Postal workers are fighting the gigification of a vital public service

Huddled around fires on picket lines across the country, postal workers like myself are carrying a load that many Canadians aren’t aware of.

My co-workers are famously fit, but even our most in-shape, seasoned letter carriers seem to agree: standing in the cold, bracing yourself against harsh wind, has left us worn down at the end of the day. 

We’re mentally exhausted, too, after a year of fractious negotiations that went nowhere, leading to an even more contentious month of rhetoric in the lead-up to our strike, which has now hit its third week. 

And then there’s the hue and cry from the corporate sector and the establishment media, who’ve brandished the stories about everyday Canadians waiting on packages. 

Though you wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, these stories break our hearts too. The person who can’t get home without a passport, the business sitting on a product that they need to ship with Canada Post, the isolated communities and seniors that are without a vital service—it weighs heavily on a lot of us. 

I’ve heard many of my co-workers say, at one point or another, that they’d much rather be out walking our routes right about now—not that 30,000 steps a day ever sounds easy.

But the loud protests of Canada’s elite also show what we’ve been pleading with people to understand: we posties grease the wheels of the Canadian economy; without us, it starts to groan.

The strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)—of which I’m a member—is now the third-longest non-rotating strike in the history of the Canadian post office. It’s shorter only than the strike in 1975, which won job security, and the strike in 1981, in which we won a maternity leave policy that later formed the basis of public maternity leave for the entire country. 

The pickets themselves have matured, with supply tents, barbecues, and even snow forts—and members increasingly willing to enforce hard pickets against management looking to enter buildings. 

On the picket lines, the current strike is beginning to invite historical comparison. On the first day, former CUPW president Jean-Claude Parrot stopped by at the age of 87 to lend support. Members who’ve heard the stories of his defiance of back-to-work legislation in 1978, including a three-month stint in jail, lined up to shake his hand. 

A lot of the posties out there have never experienced a strike like this before. For many, this has already become the big generational strike, the one through which CUPW’s self-image as one of the toughest, most militant unions in the federal service is renewed for a new cohort of members.

We’re out here to preserve a good job that serves people from coast to coast. We’ve led the way in the past, with our strikes paving the way for Canadians to enjoy maternity leave and job security. Now, we’re fighting to set another precedent—to stop the casualization that threatens so many workers across the country.

Management ‘out of touch’ with workers

Overall, there is a sense that management has grown out of touch with its workforce. 

This was clear enough when Canada Post spokesperson John Hamilton told The Globe and Mail that “many young people are not looking for full-time, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. jobs. They want flexibility. They could work for Canada Post part-time and have other part-time jobs during the week.” 

That’s obviously untrue. For one thing, the only reason many CUPW members like myself endure years of temporary/casual status is because of the eventual promise of permanent full-time jobs with job security, pension and benefits. For another, many of Canada Post’s casual workforce are not unencumbered young adults but people in their 40s and 50s, supporting families and beginning to look at their grim retirement prospects. 

His line was clearly a justification for the increasing trend of the corporation relying on casual workers, who now constitute around 20 per cent of CUPW’s total membership, myself included. As Jan Simpson, president of CUPW, told The Globe and Mail, “they don’t want to use full-timers. They want to create a part-time work force.”

Many of us love our jobs despite these conditions, but we almost universally believe we deserve at least a little bit more from our employer. To many of us, Hamilton’s quote that we were nothing but flighty young people really tipped the corporation’s hand.

Whatever it said publicly about protecting full-time jobs, the corporation’s only answer to its financial challenges is to lean heavily on part-time and temporary employees. It has done more to imitate the models used by rapid low-cost couriers like Intelcom and UniUni than those used by financially sustainable postal systems around the world, let alone our unionized private-sector parcel business competitors.

Canada Post trying to create “cheaper and more precarious’ workforce

Despite its importance to postal workers and the future of this postal service, the strike is poorly understood from the outside. 

It has mostly been seen as a dispute over wages. And that’s partly true, the wages are part of the disagreement: the union is seeking to keep them in line with inflation, something in the ballpark of 22 to 24 per cent. The corporation has offered just shy of 12 per cent over that same period. 

