LABOUR: Postal Workers Strike in Canada

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Nov 20 1997 (IPS) - Canadian postal workers, echoing the concerns of labour unions in the United States, have gone on strike over government demands for more “flexibility” in job arrangements.

More than 45,000 employees walked out Wednesday in protest against the state-owned Canada Post demands they fear will lead to the disapparance of 4,000 full-time jobs and an increase in part- time positions. These are the same concerns that brought out members of the Teamsters Union in the United States last month in a successful strike against United Parcel Service.

Canada Post made a profit last year of about 78 million dollars on revenues of some 3.5 billion dollars – some of which came from the sale of real estate assets. But management declared it wanted to cut about 140 million dollars in costs in order to further modernize its operation.

As the Toronto Star, a supporter of the Liberal party government, put it: “Canada Post is struggling to transform itself into a self-sustaining enterprise that can compete in an era of e-mail, private couriers and modern communication technology.”

But Darrell Tingley, president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) says that Canada Post is attempting to extract money from its employees at the bargaining table and use it to pay dividends to its major shareholder, the federal government.

“(Canada Post) could also settle an agreement and avoid a strike if it wished. Instead by the end of the (five year) corporate plan the post office will be paying 56 million dollars per year in dividends to the federal government, he said. “For that amount of money, they could reduce postage by three cents.”

CUPW attempted to avoid a national walk-out while continuing to negotiate with management because it feared that the federal Liberal government would legislate their members back to work through Parliament. This would take the entire labor dispute out of the hands of the two contending parties, and resolved instead by a third-party arbitrator.

As the talks dragged on earlier this month, Canada Post precipitated the strike action by laying off some emplpoyees alleging that there were reduced demands for service as fewer Canadians were mailing letters in anticipation of a disruption.

Historically bad blood between union and management in the crown corporation reached a boiling point just before the walk-out when the Canada Post chief negotiator was replaced after punching his union counterpart late in the evening – in front of a journalist.

The government, despite its official support for Canada Post’s restructuring initiative is leery of an immediate back-to-work bill in Parliament, political sources said. A leaked memo several months ago revealed the federal minister of labour, Alfonso Gagliano had assured the Canadian Direct Marketing Association, representing the private couriers, that his government would act quickly if the postal workers hit the picket line.

Labour expert Gene Swimmer, a professor of public administration at Carleton University in Ottawa noted that “Strikes increase the stakes and forces concessions.”

He said Canada Post and CUPW could compromise on a fixed number of permanent full-time jobs in the corporation. But if the federal government ends the labour dispute and calls on a third party, it is not certain that the union will get a sympathetic hearing. “Arbitrators are more comfortable [dealing] with wages and benefits,” Swimmer aid

The restructuring of Canada Post on a more commercial basis , which has been going on since 1986 under a mandate set by successive Canadian governments and part of an international trend with postal services across the industrialized world, is at the heart of the labour dispute.

Neither the governing Liberals nor their Conservative predecessors in Ottawa have been able to resolve the contradiction at Canada Post between “maximizing returns while providing a regulated public service,” says political scientists Robert Campbell, author of “Politics of the Post.”

Privatization of Canada Post has been discussed in Ottawa and pushed in some right-wing business circles, but the federal government has not acted upon it, notes Campbell. There is “lingering”” support in this country for a universal postal system which services both the lucrative highly populated cities and the money-losing, less dense rural and northern areas.

A recent report commissioned for the federal government has urged Canada Post to get out of the courier business, leaving that to the private sector, and stick with delivering the mail. That was shelved because that would have meant raising the cost of stamps for Canadians who are still blessed “with having one of the cheapest postal rates in the world,” adds Campbell.