On March 17, New York City letter carriers voted to defy the law and go on strike. Clerks and other postal workers refused to cross their picket lines. Then, the wildcat strike suddenly spread across the country. By the following week, 200,000 postal workers from New England to California had walked off the job. Time called it the largest walkout ever against the Federal government.
President Richard Nixon vowed to crush the postal workers. “We have the means to deliver the mail,” he claimed. It was a hollow claim. He dispatched 23,000 United States Armed Forces personnel to New York City to process the mail, but without proper training, there was no way they could do the job. Meanwhile, courts were busy serving injunctions and imposing fines against union leaders.
Finally, the Post Office Department figured out it needed postal workers.
It went into serious bargaining with the postal unions. Within one day, they reached a preliminary agreement and the postal workers went back on the job. After a final agreement was hammered out a month later, the postal workers won a 6 percent wage increase—and that summer, President Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act that gave the postal workers an additional 8-percent raise.
They won another big victory. Under the newly reorganized Postal Service, postal workers now had rights they never had before. They could bargain collectively for wages, benefits and working conditions. And while they were still prohibited from striking, they achieved a binding arbitration process for resolving contract disputes.