Striking Canada Post employees are seen at a Canada Post mail sorting facility during nation-wide strike action in Ottawa, on Nov. 18.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
A proposal by Canada Post to create a new class of employees who would work flexible, part-time hours on weekdays and weekends is provoking the ire of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and has become a stumbling block in negotiations for a new collective agreement.
More than 55,000 Canada Post workers have been on strike since Friday, with both parties still far apart at the bargaining table over issues around employee classification and wages. The parties began negotiating with a federally appointed mediator on Monday.
Canada Post wants to make its parcel delivery services more competitive, after years of losing billions of dollars from dwindling letter mail. In order to do that, the Crown corporation has suggested adding new part-time jobs to accommodate seven-days-a-week delivery.
In an e-mail sent to employees in September and obtained by The Globe and Mail, Canada Post proposed the creation of two new employee classifications called “part-time flex” and “weekend part-time flex,” which would effectively be permanent part-time positions working different shifts to deliver parcels.
These positions, according to an explanatory document attached to the e-mail, will be permanent jobs with benefits, a pension and vacation entitlements. But the pension option for these employees will be the defined contribution component of the plan, and not a defined benefit pension like full-time employees have. Additionally, flex employees will have access to their health benefits plan only after 1,000 hours of working.
CUPW is vehemently opposed to a “two-tier work force” in which some classes of employees have enhanced working conditions over others. The union has long been unhappy over the growing number of temporary and part-time employees within the postal service, calling it a slow “gigification” of the post office. CUPW is the parent union of Gig Workers United, a Toronto-based community union that is trying to push for gig workers like delivery couriers and rideshare drivers to be classified as employees under provincial employment acts.
Data provided to The Globe by CUPW show the corporation’s temporary work force grew substantially between 2018 and 2022, outpacing growth in the total number of employees.
Temporary employees make up more than 20 per cent of Canada Post’s overall work force. As of June, 2022, there were 12,778 temporary workers, compared to 8,605 in June, 2018 – a 48-per-cent increase. In that same time frame, the share of part-time employees grew by 12 per cent to 6,583 people while the share of full-time employees increased by 10 per cent to 40,195 people.
Canada Post’s temporary workers – or “casual” employees as they are known within the postal service – have no benefits or pension. They are scheduled to work according to the postal service’s needs and are expected to be available for shifts when they get a call from a scheduler. Two current temporary employees said that they had been working in casual positions for years with little prospect of getting full-time positions. The Globe is not identifying them because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
Canada Post argues that the creation of more part-time permanent employees will reduce the share of temporary employees because the corporation will be able to convert these casual jobs into part-time positions.
But many casual employees, according to the two Canada Post workers, already get full-time hours of work, so they would effectively be losing hours and wages by moving into permanent part-time roles.
Jan Simpson, president of CUPW, said in an interview that the terms of the last collective agreement in 2018 had given Canada Post the right to hire full-time employees to staff weekend shifts and move into seven-day delivery. “They don’t want to use full-timers. They want to create a part-time work force,” she said.
Jon Hamilton, spokesperson at Canada Post, told The Globe that the corporation needed an employment model that leaned more heavily on part-time work rather than full-time jobs in order to compete with delivery giants such as Amazon. “Many young people are not looking for full-time, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. jobs. They want flexibility. They could work for Canada Post part-time and have other part-time jobs during the week,” he said.
Mr. Hamilton added that working with the federal mediator has been helpful and both Canada Post and CUPW are hoping to reach a negotiated settlement.
Inequity in a work force could also be damaging to unions, said Larry Savage, a labour studies professor at Brock University.
“Two-tier contracts are a long-term recipe for resentment and disunity within the union,” he said, adding that when unions accept the logic of two-tier contracts, they embolden employers to demand even greater concessions in the next round of bargaining.
“Over time, as workers begin to question inequities built into their contract, the union will ultimately be put in a position of having to defend that unfairness to unhappy members, typically the newer employees,” he said.