The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) is the
union of city delivery
letter carriers working for the
United States Postal Service.
In
1889, the
Milwaukee Letter Carriers, knowing many of their fellow carriers would be attending the
Grand Army of the Republic Encampment in their city that
summer, issued an official call to meet during the reunion to form a
national association and act on other matters of importance to letter carriers. On August 29, 1889 60 letter carriers from 18
states gathered together and unanimously adopted a resolution to form a National Association of Letter Carriers.
The union's
first major task was to win implementation of the
eight-hour workday which was deliberately being ignored throughout the country. It was not until the NALC won a
Supreme Court decision and $3.5 million
overtime award in
1893 that the eight-hour day was truly recognized for letter carriers.
Since then the union has fought to maintain adequate pay and working conditions for all its members. In
1970 over 200,000 letter carriers and other
postal employees across the
country walked out in response to
Richard Nixon's refusal to provide an adequate pay raise for letter carriers.
Now there are 312,500
active and retired members of the NALC, of which over 241,000 are city delivery letter carriers currently employed by the
U.S. Postal Service. There are 2,712 local branches representing letter carriers in all 50 states, the
District of Columbia,
Puerto Rico, the
Virgin Islands and
Guam.
NALC is affiliated with the AFL-CIO
Most information in this write up is from http://www.nalc.org