Experts Warn Canada Post Union’s Bargaining Power Is Waning
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ sudden decision to end a full-time strike and move toward rotating strikes suggests the union is losing leverage in the drawn-out labour dispute, according to labour experts and frustrated employees.
On Saturday, more than 55,000 Canada Post workers will begin rotating strikes, ending a two-week stoppage that began after the federal government announced sweeping changes to the postal service that include scrapping door-to-door mail delivery and closing some rural and suburban post offices.
The announcement came during a long and testy negotiation between Canada Post and CUPW, which began in late 2023 and has already seen postal workers go on strike once before, late last year.
“It is becoming increasingly evident that CUPW no longer has the strategic capacity needed to sustain an effective national strike,” said Larry Savage, professor of labour studies at Brock University.
The federal government – the sole shareholder of Canada Post – argues that a deep restructuring of the Crown corporation is needed because it is effectively insolvent, and repeated bailouts are not a sustainable long-term measure to bring the postal service back into good financial standing.
Stephanie Ross, an associate professor of labour studies at McMaster University, said it was unusual for striking workers to backtrack to a partial strike.
“Perhaps the timing of the full-time strike was not ideal because unlike the last round of strikes, we are not in the holiday season just yet,” she said. “It remains to be seen whether some people have permanently changed their choice of delivery courier. If that becomes the case, CUPW might not have the same level of leverage as it did in the November, 2024, strike.”
CUPW did not respond to a question from The Globe about why it was ending the full-time strike in favour of rotating strikes.
In a statement issued Thursday evening, CUPW national president Jan Simpson said “postal workers would much rather have new collective agreements and be delivering mail instead of taking strike action.” She accused Canada Post of chipping away at “the postal service, worker rights and good jobs” in its latest offer to the union.
Ms. Simpson also criticized the federal government for making a “mockery” of the bargaining process by calling for a restructure of the postal service in the middle of negotiations.
CUPW’s decision to end the full-time strike came a day after a meeting on Oct. 8 with federal Public Works Minister Joël Lightbound. According to Ms. Simpson, CUPW asked the government to backtrack on its restructuring plans, but were rebuffed.
The overhaul of the postal service is expected to lead to job losses throughout the corporation. Canada Post has already said that it would offer voluntary buyouts to staff with up to 78 weeks of pay, and layoffs will only begin if attrition and departure incentives were insufficient to reduce the size of the work force.
Two postal workers said morale on the picket line had been low after about a week. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the workers because they were not authorized to speak publicly on workplace issues. They said some workers felt disappointed that public support for the union was not as strong as last year, and that the second strike was having minimal impact.
But the two workers also questioned the logic of having rotating strikes, saying it would not effectively put pressure on Canada Post to improve their offer.
In July, CUPW members voted overwhelmingly against Canada Post’s proposed contract that offered a 13.59-per-cent wage increase over four years, a signing bonus ranging between $500 and $1,000, and the creation of a new category of part-time, flexible employees to conduct weekend delivery. CUPW’s counter-offer to Canada Post in August included a 19-per-cent raise over four years and more reassurance about job security for full-time employees.
Last week, Canada Post presented new offers to CUPW that maintained many of the same key provisions on wages and benefits, but removed the signing bonus.
Prof. Ross believes that it is possible CUPW might have tried to get the government to intervene in the bargaining process by forcing arbitration on both sides. She said that in certain negotiations, unions can benefit from forced arbitration because the process tends to favour the terms in an existing collective agreement.
“In this situation, arbitration is a way to defend the present collective agreement from major changes,” she said.
Canada Post says it has lost approximately $5-billion since 2018, owing largely to the decline in letter mail and rise of low-cost couriers that operate seven days a week.
In June, the union had proposed to federal mediators that both sides enter into binding arbitration administered by the federal labour board, but Canada Post rejected the offer.
Ms. Simpson said that Canada Post had been omitting key facts about the structure of its work force, namely that hundreds of supervisor positions had been added over the last five years, while unionized sorting and delivery jobs were cut. “Although there are fewer people to supervise, Canada Post is spending more money on supervisors,” she said in CUPW’s Thursday statement.
The union has long disputed Canada Post’s version of why it is losing money, arguing that the corporation is bloated with middle managers, and that executives are not striving hard enough to figure out alternate streams of revenue beyond parcel delivery.
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
