The following statement was sent to the World Socialist Web Site by a striking Canada Post mail carrier and member of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC). The PWRFC was established by postal workers in June to seize control of their contract struggle from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) bureaucracy. We encourage all postal workers to write to the committee at canadapostworkersrfc@gmail.com to explain what the main issues in your strike are and how you think the struggle should go forward.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) belatedly called a strike beginning Friday, November 15. While a national strike certainly strengthens our position, under the discipline of the CUPW apparatus we find ourselves isolated from other sections of workers.
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) has seen an outpouring of support from postal workers who understand the necessity to build workers’ power to defy impending strikebreaking action by Liberal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon, which the CUPW leadership will capitulate before and enforce. We know this because the CUPW has sold us out repeatedly in the past, including by folding without a fight in the face of back-to-work laws in 2011 and 2018, and ramming through numerous concessions-filled contracts.
Now that we find ourselves on a nationwide strike, we must seize this opportunity to further strengthen our struggle by linking up with broader sections of workers across the logistics industry. We must answer Canada Post Corporation and the trade union-supported Liberal government’s attacks on our working conditions and wages with a class-conscious response. Instead of participating in a race to the bottom against low-paid precariously employed delivery workers, we must turn to these workers and fight to rally them alongside us in a joint struggle, based on our common class interests, for well-paid and secure jobs for all.
We should send informational pickets to Amazon fulfillment centres, and depots for UPS, Fedex and other courier services, to appeal for a common fight among postal and other delivery workers in the coming days. Our natural allies include workers at Purolator, Amazon, UPS and FedEx. Urging delivery workers to refuse to scab by handling Canada Post packages, and explaining that all of our jobs are similarly threatened by automation and AI, will be met with enthusiasm by these workers, who are among the most highly exploited in the industry. This will put us in a position to explicitly combine our struggles into a powerful social movement to defend our democratic right to strike, as well as our social rights to decent-paying, secure jobs, a reasonable work-life balance, and safe working conditions.
Like postal workers, other delivery workers are starved of information and a class-conscious political orientation. Broad sections of workers will welcome our perspective, as we’re all suffering the rising price of groceries and shelter, and attacks on our wages as the profit-hungry corporate elite seeks the “Amazonification” of our industry.
We must wage a common struggle to seize new technologies, such as automation and AI, out of the hands of the financial oligarchy and place these productive forces under the control of workers themselves. As the PWRFC has explained in its statements, automation and AI have the potential to significantly reduce our workloads with no loss of pay, but they are currently being used to intensify worker exploitation and pad Canada Post’s bottom line. This is due to the fact that these technologies are controlled by the capitalist financial oligarchy, and its political and economic servants. We should fight for workers’ control of postal operations, which will allow postal workers on the shop floor to decide how to organize the sorting and distribution of mail.
CUPW will never take up this struggle, as it defends capitalism and Canada Post’s “right” to make a profit. As CUPW President Jan Simpson put it, “We recognize the challenges our employer is facing, and our goal is not to simply make demands, but to work together toward solutions.”
The unification of workers in rank-and-file committees is necessary to protect our right to strike, our wages and working conditions, and to raise the living standards of logistics workers across Canada and North America. This fight can only succeed if we make our struggle the starting point for a mass movement by workers against government cost-cutting for public services, the wasting of tens of billions on wars around the world, and huge handouts to the corporations.
Hopeless moral appeals to government agents and union stooges must be replaced with direct engagement with workers who share the same class interests as us. We should reject with contempt all efforts to divide us along sectional lines. Claims that workers at Amazon should be seen as competitors or even enemies, or suggestions that urban and rural postal workers do not share common goals, play into the hands of Canada Post and the union apparatus because they keep us divided and paralyzed.
We have the opportunity to educate and mobilize masses of workers in the logistics industry and grow the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. The working class is the most powerful social force on the planet, and we must appeal to our underlying class solidarity to break free of the authoritarian dictates of the corporate oligarchy. Strike while the iron is hot! And act before the CUPW officialdom moves to smother our strike, forcing concessions on a membership that is angry and ready to fight back against the corporation’s ruthless pursuit of profit.
Fill out the form below to contact the PWRFC and do your part to spread awareness of our strike!
In solidarity,
A striking Canada Post mail carrier