens.

In 2025, APWU president Mark Dimondstein told members facing what they saw as threats to the Postal Service to rally, bargain, and press politically — the tools the 1970 bargain left them. Not the one their predecessors used in the union hall that March night.

Whether a neutral arbitrator can protect workers as effectively as a work stoppage once did is the open question underneath every postal contract. The 1970 strikers forced their answer at some personal risk. Everyone since has had to trust the process they left behind.

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