About That Strike?

Jeff Green | Dec 04, 2024

Over the past 3 weeks I have talked to many people about the postal strike, and everyone seems to have an opinion. 

I have heard that the union is just trying to keep its members in secure jobs, protecting pensions and working conditions as well as the interests of new workers who will be coming on to work at Canada Post in the coming years.

And I have heard that CUPW represents a class of overpaid, under-worked, privileged workers who are 'lucky to have a job' - working for a company that is losing money and needs to control labour costs?

Nobody seems to argue that Canada Post is a well run corporation. But people don’t agree about what it needs to do to improve service and stop losing money.

Some say the only way is to cut labour costs, and CUPW needs to accept that or everyone will be out of a job. Some say the company is top heavy, and unwilling to look at opportunities to take advantage of new opportunities.

It often boils down to whether people are pro or anti-union.

There are pickets set up at post offices in our region, and the workers on those pickets have their own perspective on what is going on. 

They are loyal to their union, but they feel powerless. They would rather be delivering mail than standing around waiting for the weather to get colder for $52 a day in strike pay. They want stability in their workplace, they want to know what they are getting paid when they come to work, and they want to be compensated for the physical demands of the job. Like workers everywhere, they will judge the outcome of the strike by what it means for them. If the result is not what they are hoping for, they will begin considering other work. 

And the longer the strike lasts, the less they like Canada Post.

Laura Doherty is the Vice President of CUPW Local 556. She works out of the Inverary Post Office. The local represents rural and urban workers in Kingston and Frontenac County. One of the complicating factors in this strike is that there are two contracts, one for rural and one for urban Canada Post employees. Local 556 represents all of the workers in the region, even though there are two contracts.

Laura Doherty said there is a gender equity aspect to the way the separate contracts pay out, because most of the mail carriers in urban areas are men, and most of the rural carriers are women, and combining the contracts could address that inequity.

She also said that, on the pension issue, Canada Post's intention to change from a defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan is a non-starter for the union. And in the one change that has come out of the stop and start negotiation process in the strike, it appears that Canada Post has now agreed with the union position on pensions.

But Doherty is equally concerned about the “Flex” benefits plan that Canada Post wants to put in place, a plan that CUPW says results in fewer benefits and erosion of benefit levels.

She said, “Canada Post is trying to paint us as the bad guys, when we are just trying to protect our legitimate interest, our wages and benefits.”

Canada Post is an important service in rural areas.  If Canada Post went away, we do not know that someone else will magically arrive on all of our back roads with every package that we order from around the world.

Of course, I look at this from the perspective of the Frontenac News. 

Canada Post makes it possible for ua  to deliver our paper to every household in the region. The service is not as reliable as it was up to about 5 years ago, but it is still essential to us.

We post all of our content on the web, and it is easy for almost everyone to go to frontenacnews.ca and read it. 

But there is a lot of competition on the Internet for eyeballs, a lot of competition, much of it from companies whose sole purpose is to sell those eyeballs to companies whose sole purpose is to extract some benefit from massive numbers of people seeing their content.

We have about 30,000 people who we serve, not 6 billion, and the best way to get our information to those people is to get around all the competition on the Internet by sending a newspaper directly to them.

Our advertisers know that, and that is why we have continued to thrive as a print based business in a predominantly electronic world.

That makes us one of those businesses that are nervously looking at every statement by Canada Post, CUPW, and the Minister of Labour, trying to figure out where this is going, and how long it might last.

My conclusion at this point is that not only do  the union and the corporation have different goals in these negotiations, they also cannot find any middle ground right now that they both can live with.

The federal government may step in eventually if they have to, but with no discernable result that both parties can live with, the minister of labour continues to say arbitration is not a viable option.

When this all ends, and the timing of that 'when' is a big deal for us and a lot of other small businesses, we will all move on to other concerns,

But what is clear this time around is that the viability of Canada Post's rural service delivery will remain fragile, and that is something those of us whose business depends on that service will not be able to ignore completely.