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By Erin Hudson - The McGill Daily, September 2010
On November 22, 2010, nine weeks after a new, arduous mail delivery system was introduced to Winnipeg, postal workers simply walked off the job. They had the consent of neither Canada Post nor their union leadership.
This is how Bob Tyre, president of the union’s Winnipeg branch, tells it: “One of our temporary workers said, ‘I can’t do the new method. I’m more than happy to do work in another depot – I’ll deliver the old way – but this new way is too much for me and I can’t do it.’ So they suspended him on the spot and that angered the building. We had four letter carrier depots in that building together. When the boss wouldn’t back off, well, then, they walked out for a day.”
The walkout would set the stage for six months of workers’ struggles, culminating in this summer’s mail strike. But the walkout would also inspire some workers to break with their union’s powerful National Executive and to question the future of unions. From November 2010 to June 2011, anarchism arrived at the post office.
Last fall, Canada Post Corporation (CPC) introduced the Modern Post – a new method of delivering mail that would begin the transformation Canada Post believes they need in order to modernize, become financially sustainable, and maintain relevance in the digital age where mail volume per address is decreasing.
The Modern Post plans to motorize letter carriers and implement a two-bundle carrying method. The two-bundle system will consist of one bundle of presequenced mail to hold on the forearm, and a second bundle of flyers to be handed out at each point of call. Instead of letter carriers sorting their mail in the plant, machines will sequence the majority of mail, which means that letter carriers will spend more time on delivery routes.
Parcel delivery drivers will be almost completely eliminated. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) estimates that in Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, and Scarborough, 306 jobs will be cut as a result of the new system.
Outside a union meeting in Montreal, delivery agent Denis Auger Delegue said this is his first bad year at the post office in 32 years.
Modern Post was first implemented in Winnipeg’s Southwest and Northeast depots. The system came in two waves, beginning the transition on September 20, and completing it on October 18.
On November 4, following a court decision prohibiting workers from refusing to work under Modern Post, the CUPW – which represents all Canadian postal workers – released a web bulletin weighing in on the matter. Their message: the union’s collective agreement, which was set to expire at the end of January 2011, would not protect workers who walked off the job to protest the Modern Post.
With little concrete action taken by CUPW’s National Executive, workers facing the daily challenges of the Modern Post took matters into their own hands.
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