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Statement: The 2026 NALC National Elections
Listen to this statement on our podcast The Relay Box!
Last week was a momentous milestone for the NALC. We concluded our first nationally competitive election in generations, and the message from the rank-and-file is clear:
“We Need Change!”
In 2022, 43,363 ballots were cast in the national elections. In 2026 that number was 61,120, a 40% increase in voter turnout. Despite the increase, the 2026 totals were still tens of thousands less than the historic vote that rejected the Tentative Agreement in early 2025, when 70% of the 90,000 members who participated voted “No.”
Just as 70% percent of the voters rejected the Tentative Agreement in 2025, last week over 70% of the membership voted against the so-called "Establishment Slate.” The combined vote totals of James Henry, Mike Caref and Lew Drass strikingly echoed the Vote No percentage of 70%. A supermajority of Letter Carriers want something different than the path walked by President Brian Renfroe. The Concerned Letter Carrier Slate, running on a platform of change, won a majority of the nationwide positions, and half of the contested National Business Agent (NBA) positions and James Henry was elected President of the NALC.
President Renfroe did not run for reelection, which alone represents one of the greatest accomplishments of the reform movement in the NALC. This week, the establishment slate that carried his legacy lost the majority of national offices that it held. The moniker “establishment” gets thrown a lot, so what exactly does it refer to? Many of those that are deemed “establishment” have venerable experience, are beloved and have spent decades honorably representing carriers. Besides, we’ll always have elected officials, so was there something about the outgoing Executive Council that made it especially “establishment-y?”
This outgoing Executive Council went wrong in several important ways:
It took orders from the President from above, instead of the membership from below.
Instead of taking the fight to our bosses, it made excuses for them.
And most damningly, it provided cover for President Renfroe as he delayed our contract negotiations out of a time of nationwide union victories across all industries in 2023 to a time of Union peril in 2025 and then continued to support the weakest TA since 1970.
We call on the incoming Executive Council to not make these same mistakes.
The outgoing Executive Council has made some important moves towards a better union at the 2026 LA National Convention - they expressed support of a $30/hour starting wage, declared the NALC a Sanctuary Union, support for our trans brethren, support for the right to not cross picket lines, as well as transparency measures such as livestreaming the convention. And even while overriding the membership’s vote of no confidence in the TA, President Renfroe took the threat of an illegal take-over by the Trump Administration’s Commerce Department seriously, and marshalled all our D.C. influence to neutralize this existential threat.
But ultimately the membership has put their support behind a new crop of leaders to demand the restoration of the Letter Carrier craft and hold Postal Service management at every level accountable for the degradation of delivery standards and working conditions. The election was acrimonious, and at over two years in length, far too long! We have seen social media turn allies into enemies. If only we each spent as much time organizing our local branches as we do posting on Facebook! But this was, after all, the first contested national election for as long as anyone can remember, and the allure of this new partisanship and the freewheeling tribalism that stemmed from it allowed brushfires of antagonism to burn through social networks.
But now our fractured Union needs to put the slates of 2026 behind us, and turn our energy to unifying against the abuses of the bosses. Superman is not coming to save us, only each individual carrier joining together in collective action can guarantee the future of light blue. It is time for us to unify and collectively confront abuse on the workroom floor, mobilize our hundreds of thousands of members for a historic contract, and fight our opponents in congress who hate the very idea of a public, universal service that pays a living wage to its workers.
The Grievance Process
On these issues, President-elect Henry has a tough road ahead of him and we should not pretend that anyone could easily fix the issues facing the Letter Carrier. The USPS has hijacked the Grievance-Arbitration process, and recently the Elston memo has stripped from local supervisors their independent authority to settle grievances. Ask any shop steward and they will say that the task that is most immediate is fixing the grievance process by addressing the Service’s uncontractual stonewalling and the mounting backlog of cases at Step-B and pre-Arbitration. Country-wide there are over 50,000 cases “stalled” in the backlog. Every one of those cases represents a time when management harmed a Letter Carrier. Justice delayed is justice denied to the rank-and-file on the shop floor, and the grievance process must be protected as it is one of our strongest tools to defend our working conditions.
Backup teams must be activated and the backlog needs to be addressed for the NALC to maintain credibility with its membership. The process of assigning Arbitrators must be expedited. A major test of the first 100 days of the Henry administration will be to meaningfully attack the DRP backlog and file national-level grievances to demand that the USPS respect our collective bargaining agreement.
A Contract Our Members Deserve
On the workroom floor, the greatest issue that our union has faced is the long decline in our wages. Inflation and 20 years of weak contracts have eroded our standard of living. Letter Carrier starting wages are now below what they were before 1970. Now many carriers across the country must depend on multiple incomes and crushing amounts of overtime to support their families.
The majority of the incoming Executive Council ran on the CLC slate and agree with nearly all of Build a Fighting NALC’s Points of Unity including:
30 Dollars an Hour Starting Pay
All Career Workforce
Full COLAs
Overhauling the uniform system
Reducing time to Top Step
To accomplish this, President-elect James Henry has committed to establishing a national Organizing Director along with regional and branch-level organizers to engage the membership in meaningful contract campaigns. This is a key step towards recognizing that we must be actively organizing at the branch-level with supporting infrastructure from national NALC if we want to deliver a truly historic contract.
We in BFN want an expansion and empowerment of the new Rank-and-File committees, with elected delegates and a commitment to Open Bargaining as passed by the 2024 national convention in Boston. Although the most recent Right to Strike resolution did not pass in LA, BFN is committed to continuing to advocate for the basic freedom vital to all worker-struggles —the right to strike legally. We will also continue to educate rank-and-file and union officers about the essential fact that the strike, or the threat to do so, is the basic foundation of any union’s leverage in negotiations. Short of obtaining that right, we call on the Henry administration to leverage the trust and love that the American public has for the letter carrier and demand that the Postal Service agree to a contract that honors the letter carrier’s essential place in American life.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Our membership wants change to the grievance system, the culture of the union, and wages and benefits. BFN is committed to developing bottom-up initiatives, activating the NALC membership, and ensuring that democracy and transparency are a modus operandi in our union, not just a buzzword.
We are in a new era of the NALC. We will have one-term presidents if an administration does not deliver. We in BFN know it, so does the newly elected Executive Council, most importantly, the rank-and-file know it.
And while this election was focused on the national, there remains nothing more important than the letter carrier on the work room floor. It falls on you, dear reader, to organize your work floor, to call out safety issues, to stand up for the abused CCA, and ensure that your local branch leadership is responding to the reality of the working conditions in your station. It doesn’t matter who is in charge of National if the rank-and-file are not in charge of your station. If you are interested in being part of the rank-and-file reform that will fight along side the new administration and hold them to account when they fall short, come to our next training Secrets of a Successful Organizer on November 17th, or our next BFN General Membership Meeting on November 22nd.
Over the coming months and years BFN is committed to reform at every level of our union, in service of a more democratic, militant, and inclusive National Association of Letter Carriers. Unions change in elections, resolutions and bylaws amendments, but first and foremost, the change through rank-and-file action as coworkers take charge of their union and their workplace.
Build a Fighting NALC congratulates President-elect James Henry and may our best days be ahead of us.
In Solidarity,
The BFN Coordinating Committee 10/26/2026
Sources and Further Reading:
NALC Announcement : https://www.nalc.org/news/nalc-updates/2026-nalc-national-election-results-announced
Results by Region: https://www.nalc.org/news/nalc-updates/body/Certified-Election-Results-2.pdf
CLC Slate position.
https://concernedlettercarriers.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/CLC-Platform-Attachment.pdf2022 Election Results:
https://www.nalc.org/news/nalc-updates/body/2022-NALC-Election-Official-Summary.pdf
https://www.nalc.org/news/nalc-updates/body/2022-NALC-Election-Certification-by-Committee.pdf
TA Election Results:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v1MSkRV1Ni9eh1i7Q6f2O7TNcJJHRzDo/view?pli=1
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