The Vice President of CUP-W Local 854, representing Williams Lake to 100 Mile House, is disputing Canada Post’s claims that the union’s latest offer is going backwards and not forwards.
Tanya Pare says they’ve actually taken a big step back.
“We’ve said we wouldn’t ask anymore to be put together, the rural-suburban mail carriers and the urban carriers, we were asking for that and we’ve stepped off of that. We’ve come down with our (wage) request, I think we’re at 19 percent.(over 4 years) We started at 24 percent I believe, so I don’t know how they can say that we haven’t come down. We’ve come down in many ways and in some ways there were concerns that some people on the line wouldn’t even agree to what we’ve come to but there are 55,000 people that need to be kept happy.”
Pare says they still have concerns over health and safety issues as well that haven’t been addressed, and she says Canada Post wants to make changes that will only add to that.
“Basically they would have people inside sorting all day long which is going to be very tiresome on the shoulders, the arms. We’ve been doing it about an hour and half to two hours in the morning and taking out our own mail. They want to take that away from us and just have us come pick up the mail and just go out into the elements and have to deal whatever got sorted for us. That is something that all of us are extremely upset about. And because they’re doing it that way they’re going to be starting us later in the day and then we’ll be delivering in the dark because we will have 7 1/2 hours outside and especially up north here, not to mention we’d have to worry about childcare.’
Pare says the company is also talking about dynamic routing.
“Which is also a major concern because you’re going to be going in blind everyday. A lot of us, we go into our route, we know it, we change our direction every day depending on what our parcels are but we get to make that decision in the morning. We get to decide when we come in how we’re going to deliver that day and we do it safely because we know our area.”
Pare also disputes the claim that Canada Post is losing hundreds of millions of dollars (3 billion dollars since 2018) every year.
“They’re also complaining and saying that they are losing money but in fact prior to our negotiations they told us that they were strategically investing. They’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars into infrastructure to grow the business, and why would they refuse to put it towards the workers who actually do the work ?”
Canada Post says it has made several moves to close the gap in negotiations over the past few weeks to try and reach a negotiated settlement.
It says it is looking for much-needed flexibility to its delivery model to improve service for Canadians and to grow its parcel business.
Today (Thursday) is day 27 of the strike by 55 thousand members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, including 88 in the Cariboo. (45 in Quesnel, 34 in Williams Lake and 9 in 100 Mile House)
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