MONTREAL — When Canada’s 55,000 postal workers, members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, went on strike last November they were met with a government back-to-work order denying them their right to strike. Since they returned to work Dec. 15, Canada Post bosses have insisted on a contract with wages that lose ground to inflation, job cuts, replacing home mail delivery with community mailboxes, and hiring part-time package-service workers on two-tier wages and conditions.
The CUPW initiated a ban on working overtime rather than immediately calling a second strike May 22. This was “to buy some time to look at Canada Post’s proposals. We want to maintain that we are not the ones causing disruption. They wanted us to go on strike,” Sarbjeet Deol, a union shop steward in Mississauga, Ontario, told the Militant.
Canada Post is a Crown corporation, that is, a for-profit company that functions under the authority of the federal government and supported by government subsidies. The workers deliver 8.5 million letters and 1.1 million parcels each workday.
The capitalist media have waged a shrill campaign against the postal workers and their union in recent days, laying the groundwork for more government strikebreaking legislation. Canada Post bosses and employers across the country, based on previous experience, expected that the new Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney would order the workers back to work if they went on strike.
Over a 50-year period striking postal workers have been forced back to work five times by both Liberal and Conservative governments’ anti-strike laws. In 1980 CUPW President Jean-Claude Parrot was jailed for three months after refusing to obey strikebreaking legislation.
Defense of the workers’ right to strike is a crucial issue in the class struggle in Canada. In the last year Ottawa has ordered striking port workers in Vancouver, Montreal and Quebec City back to work, as well as members of the Canadian Union of Teamsters rail workers.
Working people need the right to strike to protect our class interests as the capitalist economic crisis worldwide deepens, and bosses, their parties and governments try to stabilize off our backs their system and profits.
“Because of what the government has done we don’t really have the right to strike or assembly, even though that’s covered by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” postal worker Kim Scharley told the Militant at the end of her shift. She works as a clerk at the giant sorting plant in Saint-Laurent, a suburb of Montreal. “The government is trying to bust unions and drive us down to minimum wage,” she said.
Solidarity statements with the postal workers union have come from the Canadian Labour Congress, Ontario Federation of Labour, United Food and Commercial Workers union, the Communist League and others.
Joe Young contributed to this article.