Who wants to start a labour movement?
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Logo: "Logo of the Confederation of Canadian Unions" by "portpass19" is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Big picture: Because the cost of living (inflation is just one component) has been increasing for 40 years, with very little increase in compensation or benefits.
Small picture: Canada Post wants to exploit delivery/logistics workers the way Amazon does, and that's a crock of shit.
This is really helpful. Most of what I have seen are people on reddit screeching about how entitled and unskilled postal workers are. I'll continue to buy locally and avoid Amazon.
Here's a quote from the Canada post business newsletter they sent out today about the strike:
Our core business is delivery. While postal services around the world are working constructively to evolve their delivery approach to respond to changing customer needs, CUPW’s demands reinforce the status quo and add significant and unsustainable long-term fixed costs. One example is continuing to demand that our facility cleaning staff and other contracted support services become permanent Canada Post employees.
Edit: People who down voted this, why? It came directly from Canada Post, and shows just how little they consider their workers to be humans that deserve rights. The past 3 newsletters are all written with a huge "unions are bad and stifle progress" vibe, even though the union is just trying to protect the workers.
For an actual answer, the union is demanding basic needs be met, like a minimum 20 hour workweek guarantee, cost of living adjustments, cutting down on exploitive contract labour policies, and Canada post execs want to cut labour hours while increasing the number of days open, delivery hours, and overall increasing the stress and workload for staff without increasing compensation.
I had a friend who was hired there 2 years ago as an on-call employee, with the promise that he'd be able to be moved up to full time regular at some point. He has to be available full time through the week, but only gets 1 or 2 shifts a week and is still waiting to get full time hours. He's had to keep working in a kitchen on the weekends to support himself, but cant work through the week in case he gets called in for mail delivery. Its actual so unreasonable.
Wow. It needs to be law that if you’re on call you need to be getting paid at least 80% of your regular rate.
I didn't downvote you, but by quoting without an addition comment, your comment seems like it agrees with what Canada Post said.
If you included your "for an actual answer" self-reply as part of your original comment, you likely wouldn't've been down-voted in the same way.
Fair point, I just assumed that the excerpt I chose was clearly evil enough no one would mistake the top level comment for support.
The problem is that from a significant portion of online and in person commentary it seems people do take corporate press releases at face value. I'm a union worker myself and even some of my own coworkers fall into that trap, although fortunately they snap out of it when I remind them of the garbage our employer has tried to feed the public.
Canada Post wouldn't say those things out loud if they expected that most people would see it as "clearly evil". Sadly I think their expectations aren't completely wrong in this respect 😒