The following statement was issued by the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee, an independent group of workers organized to fight both management and the corrupt union bureaucracy. To join the committee, fill out the form below.

To all postal workers:

Nearly 1,000 armed private security guards are being rushed into USPS plants in the final weeks before the midterm elections—into the very facilities that will process millions of mail-in ballots. Asked what the guards are for, Postal Inspection Service spokesman Brian Benson did not bother to disguise it: They are being deployed “to provide security and act as a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the mailstream.”

They are not here to protect the mail. They are here to watch the people who move it. The guards are being pointed at the workforce at the exact moment the Trump administration is attempting to turn the Post Office into an instrument of election rigging—and on the eve of the deepest cuts in its history.

We demand the immediate withdrawal of these armed private guards. Postal workers must organize against the actions of USPS management and its armed contractors, report any attempt to violate the rights of voters or postal workers and respond collectively to stop it.

Why these facilities, why now

Armed guards have been reported in Denver, at Carol Stream and another location in Chicago, in Charlotte, and at two facilities in Topeka, Kansas. The list of targets also includes Atlanta, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Diego and Tampa. The pattern is focused on large postal facilities with a thousand workers or more, especially concentrated in Democratic-leaning and swing-state cities.

At the Denver Processing and Distribution Center, workers report that four armed guards have begun checking employee badges at the entrances, despite the electronic badge readers that already do that job.

“It’s really suspicious,” said Claire McKean, a postal contractor and investigative researcher. “Seeing armed guards deployed in primarily Democratic-leaning or swing states is alarming.” She put the question plainly: “How do we know that they’re not going to load all the ballots into armored trucks with armed security standing by?”

One of the security firms, Spanish multinational Prosegur, is notorious for human rights violations. In 2024, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, excluded Prosegur from its investments after concluding the company was possibly contributing to serious human rights abuses through its Brazilian subsidiary, Segurpro.

Among the cases examined by Norway’s Council on Ethics were the following:

• A Segurpro guard shot and killed a man suspected of stealing from a railway operated by the mining giant Vale.

• Segurpro personnel were found to have blocked indigenous communities from reaching their ancestral burial sites, from fishing in the Acará River, and from traveling to a nearby town for supplies and medical care. They used rubber bullets, tear gas and batons against roughly 150 people, injuring about 20.

International labor organizations have also filed complaints against Prosegur alleging anti-union practices and violations of workers’ rights in multiple countries.

There have already been serious incidents involving armed contractors at USPS facilities. In April 2024, at a regional processing and distribution center in Charlotte, North Carolina, a private security guard shoved a female postal worker to the ground and punched her in the face, according to Miriam Bell, president of the Charlotte Area Local of the APWU. Another mail handler intervened after seeing the guard reach toward his sidearm. Management then retaliated against the victim by putting her on emergency placement in an attempt to fire her, Bell said.

These armed contractors operate with little oversight. A 2022 audit by the USPS Office of Inspector General found that 35 of 115 guards examined, roughly 30 percent, lacked the required security clearances and that auditors could not verify completion of required training for sampled guards.

Armed guards and the coming postal cuts

After the holiday peak season ends, these same armed guards could be used to intimidate workers in postal facilities who oppose the deepest cuts in USPS history.

Postmaster General David Steiner has brought in Alvarez & Marsal, a corporate turnaround firm, to draw up the cost-cutting plan. Steiner has told Congress that USPS plans to employ 30,000 to 35,000 fewer workers within four years, and to shift the workforce “more toward pre-career than career” employees. This means more disposable, low-paid, no-benefits workers.

And that is only the beginning. The Postal Service’s own Inspector General has floated a 10 percent workforce reduction, roughly 60,000 jobs, alongside fewer delivery days, the conversion of door delivery to cluster boxes, and the outsourcing of transportation and retail operations. Management has already suspended payments into our pension fund and frozen hiring. Steiner has threatened the closure of “thousands of unprofitable post offices” and an end to six-day delivery. The date is set: Management has said it will begin the operational offensive after the New Year.

These cuts will be wildly unpopular, and management knows it. The Post Office is the most popular institution in the federal government. The public does not want its post offices closed, its delivery cut or its mail slowed. The workers do not want their jobs destroyed. The only people who want these cuts are the financial oligarchy and the politicians who serve it.

The conclusion is inescapable: Armed guards are being moved into postal facilities now, before the cuts begin, to intimidate the workforce and to be on hand when workers’ anger erupts.

The union knew—and did worse than nothing

The deployment of armed guards was reported publicly months ago. Yet when postal workers raised it with the APWU, the union claimed to have “no solid information” and was “extremely hesitant” to discuss it. At another facility, when workers pressed their steward for answers, they were merely told the matter had been “escalated up the proper chain.” The “proper chain” is the place where our grievances go to die.

The union bureaucrats are themselves industrial security guards whose job is to discipline the workforce, to channel our grievances into procedures that go nowhere, and to prevent any independent organization of the workers. At the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), union officials are preparing to take the next contract to binding arbitration and imposing it without even the fig leaf of a membership vote.

So we must not wait for the union officials to act. We must act ourselves. The Democrats will not stop it: They agree with the austerity and fear a movement from below more than they fear dictatorship. The union officials will not stop it: They are integrated with the very state apparatus that is carrying it out.

The only force that can stop this is the working class itself, organized independently of both corporate parties and their enforcers in the trade union bureaucracy. We call on postal workers in every station and distribution center to build rank-and-file committees, to share information across crafts and districts, and to link up with federal workers, teachers, industrial workers and postal workers around the world in a unified class movement against dictatorship.

The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee was founded by postal workers in September 2023 to organize a fight against attacks on jobs, wages and working conditions, independently of management and the union bureaucracy. We fight to defend workplace safety, pensions, democratic rights and the Postal Service as a public institution, and to build a network of committees through which postal workers can share information and coordinate action with workers across the country and internationally.

These are our demands:

1. The immediate removal of armed personnel from our facilities. We do not need armed men standing over us to “deter” us from compromising the mailstream. That is the language of a prison, not a workplace. The mail has been safe in our hands for generations, and it is safe now. The ones who are the real threat to the mail are the government officials and managers sending in the contractors.

2. Full disclosure, now. Who are these guards? What is their training and certification? Who do they answer to? We demand these answers publicly, not “up the chain” where our questions have disappeared for months, and not through unofficial word-of-mouth about rooms being handed over behind our backs. We refuse to go on allowing management to make these decisions behind closed doors while the union stands by in complicity, telling us it has “no solid information.” If the union has no information, that is because it has not demanded any. We will not accept a union that feigns ignorance, while armed guards are moved into our plants.

3. No searches, no pat-downs, no surveillance of postal workers. Rooms in our plants are being converted into rooms for patting people down. This must end.

4. No use of security to discipline or escort workers. Management already violates our Weingarten rights with impunity, with no accountability and no pushback from the union apparatus. We will not allow armed guards to become the enforcement arm of discipline—to walk workers out of the building without union representation, to intimidate, to escort. Security is not a disciplinary tool.

5. No interference with the mail or with mail-in ballots. As the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee has already declared: We will not do it. We refuse to carry out any order to withhold, delay or “verify” mail-in ballots. We will not be the instrument of the disenfranchisement of the American people.

If you agree with these demands, join the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee and help organize workers at your facility to carry them out.

In solidarity,

The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee