After over two years of negotiations with management, and many weeks on the picket lines, Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) members have been presented with a tentative agreement. This deal accepts the management’s core demands, and will not stop the destruction of the public postal service and the destruction of tens of thousands of union jobs. This offer should therefore be rejected!
The proposed deal accepts most of management’s demands to gut the public postal service, including the ending of door-to-door mail delivery and the closure of approximately 100 rural mail depots.
The contract also accepts the creation of two more types of part-time positions with inconsistent hours for mail and parcel delivery, including weekend delivery. These “unstructured” or “flex” positions represent an attempt to compete in the rat race with private sector exploiters like Amazon, something which the union leadership had previously been staunchly opposed to.
It is true that some of management’s other demands to Amazonify the post office were shelved: namely, market pensions for new hires, dynamic routing and load balancing. With the Carney government fully behind management’s cost-cutting agenda, however, they will surely come back with these demands at a later date.
Finally, minor improvements to wages and benefits included in the latest offer represent a mere sugar coating to make this poison pill easier to swallow.
But to do so would be to accept the beginning of the end of the public postal service as we know it, and to throw our future livelihoods into jeopardy.
Crisis of leadership
We are in this dilemma because our national leadership has consciously sabotaged and de-escalated the struggle at every stage, hoping to find some sort of happy middle ground with Canada Post management that does not exist. The resulting deal is so bad that the national executive board split, with five of 15 members voting against, including CUPW national president Jan Simpson!
But Simpson and co. are responsible for getting us into this mess. The current CUPW leadership has had no real explanation for problems facing Canada Post, because that would mean admitting that Canada Post is being destroyed by the capitalist system. Instead of mobilizing all delivery workers together in a fight against Canada Post, Purolator, UPS, Amazon and DHL, they have frustrated and demobilized the ranks and are now conciliating with management and trying to get the workers to accept further steps backwards.
To get out of this blind alley, we need a socialist leadership that puts forward an alternative to the capitalist rat race—not just the status quo of bureaucratic government management, but genuine democratic workers’ control of the postal service from top to bottom.
This is the way forward, and it starts by voting no to this tentative agreement.
