No. 41
June 9, 2026
In Defence of the Public Post Office
Ratification of Collective Agreements Signals New Phase of Fight to Defend Postal Workers and the Postal Service
TML: Can you explain the results of the recent contract vote that concluded May 30 and what comes next?
Learie Charles: Postal workers have now ratified both the urban and rural collective agreements. The urban vote was close to 90 per cent and the Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers' (RSMCs) vote was almost 86 per cent in favour of the contracts. One thing that is not known yet is how many workers actually voted. In our local it looks like just about 30 per cent of the workers participated. I think that's because they are just fed up with the whole experience of negotiations, government attacks and the refusal of Canada Post to negotiate. Negotiations really only began after the strike was ended in October 2025 and an agreement was made on December 22, 2025, that until the negotiations finished we would not strike. Now, once the agreement is signed there cannot be any kind of strike action until January 31, 2029 when the contract ends. We are legally bound to that. Traditionally they have been very harsh if any job action takes place during the life of the collective agreement.
The general sentiment of the workers is that they will accept it
because the negotiation process and government intervention have been
going on too long, even though it doesn't do justice to what is needed
to raise a family in Canada. The sentiment of the workers was "just
let's get this thing
over with." In terms of the contract, most of it is not new at all, and
it was discouraging for the workers that the national executive boasted
that this is the best contract since 1982, especially highlighting that
Article 53 was maintained. Article 53 is job security language that was
negotiated
25 years ago and not changed since. We wanted it improved. To say that
we didn't lose it and that's a big advance is misleading. It needed
improving to match the conditions of today which are not the same as 25
years ago.
TML: What is the significance of Article 53?
LC: Here's an example. Article 53 is being used right now in Ontario's Metro East and Metro West Post office. There are 12,000 postal workers in the area from Whitby in the east to Oakville in the west and from Brampton in the north to Lake Ontario in the south. The five-ton drivers' runs have been restructured, it took a year, and on May 23 they applied Article 53 which means that all vacancies are on hold and the 52 drivers whose jobs have been eliminated and the workers made "surplus," can bid on open jobs. They can pick any full-time position that is available, letter carrier, postal clerk or other. In that way they are fully protected. But if, for example, a driver cannot handle letter carrying, has been a driver all their life, they will lose the right to return to their full-time driving job if they change to part-time driving. A worker who has been displaced through restructuring and has taken another full-time position can get their original job back if it becomes available in the next 36 months. If they moved to part-time driving and the job they have left becomes available they will not be eligible to get it back because they have changed their status from full-time to part-time. So protections exist already, but as you can see, need improvement.
We think this type of restructuring and declaring workers "surplus" is going to increase in the near future. One aspect is consolidation. For example there is a building in Don Mills which has four postal stations, each with their own staffing and other relief workers. They will be condensed into one. The same thing is happening in other places and it will result in the elimination of between 20 and 25 per cent of the workers, use of fewer vehicles and so on.
As well, anything that was to the advantage of Canada Post in the old
contract they are pushing through as fast as they can before the new
contract takes effect. I recently got a call from a manager who wanted
to eliminate one of the router positions in his station. The router is
the worker who
sorts the mail. There are four and he wants to reduce it to three,
taking the work done by the fourth worker and dividing it among the
other three, so increasing their work by a third.
I recently got notice of another six positions being eliminated and I am sure this will continue for the rest of the year because they want to downsize everything. In the meantime volumes of work are going to go up. Right now they are at their lowest. Before the strike workers had 60-65 parcels a day, now 10, that's how drastic the reduction was. During negotiations Canada Post encouraged customers to go to Purolator which offered incentives to sign 18-month contracts that will be ending soon. The big discounts they offered brought their prices in line with Canada Post. They made a lot of money on volume. We know the work will come back fairly rapidly as soon as the contract is signed and the public and the big companies know that the workers can't strike until the end of the contract in January 2029. Customers will send back their work. The workers know this. They've gone through this before.
TML: What other aspects of the new contract are workers concerned about?
LC: The wage provisions are not what we need. Workers are without an actual wage increase for the last three years of this five-year contract. The wage increases from now to 2029 are dependent on the cost of living going up. This is, in my opinion, not a progressive way to negotiate. Cost of living increases are not added onto workers' wages. The struggle should have been to increase the base wage instead of focusing on the cost of living. In 2026 the pay "increase" will be about 1.9 plus per cent, linked to the increase in the cost of living, the same formula as is used for indexing pensions. Workers got a five per cent wage increase when we were forced back to work in 2024. Workers are now owed the three per cent increase for 2025 and about 1.9 per cent for this year.
Everything the company went for they got in this contract. Not just on wages. One of their main aims was to transform the post office into a gig-work outfit. They wanted more part-time and they got it in every department where they wanted it, whether they are called flex part-timer or unstructured part-timer or a weekend parcel part-timer. So you have a regular part-timer who comes in and works approximately 15 hours minimum, then you have an unstructured part-timer who has to work 20 hours and they can give them anything to do any day, and then the parcel part-timer who only works on the weekend, 15 hours. Part-timers are assigned any extra work that comes in and can be extended to eight hours in a day. This is catering to a whole gig economy. If I work part-time in the post office I have to have another job.
