Bernie Sanders (I-VT) picked up a big endorsement today as the 250,000 member American Postal Workers Union endorsed his campaign for president.
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The endorsement comes just under a month after Sanders’ appearance at the union’s All-Craft Conference in Las Vegas in October.
The postal workers’ union said Sanders has a long history of supporting its workers and pointed to his efforts to keep open post offices and mail-sorting plants in rural communities, oppose slower delivery standards and fight attempts to privatize the mail service. Same, too, for the National Nurses United, Sanders’ first national union endorsement.
While Sanders continues to trail rival Hillary Clinton in the latest national polls, the postal workers said there’s a reason Sanders is generating unprecedented crowds at his rallies and growing energy among workers, young people, and those exhausted of establishment voices and status quo politics.
The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) announced that its executive board has voted to endorse Sanders, calling him “a true champion of postal workers and other workers throughout the country”.
Insurgent socialist presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders scored a coveted endorsement from one of the largest public sector unions in the country on Thursday.
Calling the Democratic candidate “a fierce advocate of postal reform to address the cause of the USPS financial crisis”, Dimondstein said “Bernie Sanders doesn’t just talk the talk: he walks the walk”.
Such an agreement, the senators said, must require that the company “recognize the union as the worker’s exclusive bargaining representative on the basis of a majority representation of signed authorization cards”. “You go to check-cashing places, which rip you off. And, yes, I think that the postal service, in fact, can play an important role in providing modest types of banking service to folks who need it”. Sanders called out the Republican plan to kill 230,000 Postal Service jobs through privatization. “Based on his Senate record, we are confident he will appoint good people to public office and end conflicts of interest”.
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Dimondstein praised Sanders’ commitments to Social Security, advocacy for Medicare expansion, and opposition to Trade Promotion Authority granted by Congress, and his rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact negotiated by the administration with 11 other nations. “No other candidate has his record of exposing the rule of the billionaire class”, Dimondstein said. But President Richard Trumka, representing more than 12.5 million union members across 56 unions, later softened that stance, suggesting it was “conceivable” a federation endorsement might emerge before ballots are cast in Iowa and New Hampshire, although he said it remained “unlikely”.
