President's Blog – April 8, 2016
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Friday April 8 2016
As most members are by now aware, Canada Post applied for conciliation on Monday. This means they are preparing to push negotiations to a head.
So far, management has refused to discuss any of our proposals to expand service for the public and improve working conditions for postal workers. They are asking for major concessions.
Clearly they have not got the message: postal workers are finished with concession bargaining!
The boss wants to:
- Downgrade our pensions to defined contribution, not only for new hires but going forward
- Cut certain leaves (compensatory, day in lieu, pre-retirement)
- Cut vacation time for everybody
- Deny Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers leave during November and December
- Freeze pay for temp workers and cut vacation pay
- Use cheaper labour and temp workers for the booming parcel delivery business
- Make us deliver bigger heavier unaddressed admail pieces in a shorter time
- Pay us only $1 per lock for changing the locks on the new “community” mailboxes
- Cut paid meal breaks
- Remove the right to have a place to wash our hands, use the washroom and get a drink on our meal breaks
- Bring in automated volume counts that expect us to “just trust them” that the counts are right
- Start “flexibility” pilot projects that would affect our ability to schedule our workdays and vacations
- Keep Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers firmly in second place when it comes to pay, benefits and job security.
- Cap our benefits and hike our premiums for our health plans
- Increase premiums for retirees from 35% to as much as 80%
- Remove cost-of-living increases from those on long-term disability
- Make the short-term disability plan more intrusive and more stressful for the applicant, and prevent us from using annual leave during the waiting period.
Postal Workers will not accept these roll-backs and your negotiators are making this clear to Canada Post at the bargaining table. Management says they want a negotiated collective agreement, but their actions say otherwise. These Harper-era cronies have done nothing but attack postal workers and the services we provide to the public for years.
Stephen Harper thought he could impose cuts and postal workers proved that by standing together with our allies, we can defeat the austerity agenda.
Without our labour, there is no Canada Post. The sooner Canada Post gets that message, the sooner we can have a collective agreement.
