New York Metro Area Postal Union

The New York Metro Area Postal Union (American Postal Workers Union, Local 10) represents clerks, motor vehicle staff, maintenance workers and mail-handlers in the greater New York City area. (Some mail-handlers, however, are represented by other unions.) By the 1980s the union enrolled more than 25,000 members. The local originated as Local 10 of the National Federation of Post Office Clerks. Officers and most of the members of this local seceded in 1958 to become the Postal Union of Manhattan-Bronx Clerks (which in 1960 changed its name to the Manhattan-Bronx Postal Union), with the aim of uniting many postal craft workers into one industrial union. The union became part of the newly-created American Postal Workers Union in 1971, after taking a leading role in the hard-fought national strike of postal workers in 1970. Under the presidencies of Moe Biller and Josie MacMillan from the 1958 through the 1980s, the local union won significant gains for its members. Both the membership and the leadership became more diverse as post office jobs opened up to minorities and women as a result of civil rights initiatives in the 1960s. In 1973 the union changed its name to the New York Metro Area Postal Union, the new name reflecting the inclusion of the New York Bulk and Foreign Mail Center and the North Jersey Facility in the local's bargaining unit.

From the guide to the New York Metro Area Postal Union Photographs, circa 1955-1981, (Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive)

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