Last minute negotiations contiune to avoid postal strike
Posted Jun 1, 2011 2:19 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Canada Post is meeting with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers Wednesday in a last ditch effort to avoid a strike.
The union has served notice that if a collective bargaining agreement can’t be reached by Thursday at 9:59 p.m. MT, then its urban members will walk off the job.
This means close to 50,000 workers would go on strike.
John Caines with Canada Post tells 660News, if they were to walk off the job, mail wouldn’t be delivered across the country.
“People in urban Canada probably wouldn’t notice the effect of a mail disruption in the interim, but as time goes on they probably would,” he says. “Small businesses would really be affected here. They rely heavily on Canada Post to fill their orders, to collect payments, and without us, their cash flow would dry up.”
He adds, those in remote communities would really feel the effects.
“People in rural Canada, we really are an essential life line for them,” he says. “A lot of them have no broadband access, they shop by mail order. We’re the only courier company that really delivers to them.”
“You can look North of 60, and up there, all those people, they depend on us for everything,” he adds. “I mean we deliver everything from drugs to glasses and clothing and government cheques.”
There are still outstanding issues over wages, pensions and new work methods, but Caines says he hopes the union will accept their latest offer.
“We have an offer on the table that we think will make the employees better off then they are today,” he says. “They’ll get a wage increase in each of the four years of the contract. They’ll maintain their benefit pension plan, they’ll continue with their job security, they will also share in company bonuses if the corporation meets its financial and performance targets, and they’ll also have a new sick leave program.”
The sick leave program is said to be one of the main sticking points in the negotiations.