But my sense from the picket line is that while wages are still on the bargaining table, they are far from the defining factor that motivates workers to walk the picket line day after day. Instead, workers are driven by attacks to the pension fund and an even more aggressive push toward casual work.

Management’s proposed pension reforms would shift new hires off the historically popular defined-benefit pension, which pays a predetermined rate to retired members, and onto a defined-contribution pension—in which a member and employer’s contribution is set, but the amount the member will receive is not. 

Junior members and casuals waiting for full-time employment see this as a blatant cut to the compensation package. Senior members who would remain on the more popular pension fund see it as move that would starve their pension in the long term. It’s also clearly a ploy by management to divide the two groups of workers—especially when one considers that there are no financial grounds on which to alter the existing benefits.

An even bigger issue for many of us in the union is the increasing part-timing and casualization of the workforce. This has become a key issue at the bargaining table, and appears to be the main reason talks between the two sides have broken down over the past two weeks. 

Canada Post is seeking to implement a more flexible model that relies more heavily on part-time and flex-hour workers, a move it sees as necessary to compete in the parcel space with evening and weekend delivery.

Beyond a few details—a guarantee of only eight hours per week, with up to 30 hours of availability expected if the corporation requires it—little is known about the type of positions management wants to create, and employees have not been consulted on potential changes. 

Our CUPW leadership appears to view this—correctly, in my opinion—as an attempt to remodel our delivery services at the bargaining table, in part by creating new part-time employee classifications that will over time cannibalize the work currently performed by full-time, permanent staff. 

In fact, there are already terms in the collective agreement that would allow Canada Post to pursue evening and weekend delivery using a mix of part-time and temporary employees, but for whatever reason the corporation has refused to implement these models, and is now insisting it needs the power to make further changes instead. 

Many of us believe that by getting us to agree to weekend and evening delivery, the corporation’s aim is not to move parcels to your door any faster, but to create a staffing model that is cheaper and more precarious—a benefit only to management, not to anyone served by Canada Post.

Media coverage falls short of what public, postal workers deserve

For the most part, none of this makes the news, and most members have given up on the media. Mainstream outlet reporters have visited our picket line in Ottawa only to chide us that our media department isn’t getting back to them quickly enough, when they could talk to any of the members in front of them.

The media has seemed more interested in the public power struggle between Canada Post and CUPW than any of the actual issues that underlie it. A national union fighting the casualization of labour that has infected the entire Canadian economy ought to be a big story, but the coverage so far has largely focused on existential questions about the post office, set against the all-too-convenient backdrop of the corporation’s latest financial results. 

There is no shortage of business interests lining up to help fan these flames. The CBC has, for instance, quoted Carleton professor Ian Lee at least a dozen times, knowing that he’ll paint a reliably dramatic picture of an apocalypse for Canada Post—while rarely disclosing that Lee is a former employee of Canada Post’s corporate department. (That he has unsuccessfully predicted and egged on the demise of the post office for much of the past 15 years seems not to disqualify him either.) 

“Even as the media […] has improved their labor coverage when it comes to other public services. It doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to Canada Post workers,” said labour studies professor Adam D. King, interviewed by Press Progress. “I’m not sure how to explain this, but it is something that I think has been there, not just in this strike, but in previous strikes, there is a tendency to look at the supposed negative impacts.”

On the other hand, few reporters bother to interview the rank-and-file workers, and even fewer take the concerns and questions we have and turn them into hard questions asked of Canada Post’s management. Postal workers have the highest rate of disabling injuries out of all federally regulated sectors—but good luck getting the media to mention that alongside our demands for better working conditions. 

Digging in to win

So here we are, into our third week on the picket lines. Members wonder if we’ll be back by Christmas. On our picket line, we’re setting up our annual Christmas food drives, building wind barriers and trying to find ways to keep ourselves busy all day. We’re all sick of Timbits, but we are, for better or worse, dug in. 

A strike that was initially about a lot of things, from pay and pension to safety and staffing, has crystallized into something more concise: the fight to protect a good, career job that serves Canadians from coast to coast. We want to work at the post office, because working at the post office means something to us. 

None of us are here to get rich, and if we wanted to drive for Amazon, we would all just drive for Amazon. But we won’t embrace the logic of the gig economy, and we definitely won’t allow it to be ushered in through the side door.