CUPW Meeting With the Minister’s Office October 16 – Recap

Yesterday, members of CUPW’s National Executive Board and Negotiating Committees continued their discussions with representatives from Minister Lightbound’s office about the future of the public post office and what it will take to get ratifiable collective agreements.

We explained the importance of job security protections in our collective agreements as well as the need for stronger collective agreement language to prevent Canada Post from contracting out work. We explained how taking away these protections will only hurt workers and won’t actually help the Corporation grow to better serve Canadians.

We demonstrated how Canada Post has misled the public by pointing to omissions in how it presents its financial picture, and we continued to highlight Canada Post’s campaign to use its subsidiary, Purolator, to undermine our negotiations and drive down Canada Post profits.

We also raised concerns about Canada Post’s “non-negotiable” demands and how these prevent meaningful progress at the bargaining table. One of Canada Post’s non-negotiables is the implementation of dynamic routing; however, we informed the Minister’s office that a dynamic routing pilot project was already trialed and ended by management, not CUPW.

Mandate Review and Lack of Consultation

We asked about the Minister’s plans for the upcoming mandate review and stressed that the process needs to be public and fully transparent.

During his announcement September 25, the Minister gave Canada Post 45-days to present a plan to implement some of the recommendations of the Kaplan Report.

Many new demands are now included in Canada Post’s most recent global offers, in accordance with Canada Post’s understanding of the Minister’s announcement. We pointed out how this impacts the current round of bargaining.

Next Steps

We urged the Minister’s office to get back to us as soon as possible and to ensure that any decisions about Canada Post’s future are made transparently and with Union input.

In solidarity,