No to Legislative Strikebreaking! Victory to Postal Workers!
by Kiri Vadivelu
Free collective bargaining, including the right to strike, is being reduced to a farce by the Liberal minority federal government. Postal workers are the latest victims of this abrogation of labour liberties, with no hint of defiance suggested by the Canadian Labour Congress and its major affiliates. On the heels of Ottawa’s gross interference with job actions by dockworkers and railroad employees during the summer, this comes as a hard blow. It demands a powerful collective response, including a general strike. The CLC should convene an emergency conference now to adopt and implement an immediate plan of action to defend posties and workers’ rights.
On December 13, Justin Trudeau’s Minister of Labour, Steven MacKinnon, directed the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to determine whether Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) can quickly negotiate a settlement under obscure Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code. Three days later, the CIRB ordered an end to the strike, sending the dispute between the parties to an inquiry set to report in May 2025.
Thus, the government uses its arbitrary powers to allow the bosses to drag their feet, and refuse to bargain in good faith with workers and their unions. Prime Minister Trudeau signals that corporations have only to pretend to negotiate during the daylight until he bails out management at the dusk.
Canada Post comprises the biggest delivery network with over 6,000 post offices across the country. It is the backbone infrastructure essential to small communities from coast to coast. 55,000 CUPW members take pride in the 150 years of high-quality service provided in all kinds of weather.
Outrageously, a year into bargaining. Canada Post presented a wage offer of 1.5 percent in 2024 to a compounded 12 percent over four years – a far cry from what postal workers, who suffered a cut in purchasing power of over 20 per cent since the COVID lock-down, deserve. The company’s revenue shortfall of $3 billion from 2018 to 2023 has little to do with workers’ wages and benefits; it is much the result of management’s untimely capital investments and CEO bonuses.
Meanwhile, the corporate media has spread the most outlandish lies about postal workers. We’re simultaneously portrayed as obsolete, glorified paperboys, and also blamed for destroying Canadian small businesses. They say we should be privatized and be subjected to the whims of the market — and in the same breath they demand that we be treated as an “essential service” and forced back to work.
Throughout the pandemic, postal workers across the Canadian state tirelessly worked to ensure the flow of letters and parcels to every household. The least that Canada Post, a public corporation, could do in return was to respect the collective bargaining process when the time for contract renewal arrived in 2023.
In addition to a wage increase to keep pace with the cost of living, CUPW asserts the need for job security, improved benefits, adequate staffing, guaranteed hours for permanent relief employees, improved rights for new hires, and no contracting-out or fragmentation of work, such as a Separate Sort and Delivery System (SSD).
The truth is letter carriers are being crushed under unmanageable, unsustainable workloads. Routes can exceed 1,700 delivery points, involve climbing more than 160 flights of stairs, or stretch over 30 kilometers. We perform these tasks while carrying the weight of 7 bundles of mail, flyers, and parcels. These grueling demands are the result of a delivery model imposed by management, conceived in the fantasy world of a business school.
SSD was designed to eliminate the carrier’s duty to sort and prepare their mail. In reality, it means workers are stripped of the time and tools to do so, yet we’re still expected to perform these tasks in inadequate workplaces. This so-called efficiency has allowed Canada Post to drastically lengthen routes using a broken, outdated measurement system causing incomplete work on a daily basis, leading to backlogged mail that must be reintegrated into the system for the next day’s delivery.
Canada Post uses inhumane route lengths as an excuse to harass, discipline, and abuse workers they view as problematic. Those who report hazards on their routes are targeted. Workers who take their lunch or restroom breaks are punished, expected to skip meals and to urinate in a bottle, or not at all. Workers who demand safe conditions or report injuries face retaliation. Women, trans, and racialized workers are especially isolated and mistreated. All of this is done under the guise of “performance issues” with workers struggling to walk more than 30 kilometers a day.
Rather than collaborate with the union to restructure routes into manageable, safe workloads, the corporation is trying to remove the collective agreement’s protections against surveillance and tracking. They want to use these tools to discipline workers on flimsy grounds, making it easier to punish us for the corporation’s failure to provide proper working conditions.
The constant, arbitrary discipline has created a dire health and safety crisis at Canada Post. Workers are so terrified of retaliation that they’re afraid to report hazards. Workers attempting to address safety issues are often escorted out to their routes by supervisors who scream at them for taking too long. If they file a safety complaint, they may find themselves the subject of baseless investigations into alleged criminal wrongdoing. Is it any wonder that letter carriers have the second highest rate of injury of any federal workers?
Canada Post is banking on the creation of a false public perception that postal workers demand too much. Management prefers the public to urge government action to legislate posties back to work, instead of agreeing to decent wages and benefits via negotiations. But for workers, the long-term solution, at Canada Post and every industry, is to put workers directly in control and eliminate the boss class.
If Canada Post was truly struggling financially, shouldn’t it have been eager to negotiate a deal and bring workers back before the busiest time of the year? In 2023, the Canada Post Group reported a loss of $637 million according to its 2023 Annual Report. Despite these financial struggles, the company still allocated $15 million to the compensation of key management personnel, covering both short-term and post-employment benefits. For a company facing such losses, hefty executive salaries raise questions about priorities.
