With the price of postage and package transport of the U.S. Postal Office increasing more and more, will we see the demise of our own Postal Service?
Will FedEx be the new postal service?
Canada Post Locks Out Workers, Union Calls Move Irresponsible
June 15, 2011
UPDATE: CTV News says it has learned that Labour Minister Lisa Raitt intends to push back-to-work legislation forward in an effort to end the ongoing postal strike. But Parliament will first deal with the Air Canada strike, before getting to the postal strike next week.?Read more here.
THE CANADIAN PRESS ? Don?t bother checking your mailbox this morning.
Canada Post has suspended urban mail operations across the country after 12 days of rotating strikes by its 48,000 unionized urban workers.
The Crown corporation says it was forced to declare the lockout late Tuesday night after the rotating work stoppages caused mail volumes and revenue to drop significantly.
?While we?d hoped to avoid a disruption to service to Canadians, we feel we can?t continue to let this drag on,? Canada Post spokesman Jon Hamilton told the Canadian Press.
?It?s having a huge impact on the business, it?s having a huge impact on our customers and our employees and the time is now to get a deal with the union.?
The post office estimated it lost $100 million after the largest rotating strikes took place Tuesday in Montreal and Toronto, where about 60 per cent of the country?s mail is handled.
It also said talks with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers were at an impasse, with the two sides ?far apart? on several key issues and no progress at the negotiating table for weeks.
?If we allow the uncertainty created by the rotating strikes to continue ? and we?ve seen customers walking away from Canada Post ? our ability to remain financially self-sufficient and not become a burden on taxpayers certainly is going to be in jeopardy,? said Hamilton.
Union representatives reacting to news of the lockout said Canada Post?s latest move was not entirely unexpected.
?I see it as a manoeuvre on the part of the corporation to try and get the government to legislate us back to work and legislate some type of unfavourable collective agreement on to us, as opposed to allowing the free and collective bargaining process to work itself out,? said Gerry Deveau, CUPW National Director for the Ontario region.
The federal government had appeared to rule out back-to-work legislation earlier this week, but the nationwide lockout could change that.
Canadians had already been feeling the effects of the labour dispute, not just from the rotating strikes, but because Canada Post had scaled back mail delivery in cities to Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays before declaring the lockout. The union had said the scaling back was an attempt by the corporation to provoke a general strike.
The current country-wide suspension of urban mail is likely to have a wider impact.
Although the labour dispute does not include rural postal workers, who fall under a different contract, even the post office has acknowledged that a prolonged lockout could mean they would eventually have no more mail to deliver.
?There will be nothing moving through this country,? said Deveau. ?If the government doesn?t intervene then I do see this potentially being a very long lockout.?
Both sides have said they expect to continue negotiating through Wednesday.
Deveau said negotiations had already been moving at a particularly slow place and the lockout would add an ?interesting turn? to talks. Pensions, workplace health and safety and sick leave benefits have been some of the key stumbling blocks, he said.
Meanwhile, Canada Post said it is still keen to reach a negotiated settlement.
?We certainly hope this is only a short-term measure,? said Hamilton.
?Unfortunately we have not been able to make much progress at the table and believe this is the best way to bring forward a timely resolution to the impasse.?
Canada Post?s union says the Crown corporation was irresponsible when it suspended urban mail operations across the country starting today.
The union has accused Canada Post of seeking to cause major disruptions in order to pressure the government into ordering workers back to work.
By Diana Mehta, The Canadian Press
LINK
From the World Socialist Website:
Canada?s Conservative government to criminalize postal strike
By Carl Bronski and Keith Jones
16 June 2011
Canada?s Conservative government is mounting a multi-pronged attack on the working class with the aim of bolstering big business? drive to slash wages, jobs, and benefits and breaking all resistance to the dismantling of vital public services.
Late Tuesday night, federal government-owned Canada Post imposed a nationwide lockout against 48,000 mail-sorters, letter-carriers, mail truck drivers, and postal station clerks. It sought to justify this provocation by claiming that an anemic campaign of localized 24-hour rotating walkouts mounted by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) since June 3 was costing the company tens of millions of dollars.
The Conservative government lost no time in using the lockout as a pretext to directly intervene in the dispute at Canada Post?a dispute that has been provoked by the post office?s demands for sweeping contract concessions, including a two-tier pay and benefit structure and a new hazardous and job-cutting work regime for letter carriers . On Tuesday afternoon, the government announced that before the day was out it would formally initiate the 48-hour process to introduce an emergency back-to-work law, illegalizing all job action by postal workers and suspending their collective bargaining rights.
[snip]
Speaking in Canada?s Parliament Wednesday, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended the government?s attack on the postal and Air Canada workers, saying that the labor unrest was ?threatening to jeopardize economic recovery.? This is entirely in keeping with drive of the newly-elected Conservative majority government to place the full burden of the capitalist crisis on working people. In the name of fostering ?economic recovery,? the Conservatives have pledged to further slash corporate taxes, gut environmental and health and safety regulations, and balance the federal budget through a more than 10 percent cut in federal discretionary per capita spending and by hiking user fees for government services.
[snip]
If the union strategy has been to mount an ineffectual job action, it is because its overriding concern and that of the Canadian Labour Congress has been to avoid an all-out confrontation with the government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and this for two reasons. The union bureaucracy hopes to maintain its privileges, at the expense of rank-and-file workers, by accommodating itself to Canada?s new right wing majority government, just as the unions have integrated themselves ever more closely into management over the past quarter century.The unions fear that a challenge to the government and its big business agenda could precipitate a movement of the working class that would rapidly escape their control and threaten the entire social-political order. [Emphasis added]
More?..
WHO is this strike actually hurting? The workers or their Union?s ?power??
They should be grateful they HAVE A JOB??
We ALL have to make cuts/reductions in our lives to ?make do? today in this depressed economic era.
Why shouldn?t the Unions have to do this too?
From Fox News Business:
Read by clicking on blue lettered link below
Excerpt:
[C]ustomers can still use the Postal Service?s Global Express Guaranteed service, a ?premium? service operated by?FedEx?Corp. (FDX), to send letters and packages.
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