Air Canada workers on the picket line, August 2025. Photo courtesy Air Canada Component of CUPE/Facebook.

I have worked as a letter carrier at Canada Post for eight years. It’s the only union job I’ve ever had, and I have had plenty of jobs. Gas jockey. Dishwasher. Telemarketer. Burger flipper. You name a low-paying, thankless career and I have probably worked it. So, I am acutely aware, and thankful for, the reasonably good pay, job security and work conditions which I have enjoyed thanks to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

That is why it is so disheartening to see the current state of the labour movement, where government, corporations, and to some extent even the unions themselves, are committed to a neoliberal philosophy which increasingly diminishes the ability of workers to stand up to the powers that be.

My disillusionment about the state of the labour movement began with my own union. In December 2024, CUPW had an opportunity to do something historic. We were nearly a year into our latest contract negotiations, and the corporation was insisting on massive rollbacks to the working conditions for letter carriers. Canada Post claimed it was suffering major losses, though such accounting has been the subject of some debate, and to offset those losses we would need to adopt the ways of our competitors like Amazon. Essentially it boiled down to cramming a heavier workload into the days of labourers who were already highly susceptible to on-the-job injuries due to their strenuous workdays. In Canada, postal workers represent one of the top-four sectors that routinely suffer the highest number of disabling injuries, according to the most recent federal data from Employment and Social Development Canada.

Rightly, the union would not abide these impositions. When it was clear the corporation would not budge on their demands, union membership overwhelmingly voted to strike. For several weeks on the picket line we made our stand, buttressed by a good deal of public support. Morale amongst the picketers was strong despite the oncoming deepfreeze of a Canadian winter. Everything was as it should be when a group of workers decide to stand firm against deteriorating working conditions.

The cynics amongst us knew what was coming as December rolled around. We had seen this the last time CUPW had dared to strike during the Christmas rush, and we had also seen it imposed upon rail workers by the Trudeau government just a few months before our strike. Back-to-work........

© Canadian Dimension