Canada Post decided to build new facilities, upgrade working fleet vehicles, restructure delivery routes, hire more managers and add a layer of financial fat to already high-paid executives, without adequate consultation with those who actually bring revenue into the corporation. To add insult to injury, Canada Post told the mass media that all their fancy capital investments were routine expenses — at negotiation time.
Clearly, workers are not to blame. Nobody renovates their house when they are having a bad year financially. But Canada Post does it year after year. Operating costs only increased .1% from 2022 to 2023 but Corporate loses went from $548 million to $748 million. Labour costs were also down by 3%, contrary to what has been reported by the media. Bad management is clearly the reason.
Meanwhile, Doug Ettinger, the CEO of Canada Post, is leveraging this strike for personal gain. Ettinger sits on the board of directors at Purolator, a private courier company. This blatant conflict of interest means he profits every time Canada Post loses business. Every package diverted to Purolator during the strike lines his pockets.
But it doesn’t stop there. Ettinger and his allies in management are sabotaging public services, undermining Canada Post’s role as a reliable, low-cost courier. By weakening CUPW, Ettinger is attacking the very benchmark CUPW sets for fair wages in the entire delivery sector. This is nothing short of class warfare.
Canada Post offers low-cost, flat-rate delivery to every address in the country. No private courier can compete with that. If Ettinger succeeds in gutting Canada Post, the financial burden on Canadians will be immense. Small businesses, rural communities, and everyday people who depend on affordable delivery will be left paying the price.
Canada Post stated, “both parties must urgently focus their energies on resolving outstanding issues to reach negotiated agreements.” Union negotiators were at the bargaining table for close to a year trying to do just that, but Canada Post continued to push for massive rollbacks that won’t help postal services, and that the union can never accept.
The corporation knows well that postal workers were not responsible for the pandemic, nor for inflation, nor will they take a pay cut. In a high turnout, over 95 percent of voting CUPW members authorized a strike mandate, showing vividly that they reject concessions. Pain is real for those who depend on a pay cheque to make ends meet. Inflation is historically high and rents have tripled in the last 10 years while wages are nowhere close to meeting needs.
Canada Post claims its ill-conceived changes are necessary to remain “competitive.” They’re demanding “flexibility” and limiting access to benefits, and pensions. Logistics workers’ rights are being gutted industry-wide in the name of “competitiveness.” Amazon and Uber lead the charge, reintroducing piecework through the gig economy, forcing workers to live in cars or endure 12-plus hour shifts just to afford to rent a bedroom. This isn’t competition—it’s exploitation. And postal workers are determined to bring these conditions to an end.
The business class is racing to the bottom, asking only how much more they can squeeze from workers. CUPW refuses to let decades of hard-won labor rights—paid for in workers’ blood—be sacrificed for corporate greed. Postal workers set the benchmark for fair wages and rights in this industry. Attacking our union isn’t just an attack on CUPW—it’s an attack on every logistics worker in Canada.
The Union is not opposed to 7-day delivery. Its Collective Agreement already provides for 7-day delivery. The language was written by the Corporation. Even though 7-day delivery occurs only in a few locations as a pilot project, the provisions already exist, and the Union completely supports it. Canada Post wants to scrap the current language and hire lower wage workers who have no set schedule and no set hours, which is totally unacceptable.
Canada Post expects workers to endure grueling conditions for poverty wages. A part-time postal worker makes only $25,000 a year, a full-timer $50,000—while the bloated CEO and his 22-member board rake in $450,000 plus bonuses (that’s more than the Prime Minister), all while running a public service into the ground with service cuts and negligence. Despite it all, CUPW made significant compromises to settle the dispute in its latest offer yet Canada Post is stuck in the mud and expect a corporate bailout from government in order to socialize the expense and privatize the profit.
There is a Post Office in every community. It is an opportunity to provide better service to the public. The Union has presented the “Delivering Community Power” vision to the corporation to provide services such as senior check-ins, High-speed internet and Postal Banking.
Postal workers are fighting not just for fair wages, humane working conditions and the right to retire with dignity. We’re fighting to preserve a vital public service that connects people across vast distances. The bosses and the commercial media would have you believe we’re lazy or greedy. The truth is—we’re exhausted, exploited, and determined to fight back. Support postal workers—our struggle is your struggle.
For generations, postal workers have led the way for justice for all workers. In 1981, CUPW went on strike for 42 days to win 17 weeks of paid maternity leave. Millions of other workers benefited from this gain. Now is the time to return the favour with a huge wave of solidarity.
For a general strike to uphold free collective bargaining, including the right to strike. Defy legislative strike breaking. The CLC should lead the way. Down with the Trudeau government and the CIRB intervention. Victory to CUPW! The struggle continues!
Kiri Vadivelu, is a postal worker in Scarborough, Ontario, CUPW Local 602.