Portland ralliers: ‘Keep your hands off the Postal Service!’

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — “We’re here to say: Keep your hands off the postal service!”

That’s what David Norton, the president of the local branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said to the hundreds of United States postal workers in Portland who gathered for a rally and march Sunday afternoon.

As part of an ongoing nationwide effort to rally support, United States postal workers in Portland held a march Sunday to decry any potential move to privatize the mail service.

“Public mail is not for sale,” USPS worker Theresa Dunas told KOIN 6 News. “This is actually a very real threat to us.”

Postal workers, union officials and community leaders took part in the rally to decry any potential move to privatize the mail service. that began at Salmon Street Springs in downtown Portland.

“I mean, look, we deliver people’s packages, medications, vote-by-mail ballots,” Norton said. “There’s millions of Americans every day that rely on the Postal Service and our service. We have universal delivery. So that means that we deliver to every address in this country, places where UPS, Amazon, other delivery companies don’t go. And so without the Postal Service, these people would go without any kind of needed delivery service.”

USPS currently employs about 640,000 workers tasked with making deliveries from inner cities to rural areas and even far-flung islands.

“If DOGE comes in and does more cuts, it would actually hurt our service even more,” Dunas said. “We need to have a raise. We need to have better working conditions and safety, and that’s when we’ll really see our customer service improvement.”

This is at least the second time in a month that Portland postal workers have held a very visible rally. On February 23, more than 100 Portland postal workers, union leaders and local politicians joined a nationwide “Fight Like Hell” rally to demand fair wages and protest proposed changes to the USPS by President Trump.

This past Thursday, the American Postal Workers Union said thousands of workers in all sections of the country held rallies in more than 250 locations in what they called the “National Day of Action to Defend the Public Postal Service.”

On March 14, the AP reported Postmaster General Louis DeJoy plans to cut 10,000 workers and billions of dollars from the U.S. Postal Service budget and he’ll do that working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to a letter sent to members of Congress.

DOGE will assist USPS with addressing “big problems” at the $78 billion-a-year agency, which has sometimes struggled in recent years to stay afloat. The agreement also includes the General Services Administration in an effort to help the Postal Service identify and achieve “further efficiencies.”

Critics of the agreement fear negative effects of the cuts will be felt across America. Democratic U.S. Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia, who was sent the letter, said turning over the Postal Service to DOGE would result in it being undermined and privatized.

“This capitulation will have catastrophic consequences for all Americans — especially those in rural and hard-to-reach areas — who rely on the Postal Service every day to deliver mail, medications, ballots, and more,” he said in a statement.