Diverging views of what the future Canada Post work force should look like has stalled negotiations between the Crown corporation and its union.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The labour dispute between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers – a conflict that has dragged on for 19 months – has effectively become a contest of wills.
The latest escalation in the dispute happened Wednesday, when CUPW filed an unfair labour practice complaint against the postal service, accusing it of intervening in negotiations by directly communicating with employees about bargaining terms in order to sway them.
This followed an unsuccessful attempt by the union to get Canada Post to resolve the dispute through binding arbitration, and the postal service’s own move to bypass union leadership by having employees vote directly on a new collective agreement.
“It seems intractable at this point,” said Stephanie Ross, an associate professor of labour studies at McMaster University. “It boils down to: Who has the power to force the other side to cave? And what is the cost – to Canadians, to Canada Post employees, to businesses – of continuing to disagree?”
Canada Post’s growing part-time, temp work force a key part of labour dispute with union
CUPW and Canada Post have been negotiating a new collective agreement for 55,000 postal employees since November, 2023. While both sides have made some progress on wages, they have made little to no progress on the core issue of what a future work force should look like.
Canada Post – a Crown corporation that has been bleeding money for years because of the decline in letter mail and the rise of private competitors – ardently believes it can save money and improve efficiency by increasing part-time positions at the expense of full-time jobs. The union vehemently opposes that model.
“The reason why this conflict is dragging out for so long, and is perhaps unresolvable, is because it is about the nature of work, a qualitative disagreement that is very hard to bargain over,” said Adam King, assistant professor of labour at the University of Manitoba. “From CUPW’s perspective, giving in to Canada Post’s demands for a work force with more part-timers will mean undermining the cohesion of the bargaining unit. The union exists to preserve full-time jobs.”
A May report by a federal commission created to investigate the labour dispute and Canada Post’s operations recommended that the postal service be allowed to hire more part-time workers to compete on parcel delivery.
Using independent contractors who work flexible hours, seven days a week, gives delivery giants such as Amazon a massive advantage on labour costs. Canada Post’s final proposal to the union last month included the creation of more part-time jobs with health and pension benefits and a guaranteed schedule of between 15 and 40 hours weekly. The union has yet to respond to the offer.
Canada Post workers are technically on strike now – but through the use of an overtime ban, which means that they work regular hours but not overtime. Both Prof. Ross and Dr. King believe that the union has little leverage to launch a full-blown strike in the near future because the public would be less supportive of postal workers given that their last strike ended less than six months ago.
“People’s memories are short. They might not realize a strike is the continuation of the same negotiation from last year,” Dr. King said.
This is possibly one of the reasons, he added, that CUPW recently requested that the dispute be resolved through binding arbitration – a process that forces dispute resolution with the help of a third-party arbitrator at the federal labour board. “An arbitrator is likely to look at comparable agreements in a sector. If it is something qualitative like the issue of part-time work, the union knows that if you go to arbitration, they are probably not going to weigh in on that, but rather choose the status quo.”
Canada Post rejected the request, saying that arbitration would be long and complicated, adding to its financial challenges.
Workers picket outside the Albert Jackson Processing Centre in Scarborough, Ont., during the 2024 Canada Post strike.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The 32-day strike during 2024’s crucial year-end holiday period cost Canada Post approximately $200-million, according to company spokesperson Jon Hamilton. In an interview this week, Mr. Hamilton said that since the union issued a strike notice on May 20, the corporation has seen a dramatic reduction in parcels – almost two-thirds less volume than normal for this time of year.
“Uncertainty in the delivery business is bad. We are fully staffed and fully operational, but we are running on fumes because customers have taken their business elsewhere,” Mr. Hamilton said. He added that Canada Post’s largest parcel-processing facility – the Albert Jackson Processing Centre in Scarborough, Ont. – was built to run 24 hours a day, but has only had about five hours of processing work on average daily since the strike notice went out.
In January, the federal government – the sole shareholder of Canada Post – lent the corporation $1-billion to help keep it afloat as it faces the maturing of $500-million in bonds, which must be repaid to bondholders this July.
Mr. Hamilton said Canada Post does not want to burden taxpayers and intends to remain self-sustaining. But doing so under the current collective agreement will drive it to bankruptcy, a sentiment echoed by commissioner William Kaplan in the federal report.
Ottawa has refused to intervene in the dispute and asked Canada Post and CUPW this week to return to the bargaining table alongside federal mediators.
“But if the union is dug in on its vision to preserve full-time jobs, and Canada Post does not improve its offer on that front, this negotiation could very well become one of the longest in Canadian labour history,” Prof. Ross said.