Undelivered - by Philip F Rubio (Paperback)

About the Book

"For eight days in March 1970, over 200,000 postal workers staged an illegal 'wildcat' strike--the largest in United States history--for better wages and working conditions. Picket lines started in New York and spread across the country like wildfire. Strikers defied court injunctions, threats of termination, and their own union leaders. In the negotiated aftermath, the U.S. Post Office became the U.S. Postal Service, and postal workers received full collective bargaining rights and wage increases, all the while continuing to fight for greater democracy within their unions. Using archives, periodicals, and oral histories, Philip Rubio shows how this strike, born of frustration and rising expectations and emerging as part of a larger 1960s-1970s global rank-and-file labor upsurge, transformed the post office and postal unions"--

Book Synopsis

For eight days in March 1970, over 200,000 postal workers staged an illegal "wildcat" strike -- the largest in United States history -- for better wages and working conditions. Picket lines started in New York and spread across the country like wildfire. Strikers defied court injunctions, threats of termination, and their own union leaders. In the negotiated aftermath, the U.S. Post Office became the U.S. Postal Service, and postal workers received full collective bargaining rights and wage increases, all the while continuing to fight for greater democracy within their unions.

Using archives, periodicals, and oral histories, Philip Rubio shows how this strike, born of frustration and rising expectations and emerging as part of a larger 1960s-1970s global rank-and-file labor upsurge, transformed the post office and postal unions. It also led to fifty years of clashes between postal unions and management over wages, speedup, privatization, automation, and service. Rubio revives the 1970 strike story and connects it to today's postal financial crisis that threatens the future of a vital 245-year-old public communications institution and its labor unions.

Review Quotes

"Undelivered contributes to our understanding of public-sector workers and their unions, a largely underdeveloped aspect of labor history, and it challenges the notion of a decline in activism beginning in the 1970s, a view rooted in the fates of industrial unions...Rubio has produced an account that is national in scope, even if tilted toward New York."--The North Carolina Historical Review

"Undelivered illustrates how worker militancy during this time won major victories that would shape labor conditions even as overall unionization rates fell in the late twentieth century. . . . [C]ompelling reading."--Journal of American History

"An impressive book."--New York Labor History

"Finally, a comprehensive history of the 1970 postal strike: Philip F. Rubio's examination of this understudied strike is a valuable addition to the field of labor history. By framing this action as a centerpiece of the democratic unionist revival of the 1970s, he reminds us that probably no workers had more success in transforming their union culture than postal workers."--Journal of Southern History

"This book chronicles the roots, conduct, and legacy of the 1970 strike by more than 200,000 postal workers from 671 offices ranging from Albany and Akron to St. Paul and San Francisco. . . . Rubio, a former postal clerk and letter carrier, closes this timely, compelling account with an extended reflection on the costs of the politically manufactured financial crisis, the postal service's increasingly diverse workforce, and the country at large."--CHOICE