2 January 2025
On 17 December, more than 55,000 postal workers organized in the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) were forced back to work by the Liberal government after more than a month on the picket lines. This direct intervention by the capitalist state is an egregious attack on the right to strike and sets a dangerous precedent that the entire labour movement must oppose. Yesterday aimed at postal workers, the same authoritarian measures will be used tomorrow against other layers of the public-sector workforce, such as school teachers, healthcare professionals, transit workers and civil servants.
Postal workers across the country began their strike on 15 November after giving the union a 95 percent strike mandate in October. They went out on a month-long strike to oppose attempts by their employer, Canada Post, to “Amazonify” jobs and working conditions, including normalizing part-time and temporary employment, gutting regular work patterns, ending “route ownership” and reducing the workforce through AI and automation.
The strike was ultimately broken after the Liberals sent the labour dispute to the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB), an unelected tribunal responsible for interpreting and administering the Canada Labour Code. On 13 December, Minister of Labour, Steven MacKinnon, instructed the CIRB to declare the strike illegal if it deemed negotiations between Canada Post and CUPW to be at an “impasse.” Unsurprisingly, the CIRB carried out the holiday wishes of corporate Canada and on 17 December ordered postal workers back on the job under the existing collective agreement while stripping them of the right to strike until May 2025.
MacKinnon also announced the creation of an “industrial inquiry commission” to be headed by “an outside, independent, experienced veteran arbitrator” tasked with “examin[ing] the entire structure of Canada Post, from both a customer and business model standpoint” (CBC, 13 December 2024). The commission is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to give an “independent” veneer to what is clearly a step towards privatizing the Crown corporation. With Canada Post claiming losses of $748 million in 2023 alone and $3 billion since 2018, and the Liberals anxious to cut federal spending, the commission will no doubt deliver restructuring recommendations favouring a “business model standpoint” (i.e., privatization). As the Liberals are set to lose the upcoming federal election, this is a parting gift to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
The criminalization of the CUPW labour action is part of a growing trend in which employers prolong negotiations (sometimes for years), then threaten to lock out workers and finally rely on the capitalist state to step in and “resolve” the dispute. The Liberals forced postal workers back to work the last time they went on strike in 2018, and have also intervened to break strikes by dockers and railworkers.
Canada Post and the Liberals were only able to break the postal strike due to the cowardice and complicity of the trade-union bureaucracy atop CUPW and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), which isolated the struggle from other workers and did nothing to prepare the membership to fight to win. Intrinsically adverse to class struggle, the CUPW bureaucrats initially sought to carry out a series of ineffectual rotating strikes designed to limit the impact of the action, and were only forced to mobilize the entire membership when Canada Post locked them out. Mere weeks before being ordered back to work, CUPW cravenly lowered its wage demand from a 24 percent to 19 percent cumulative pay raise, though, smelling weakness, Canada Post still refused to budge.
After the CIRB ordered postal employees back to work without a new contract, the leadership of CUPW made no attempt to canvas the membership, discuss and debate options and hold a vote on next steps, let alone advocate actually defying the order to return to work. There is deep frustration within the rank and file about being forced back to work and a combative mood among locals to continue the fight. One newspaper in Alberta reports:
“Cole Morgan, chief shop steward of Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 770, said Monday when asked if local Canada Post employees would be back on the job today, ‘that is a possibility, but that remains to be seen. We’re kind of waiting to see what the leadership has to say, but a lot of members are ready to defy if they need to.’”
—Lethbridge Herald, 16 December 2024
In a communiqué perversely entitled “The Fight Goes On…,” CUPW National President Jan Simpson intoned: “We are asking our members to return to their regularly scheduled shifts as of 8:00 a.m. local time on December 17, 2024, and await further instructions” (Bulletin No.69, 16 December 2024). Those “further instructions” amounted to not much more than resuming postal services as normal while CUPW leaders pursued a futile appeals process with the CIRB over the “constitutionality” and “application” of its own ruling.
The NDP, which had been propping up the Trudeau government for the preceding two-and-a-half years, thus making the attack on CUPW possible, only decided to pull the plug when the Liberals began to implode with the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland following US President-Elect Donald Trump’s threatened imposition of a 25 percent tariff on Canadian imports. Jagmeet Singh and the rest of the pro-capitalist NDP leadership are the parliamentary counterparts to the treacherous trade-union bureaucracy.
To effectively fight and win, workers must embrace a class-struggle perspective to break through the legalist limits set by the employers and government. CUPW members need to look to the origins of their own union. Until 1965, postal workers, then organized in the Canadian Postal Employees Association, were considered rather passive and tame civil servants. They were deemed an “essential service” and laws were in place that prohibited them from going on strike.
That all changed when they staged an illegal nationwide strike for two weeks in July 1965, smashing the anti-labour legislation and winning the right to strike. Picketing was controlled by rank-and-file strike committees, and the strikers, who were threatened with massive layoffs, successfully defied both the employer and court injunctions to return to work. The labour action gave birth to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which emerged as one of the most militant unions over the next several decades and transformed the Canadian labour movement. Joe Davidson, later president of CUPW, described the 1965 strike as a “Post Office rebellion which changed the face of federal labour relations and shocked not only the government but most of the elected leaders of the postal employee associations.”
As with other Canada-wide unions, CUPW as a whole has exhibited a higher level of worker militancy owing in part to the influence of its Quebec locals. Davidson’s successor as leader of CUPW was Jean-Claude Parrot, a former Montreal postal clerk who was jailed for two months in 1979 for defying the government’s back-to-work legislation. If trade-union leaders in Quebec have tended to show less respect for capitalist authority, it is because the rank-and-file workers have demonstrated a capacity for class struggle that has struck fear into the heart of the ruling class. One year ago, half a million public-sector workers in Quebec went on strike for better wages and working conditions.
A swift and decisive victory in the latest postal action had the potential to beat back the Liberal attack and reinvigorate the labour movement across the country. A concerted strike by all federal public-sector workers in unions affiliated with the CLC, in solidarity with CUPW and in defiance of any back-to-work order, would have been a powerful blow to the government’s attacks on postal workers and the right to strike. Had this developed, it would have immediately posed the possibility of extending labour action into rival delivery services (e.g., Amazon, FedEx, DHL), spearheading a worker-led counteroffensive to secure decent-paying, unionized jobs in the private sector. Such a situation could have rapidly escalated to encompass wider layers of the Canadian working class, organized and unorganized, dealing the coup de grâce to the lame-duck Trudeau Liberals and bringing down the government in a manner that was tactically favourable to the working class.
That opportunity has now been squandered, though more struggles are on the horizon. Radio-Canada reports that Quebec’s Minister of Labour has just announced that his government is considering amending the province’s labor code to grant him the authority his federal counterpart used “to suspend work stoppages in the rail sector, at three major Canadian ports and at Canada Post”—a clear threat to the powerful Quebec trade unions. To strike and win future battles, the labour movement will have to reclaim the militant tradition that gave birth to CUPW. That means being prepared to defy back-to-work orders and other legalistic obstacles put on the path to victory.
A class-struggle approach can only be carried out by fighting to replace the cowardly reformists who currently lead CUPW and Canada’s unions. Working people urgently need a broader, united defensive action not only to win the demands of any one particular section of the working class but to defeat the entire ruling-class agenda of austerity. Such a perspective requires new working-class leadership and a new workers’ political party that, unlike the NDP, rejects the sanctity of capitalist property and bourgeois parliamentarism.
Down with strike-breaking!
Unchain the unions—Oust the bureaucrats!
For a revolutionary workers’ party!