Reject CUPW’s surrender! Broaden our strike to other sections of workers to defend our jobs, all public services and the right to strike!

Contact the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee at canadapostworkersrfc@gmail.com or fill out the form below. Join us in building the leadership needed to secure good-paying, secure jobs, defend public postal services and fight for workers’ power.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) leadership’s Thursday evening announcement that it is unilaterally shutting down our nationwide strike and replacing it with toothless rotating strikes is a capitulation of historic proportions. Without so much as a consultative vote, the National Executive Board, just a day after meeting behind closed doors with the very government minister who wants to destroy our jobs, has ordered 55,000 postal workers to stand down in the face of the Carney government’s ruthless restructuring plan.

This betrayal threatens the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs, the shuttering of nearly 500 rural and suburban post offices, and the elimination of daily home mail delivery. But it threatens much more than the postal service, since the government is using us as a precedent for the kinds of attacks it wants to implement across the board. This is why all workers must come to our defence.

It should be clear that the CUPW apparatus never wanted a nationwide strike. For months after postal workers regained the legal right to strike this spring, following the Trudeau government’s use of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to “pause” last year’s walkout, the union leadership kept us muzzled with ineffective actions—first an overtime ban, then an ad flyer ban. These were deliberately designed to minimize disruption and protect Canada Post’s bottom line.

The only reason a full strike was sanctioned at all was because postal workers in Atlantic Canada and Manitoba took matters into their own hands. When Minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement Joël Lightbound announced the Carney government’s restructuring plan on September 25, workers walked off the job spontaneously. The CUPW apparatus was terrified of losing control. It called a nationwide strike, not to mobilize our strength, but to contain and defuse it. And now, just two weeks later, they have moved to shut the strike down.

By ordering us back to work, CUPW President Jan Simpson and the National Executive have deliberately sown confusion and demoralization, and undermined the urgently needed efforts to mobilize the entire working class behind us. They have stabbed the membership in the back, and once again handed the initiative to Canada Post and the government. They can now pursue multiple options, and at times of their own choosing, to break workers’ resistance. These include: maintaining operations while workers are bled financially through futile rotating walkouts; locking us out; illegalizing worker job action and imposing a government-dictated settlement; or prevailing on their agents in the CUPW apparatus to endorse a sellout.

We say enough! Postal workers must countermand this sabotage. This requires making our national strike the starting point for a broader mobilization of all logistics workers and the working class as a whole to defend the right to strike, public services, and good-paying, secure jobs for all, and to establish for workers’ control over the use of AI and other new technologies, so as to ensure they are used for the betterment of the population, not maximizing profits and workers’ exploitation.

To build this movement, we must take the fight into our own hands through the expansion of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee. We must break out of the state-regulated collective bargaining system, and wage our struggle as a political class struggle, mobilizing the working class behind us in defence of public services and worker rights, and against austerity and war.

The political reality: Government, management and union working together

The meeting held October 8 between CUPW leaders and Lightbound confirmed what every postal worker already knows. The Carney government has no intention of backing down. Lightbound made clear the announced cuts will stand. Canada Post’s offers, tabled last week, are a blueprint for restructuring the entire postal system on the backs of workers and the public.

The proposals include:

• Ending Article 53 lifetime job security for permanent employees, opening the door to mass layoffs and casualization.
• A voluntary buyout scheme to cull thousands of full-time jobs.
• The closure of up to 493 CUPW-staffed postal outlets.
• Reduction of delivery days from five to three, and the replacement of home delivery with “community mailboxes.”
• The imposition of dynamic routing, surveillance, and “load levelling” to slash routes and intensify workloads.

This plan amounts to the Amazonification of Canada Post. It would transform the postal service from a public utility into a low-wage logistics operation designed to funnel profits to Purolator and the private courier giants.

The Carney Liberals, acting for Bay Street and the corporate elite, have declared postal workers’ jobs “inefficiencies” that must be wiped out so billions can be redirected to corporate subsidies and Canada’s expanding war machine.

CUPW’s record of sabotage

CUPW has responded to the Liberal-management offensive with one retreat after another.

Last year, CUPW shut down a month-long strike on Trudeau’s orders, submitting to a unilateral order to end the job action issued by Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon under Section 107 of the Labour Code. Then CUPW promoted illusions in the Industrial Inquiry Commission as “voice” for workers, fully aware it was a rigged mechanism to provide the government and management with a restructuring blueprint. One, moreover, whose very creation was bound up with a ban on us taking any collective action in defence of our rights during the entire commission process.

For months after the legal right to strike was regained in May, the leadership confined us to meaningless overtime bans and flyer boycotts, shielding management’s revenue streams.

Now, having finally been forced to sanction a nationwide strike, the CUPW bureaucracy has once again intervened to demobilize workers just as our struggle was beginning to gather momentum and broader support.

By reducing us to rotating strikes, the apparatus has deliberately handed over our most powerful weapon—the ability to halt mail and parcel flows nationwide—just when we most need it.

Rotating strikes are not a tactic for victory. They are a mechanism to dissipate energy, isolate locals, and ensure management can keep operations going. We saw this in 2011, when rotating actions paved the way for the Harper government to criminalize our strike and impose concessions through legislation.

By allowing “some mail and parcels” to move, CUPW is directly assisting management and the government. Lightbound and Carney now have a free hand to let the strike drag on, increase hardship, and prepare either binding arbitration or an outright back-to-work law.

This is nothing less than collusion. The CUPW apparatus functions as an industrial police force for the Liberals and corporate Canada.

A political struggle against austerity and war

The strike at Canada Post is not an isolated labour dispute. It is part of a broader class confrontation.

Carney and the Liberals are determined to make postal workers an example—to prove that no section of workers can resist the program of austerity and militarism. Billions are being poured into the military, subsidies for corporations and preparations for imperialist wars. To pay for this, the ruling class insists that tens of thousands of good-paying jobs, from the post office to healthcare and education, must be destroyed.

The union leadership’s appeals to the NDP, Bloc Québécois, and “sympathetic” politicians are a dead end. These parties are fully committed to the capitalist order. The NDP, in particular, has a long record of supporting Liberal governments that implement austerity, Canadian imperialism’s wars, and back-to-work laws.

Postal workers must repudiate any orientation to the political establishment, fighting instead to develop a mass movement with workers throughout the logistics sector and beyond on the basis of a socialist program that places human need above private profit.

The way forward: Independent action by the rank and file

Postal workers must respond decisively. We cannot allow our struggle to be strangled by a CUPW bureaucracy tied hand and foot to the Liberals and the Canadian Labour Congress. We must build a new leadership from below.