Postal workers aren’t just fighting for fair agreements. We’re also fighting a political battle against successive anti-labour governments that have shown zero respect for workers’ Charter-protected rights to free and fair collective bargaining.
Repeated government interventions in our dispute have completely ruined this round of negotiations. Every time the Government has stepped in, it has only made reaching new collective agreements that much harder. With every intervention, the Government has pushed the parties farther apart.
This is the case yet again with Canada Post’s October 3 offers. When Minister Lightbound made his announcement to gut our public post office on September 25, the Government gave Canada Post permission to make even worse offers than the ones postal workers had just decisively rejected in forced votes in July and August.
Steps Backward…
Instead of offering improvements from its May 28 positions, Canada Post’s offers:
Give management the “sole discretion” to choose whether mail will go out on uncovered routes or when OT is needed. Give management the power to close as many of the 493 retail counters staffed by CUPW members as it wants. Suspend Urban job security protections (Article 53) in cases when Canada Post is implementing the measures announced September 25. While Canada Post says it wants to take care of job losses through “attrition,” the Urban offer gives management alone the discretion to choose how many “departure incentives” it will offer before laying employees off.
Apart from these new rollbacks, the Corporation’s offers remain, for all intents and purposes, the same as the ones it gave to us on May 28.
Bargaining should move the parties closer together. The cuts announced by the Government are what Canada Post wanted to see – they were the Corporation’s own positions as presented to the Industrial Inquiry Commission. Now we see those cuts reflected in Canada Post’s latest offers. We are in a downward spiral of Government intervention at Canada Post’s request and an increasing distance between the parties at the table.
The Government should be doing the bidding of the public, not the Corporation. Rather than gutting the post office, the Government should hold a fully public review of Canada Post’s mandate, like it said it would.
In solidarity,