Urban Unit: Time to Tell CPC to Negotiate Seriously!

Thursday August 2 2018

We have been negotiating with Canada Post for over 9 months now. Every attempt, by us, to intensify these negotiations has been frustrated by Canada Post and therefore little or no progress has been made towards achieving our major demands. Here are a few of our demands that have been the focus of discussion for the past months.

Internal Staffing: Group 1

We need to maximize full-time jobs. The number of members in precarious jobs has now reached an alarming and totally unreasonable level. In fact, close to 33% of hours in Group 1 are worked by temporary and part-time workers. In 1997, CUPW considered this issue (among a few others) important enough to strike over and, at the time, the percentage of part-time and temporary hours was at around 29%.

Enough talk. It’s time for a real solution that will give temporary and part-time workers access to full-time positions so they can earn a decent living. We still have no agreement on this issue.

Group 2 Letter Carriers

One of the many issues that needs to be resolved this round is the overburdening of letter carriers caused, in part, by the continued rapid growth in parcel volumes. We have put forward several solutions to address overburdening, one of them is a process to adjust parcel volumes every 6 months. It is also time for Canada Post to address the health and safety issues that were created with the introduction of Postal Transformation over ten years ago.
Canada Post has not responded to any of these important health and safety issues.
We are continuing our ten year long fight to get full access to information so that we can verify the workload of letter carriers to ensure the enforcement of the collective agreement. Canada Post continues to put up one roadblock after another which is preventing us from resolving this important issue.

Group 3 & 4 – Technical Services

Canada Post has continuously refused to acknowledge the value of the work that our Technical Services members perform day after day. We have demands to improve that recognition by including a bump up in pay and a new classification for heavy duty truck mechanics. We have had some talks with Canada Post but at this point, there is still no resolve to this issue. Canada Post has countered with a proposal to merge many of the functions and combine Groups 3 and 4 into one group.

Time for CPC to Move

CPC does not seem to take your demands seriously. It is time you show the employer that you are serious about them by continuing to participate in local activities and by casting your vote to give the national executive board a mandate to hold strike activities, if necessary. It is now up to all of you to send a loud and clear message to Canada Post that you support your demands and will do what it takes to get the collective agreement that you deserve.