But why campaign for Clinton and not for Trump? Oh, wait, the US Postal Service is unionized! Via the WaPo:
The U.S. Postal Service engaged in “systemic” violations of federal law by pressuring managers to approve letter carriers taking time off last fall to campaign for Hillary Clinton and other union-backed Democrats, investigators said Wednesday.
High-level postal officials had for years developed a practice of granting the employees’ requests for unpaid leave, leading last year to an “institutional bias” in favor of Clinton and other Democrats endorsed by the National Association of Letter Carriers, one of the largest postal unions. The Postal Service violated the Hatch Act, which restricts federal employees from working for or against a political candidate or party during election season.
“The culture and practice was, ‘It’s mandatory, it’s the directive” to make sure employees got time off, Adam Miles, acting director of the Office of Special Counsel, told Senate lawmakers at a hearing following an investigation by the office and the Postal Service inspector general.
The investigation found that 97 letter carriers took time off, sometimes weeks, to take part in the union’s Labor 2016 program, canvassing, making phone calls and working on other get-out-the-vote efforts to help elect Clinton and other pro-labor candidates. The workers were dispatched to battleground states, including Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio. They were reimbursed for their unpaid leave by the union’s political action committee.
Federal employees, including postal workers, are allowed to campaign for political candidates and give them money on their time off. But by directing that time off be granted even over the objections of local post office managers who said they would be understaffed, the Postal Service itself showed a workplace bias toward Clinton and other Democrats endorsed by the union, Miles said.
“USPS … facilitated (the union’s) political activity by directing local supervisors to approve union official (leave without pay) requests to participate in Labor 2016,” a report by the Office of Special Counsel found. “Characterizing this political activity as union business conferred a special status on carriers’ leave requests.”