Non-essential mail delivery could stop Friday as Canada Post put the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) on 72-hour lockout notice.
Canada Post informed the union that it would be changing the terms and conditions of employment for all union employees. Canada Post said it plans to suspend its employment agreement on Friday, July 8. According to a press release, Canada Post is threatening a lockout as a needed respond to business concerns around the postal service. Canada Post says prolonged union negotiations and the threat of a strike are having a “negative and escalating” impact on their business.
Read: Mail disruption feared as Canada Post lockout looms
“While Canada Post must take steps to address its pension liabilities, the threat of a prolonged work stoppage has many small business owners worried. There are a growing number of alternatives each year but many small firms continue to rely on Canada Post for package delivery, invoicing clients and paying suppliers," said Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB).
According to research from the CFIB over 90% of Canadian small business owners consider Canada post’s delivery services as somewhat or very important to their business.
In their press release, Canada Post cited three of the negative effects of the current negotiations. First, nearly all of Canada Post’s largest e-commerce clients have moved to other delivery services resulting in a 75% decline in volume fro these costumers. Second, letter mail is down as much as 50% in some facilities and over the weekend commercial customers deposited half the amount of mail usually deposited. Finally, there has been such a large decline in parcels that “there are often not enough parcels to last an entire processing shift.”’
While Canada Post sees the lockout as a necessary in order to resume business operations, CUPW does not agree.
“Canada Post has just served notice on fifty thousand Canadian workers that it plans to drive them out onto the streets without pay in an effort to impose steep concessions on them,” said a CUPW representative in a press release.
Canada Post wants to change employees pension plan from defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan. The CUPW says that it is also fighting for pay equity for its rural carriers who are mostly female. One of CPUW arguments is that Canada Post makes millions of dollars in profit and that money should be used to provide new employees a defined benefit pension and bring female carriers wages to levels of their male coworkers. In 2015 Canada post reported profits of $169 million, down from 299 million in 2014.
While Canada Post Canada reported profits for the past two years, for three years before 2014 they experienced consecutive losses. Canada Post maintains that the reason for the difference in pay has to do with the differences in rural and city delivery and that less demand in rural areas means that employees have shorter delivery routes and work less.
