Why did CUPW refuse to go on strike at Canada Post?

The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee will hold its first public meeting on Sunday at 7:00 pm ET. We encourage all Canada Post workers interested in taking control of the contract fight from the pro-management CUPW bureaucracy to register here attend.

With a strike called by an overwhelming 95 per cent last week and management intransigent in demanding major concessions, more than 50,000 Canada Post workers are no doubt wondering why the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) bureaucracy is keeping them on the job after 3 November is the deadline for a strike.

After a year of negotiations and more than a hundred negotiations between CUPW and management, Canada Post workers have no clarity on whether or when the union will allow employment action to take place. It is clear that no progress has been made in realizing workers’ just demands and that the company continues to make its own provocative demands for concessions. Instead of preparing workers to fight against Canada Post management and the Trudeau Liberal government, which insists that the Crown corporation must be run as a commercial enterprise, CUPW says it intends to work with the company to achieve financial “success.” those. by significantly reducing labor costs and increasing operation through the use of new technologies.

Canada Post workers are on strike during the 2018 rotating strike campaign, which was criminalized by the Trudeau Liberal government.

If CUPW President Ian Simpson and other union leaders haven’t called a strike, it’s because they don’t want one to happen.

The entire union apparatus – from the Canadian Labor Congress onwards, as well as the New Democratic Party, which supported the Trudeau government for more than two years and continues to portray it as a “progressive” ally in the fight against the Tories – opposes genuine mobilization of postal workers in the fight against concessions and in spite of government strikebreaking. Unions have been a key pillar of support for Trudeau as his government has imposed austerity measures on public services and funneled tens of billions of dollars to the military to fight the war and to the super-rich to make them even richer. Above all, they fear that mobilizing postal workers into an all-out struggle could serve as a catalyst for a broader working-class movement against an entire political establishment that has overseen decades of sweeping social spending cuts and attacks on workers’ rights. including the virtual abolition of the right to strike, while a tiny elite gorged itself on record profits.

As workers seek to picket and fight for better wages, working conditions and job protection, Simpson announced on Friday, November 1, that the union has reached a no-strike and lockout agreement with Canada Post management. Simpson said union leadership will continue to hold off on the 72-hour strike until management declares a lockout and changes postal workers’ working conditions and “shows real movement toward meeting our demands.”

This was followed on Tuesday by the announcement of CUPW’s second global offer to management of the city operations and rural and suburban mail carriers (RSMC) divisions. Lead city development negotiator Lana Smidt noted that management “has not given up its numerous rollbacks, including two-tier pensions, vacations and benefits, and forced part-time classification.” A similar note was made by RSMC negotiator Francois Senneville, who also noted Canada Post’s determination to move from a 5-year to a 7-year wage schedule.

While CUPW has demanded a 22 per cent wage increase over four years, with the first year fronting at 9 per cent, Canada Post is proposing an insulting 11.5 per cent wage increase over four years.

Despite the company’s intransigence, no strike notice was issued, and instead Smidt called on Canada Post to “begin negotiations immediately!”

It is now clear that what is happening in the meetings between CUPW and Crown corporation executives is not negotiation but a plot to figure out how best to force postal workers to make major concessions.

Canada Post, which is publicly controlled and controlled by the federal government but depends on funding from the sale of postal products, has repeatedly cited poverty. The company announced in May that it had a pre-tax loss of $748 million for 2023. The company has outlined plans to completely overhaul its operations to compete with Amazon and other private corporations by introducing technology that will turn Canada Post workers into low-wage workers. concert workers.

CUPW President Simpson’s response to this was to emphasize the bureaucracy’s commitment to “working together” with management “toward decisions that support the long-term success” of Canada Post, which strengthens its bottom line. She has floated proposals to add new duties for postal workers, including postal banking and Social Security registration for seniors, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are already overburdened with grueling routes and mail sorting tasks.

The trade union apparatus is following the same strategy they have pursued over the past decades, seeking to extract concessions from a militant and restive workforce while avoiding direct confrontation with the government. The union called alternating strikes in 2011 and 2018, which had limited impact on production activities. Then in 2011 and 2018, CUPW officials agreed without a fight to Harper’s Conservative government and Trudeau’s Liberals’ Back to Work Act. And in 2016 and 2021, they essentially extended the contract to break up the workers’ fight. In the first case, their justification was a desire to cooperate with the Canada Post Liberal task force, an organization that fully supported the idea that the post office should be run as a commercial enterprise. The extension into 2021 was justified by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The Trudeau government and big business fully support Canada Post’s demand for major concessions. The government has repeatedly intervened in powerful working-class struggles, using a restrictive, pro-business system of collective bargaining to break strikes and secure concessions, most recently among railroad workers this year and on the West Coast docks last year. No doubt Trudeau will turn to the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) and back-to-work legislation if the union bureaucracy fails to contain worker opposition.

To break out of the straitjacket imposed by the union bureaucracy, Canada Post workers established the Postal Workers Rank and File Committee (PWRFC). The PWRFC released a statement on Sunday calling for working-class political struggle against Canada Post and the Trudeau government. The statement calls on front-line workers to take the fight at Canada Post into their own hands and outlines a clear strategy for the fight:

1. Create grassroots committees at each depot, sorting center and other Canada Post worksite. These committees will allow us to resist the CUPW bureaucracy’s betrayal of our struggle and build a powerful labor movement to fight for our demands.

2. Extend our struggle to all workers. The Postal Service should be a fully funded public enterprise with well-paying and secure jobs. We can achieve this by transforming our fight into a defense of all public services, including education, health and social services, which have strong support throughout the working class.

3. Prepare to violate the back-to-work law or other government-backed ban on our strike. This will require the broadest possible mobilization of workers to confront the pro-war, austerity Trudeau government and force it to back down.

4. Organize a political counter-offensive against capitalist austerity policies and the primacy of corporate profits. This must include a decisive political and organizational break with the Liberal/Trade Union/New Democratic Party alliance, one of the main mechanisms used by the ruling class to suppress class struggle. We demand that workers’ needs be prioritized for jobs, public services, safe working conditions, and the use of society’s resources for social needs rather than corporate profits and war.

To achieve this goal, we need to unite our struggles with those of postal workers and other workers around the world, which is why we are joining the International Rank-and-File Workers Alliance.

To provide a democratic forum to discuss this program and mobilize support for it among postal workers, PWRFC is convening its first public meeting this Sunday. The WSWS is calling on all concerned Canada Post workers register here and visit November 10th at 7:00 pm ET. For more information about PWRFC or to join, fill out the form below.