During the postal workers’ strike that started on Nov. 15, one issue underpinned the whole struggle: Canada Post management is in a race to the bottom with private corporations.
Under pressure from the decline in demand for mail and the competition from private delivery services for parcels, the crown corporation is posting losses year after year—$3 billion since 2018. In particular, the growth of parcel delivery which came with the rise of Amazon has been accompanied by the emergence of low-cost small delivery companies that rely on “independent contractors”—workers with no job security and terrible working conditions.
Management has thus been calling for Canada Post to “modernize” to compete with these private corporations.
And as usually happens when the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) goes on strike, we saw a flurry of calls in the bourgeois media for the government to privatize Canada Post entirely. They all made essentially the same argument: since Canada Post keeps failing to make a profit, it must be thrust onto the private market. Then, it will be forced to compete and “innovate”. This boogeyman is used to frighten workers into submission.
It’s doubtful there’s much content to these threats. The ruling class only privatizes what is profitable. Too many small and medium sized businesses are dependent on the cheap—and inherently unprofitable—services provided by Canada Post.
But the threat to workers is real. The pressure to compete with these private corporations is leading to a race to the bottom in terms of working conditions.
This is what the capitalists and their stooges at the head of Canada Post mean when they talk of “modernizing” and “innovating”. They want to adopt Amazon-level exploitation: chaotic just-in-time scheduling dictated by an app instead of regular hours, part-time gig labour instead of full-time positions, and possibly even no minimum wage. In short, they mean algorithm-based hyper exploitation.
Crown corporations providing essential services like Canada Post should not be run by capitalists, who sacrifice services and workers in the name of their profit margins. They should be placed under the democratic control of workers, who alone know how to manage them rationally.
But ultimately, attacks on workers are inherent to capitalism. The same market forces that compel every business to squeeze their workers as much as possible for as cheap as possible are also applied to state-owned corporations like Canada Post.
The only way to stop this race to the bottom is to put an end to the logic of profit throughout the industry, by expropriating Amazon, Purolator, UPS and all the others as part of a broader socialist plan of production.
We include here a letter from a comrade and Canada Post worker.
Canada Post’s push for gig work
I completed the training process in February, 2024, at the Gateway site in Mississauga. Canada Post was funneling trainees through there by the dozens, then benching them for months at a time. Being “benched” means that you have no scheduled work assignments and must wait to be called into the depot to work at all.
According to CUPW, Canada Post currently has 12,500 such “temporary” employees across Canada. This means there is very little work to go around. Which is strange, because the training program is two weeks long, full-time hours, and paid. By my calculations, if all of them have completed the basic training program, Canada Post spent $22,000,000 on benching these workers.
What’s more, Canada Post is demanding in negotiations that it further expand this part-time layer by a whopping 50 per cent, as part of the expansion into weekend delivery services, when there is already a large reserve force of on-call letter carriers that are desperate for work.
If they get their way, they will avoid the obligation to provide stable jobs, benefits, or pensions, to any employee, for far longer than they already do. It’s obvious that Canada Post aims to destroy union jobs from the inside out, beating down the workers it already has, and setting a dangerous standard for unionized work everywhere.
–Kailan D., Toronto