The whole collective agreement has been rewritten from the standpoint that it is the part-timers that they will come to first to give extensions to eight hours before they assign overtime to a full-timer. They have eliminated the overtime on which full-time postal workers depend to increase their pay to what they need. The corporation rejected the simple solution proposed by the union on the issue of parcel delivery on the weekend by full-time workers which was to set schedules that made weekends part of the regular weekly schedule so that work would not be at overtime rates. They rejected that because they want it done by part-time workers.
They want to transition the post office away from secure full-time
work to gig work. In the plants now the workforce is about 78 percent
full-time. The increase in part-timers is mainly for letter carriers
where about 94 per cent are full-time. Now they want 10 per cent or more
to be part-timers.
There are many people who consider a job in the post office a decent
job. That's changing. They are bringing in all kinds of formulas to
replace full-time work with part-time to get the volume out. A gig
economy does not take the workers' well-being into consideration, like
injured workers' need for
accommodation or safety standards for all workers. They want to apply
the Amazon concept to the post office, a gig economy without any
security for the workers.
This contract is mainly directed against the delivery employees, in both the urban and rural contract.
TML: What's next for postal workers and the fight against Canada Post and the Carney government's attacks on the public postal service?
LC: So now the focus of the struggle changes, in the context of the negotiations coming to an end. The government has now put out a paper for discussion on changes to the Canada Labour Code. They want to make major changes to satisfy the needs of the gig economy, as a major part of the economy. They want more people to move towards a gig economy where every worker will have to have two or more jobs, living on the edge, hoping you get an extension of your part-time hours to full-time, hustling to get your work done, or racing at your own expense from one job to another. It compromises safety and it causes anxiety. They want to discuss Section 107 of the Labour Code. They also want to make changes to timelines for negotiations. Currently we start negotiating three months before the contract expires. They want a longer time to put pressure and to prepare. So for instance with Canada Post when negotiations start they inform their customers, suggest that there could be job action and that they should take measures, like "take your business to Purolator."
The new collective agreement includes the closing of 100 rural stations. We will continue to fight against the closure of more. They intend to increase the privatization which began in 1982, and closing 100 rural stations does not mean that the private companies will not pick that up. The monopolies like Shoppers Drug Mart will profit from that. They also subcontract maintenance -- if it's a new building maintenance will be subcontracted, even the maintenance of the machinery.
They are making other changes to work assigned to postal workers,
replacing skilled workers with less skilled workers and the maintenance
of machines will be subcontracted rather than done by machinists trained
and employed by Canada Post. Canada Post used to even have an
apprenticeship program. We used to have trained mechanics employed by
Canada Post to take care of machinery and vehicles which is now all done
by private companies. They are talking about taking that work back and
reinstating the apprenticeship program but it looks like this is just
lip service as no concrete action has been taken. The kind of changes
they are making are going to continue, a massive attack on all
distribution points so they make much more money without having to pay
more in wages.
This
is not just a problem facing postal workers. All federal government
workers are under attack. One of the Ministers said, last year at a
press briefing in answer to a question about what the thousands of
workers being laid off should do, they should join the military! That's
the solution he
gave. I was talking to a clerical worker on a military base who told me
that the day after he got his layoff notice he got a letter from the
Canadian Armed Forces asking if he was interested in joining the
military. The Liberals have a very definite program of militarization
and war and everything
serves this, even the restructuring of the post office and downsizing
the federal public service workforce.
So now that the contract has been ratified, the struggle takes on a different form. The corporation's goal is the same as it was before which is to increase the exploitation of the workers, make them do more work for less and finding new ways to do this. Workers are going to fight on this issue. They have no choice. And workers are being disciplined and losing pay for little errors, as part of this. Some are leaving, saying they can see what's coming and they've had enough. So the fight in the post office is against the arbitrary rules, the increased exploitation and in defence of workers' health and safety.
In terms of the fight to stop the cuts to the public postal service for the people across the country, we are aware and engaged. In Etobicoke in the west end of Toronto they are about to restructure that station and knock out 40 per cent of the workers to end door-to-door delivery. So now the issue is to make the public aware and mobilize them against it. We will be going into the communities, joining in holding Town Halls and speaking with the people about their services. The government pretends it has some objective analysis to back up their wrecking plans but we saw with the Kaplan Commission that they are just repeating the self-serving line of the corporation. Communities are beginning to speak up, as are municipal councils. There is a national meeting of municipalities soon and we are hoping to get them to take a stand as they did in 2014 against the Harper government's plan to end door-to-door delivery.
In the 2015 federal election we went to people's homes and asked them if they would prefer home delivery or a community mail box and almost all said home delivery and signed a card which we delivered to Parliament. Most of the Conservative candidates that we targeted with that campaign were not re-elected. So we will be organizing in the communities to fight to keep the service. We know that people appreciate and count on the postal workers on the streets in their communities and we will be working with communities to defend the public postal service.
We are calling on the whole community to join us in defending the
continuation of this public service, with decent paying jobs and proper
benefits for the workers who provide this service day in day out with
pure dedication.
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Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca