Joined: Sep 2010
Posts: 8749
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11/18/2018 at 9:26 PM
I saw this comment on a Portage la Prairie FB post and thought I’d share it here.
Hi.
I am a postal worker and would like to take a moment of your time. Unless you have been living in a cave in the mountains of West Virginia you will have no doubt heard that Canada Post
and its employees are in the middle of contract negotiations and currently engaged in limited strike action. The limited strike action I speak of is the rotating strikes and a refusal to work overtime. These are designed to cause a slight delay in the mail stream that impacts management more than our customers, and to our customers, I am sorry for any slight delay you may experience but there is a reason why we are doing this.
Part of the nature of the current conflict is that not only are our issues complex but so is the workforce itself, and by that I mean it is incredibly diverse. Not only are we trying to negotiate 2 different contracts at the same time, but these contracts cover both RSMC and city workers which i:nclude both inside and outside workers, temporary employees, maintenance workers in addition to people who's job can be a combination of more then one classification. Of course wages are an issue as they are with anyone and I wont pretend to say we wouldn't like a raise, however it is the working conditions that are much more important to us and something almost no one understands unless they work here. Everyone can see how hard roofers and nurses work, but when you do the job, you gain a completely different understanding of what they go through.
Did you know that Canada Post does NOT receive funding from the government? There is a good chance you didn't. All of Canada Post's revenue comes from the selling of stamps and shipping fees. We are self sufficient. Even if you did know this, you might be surprised to know how many people do not know this.
One of our major issues deals with staffing for both inside and outside workers. There are many RSMC's in the country that still have to find their own replacements. That means if you want to take a vacation, or get sick or injured that YOU have to find someone to sort and deliver your route. Can you think of any other business like that short of being an independent contractor? Keep in mind these are not contractors but Canada Post employees. If you cant make it to work for what ever reason, does your boss tell you it's your responsibility to find someone to do your work? Canada Post has also agreed to a minimum staffing ration of permanent employees to temporary employees. They have been ignoring this ratio for several years now.
Staffing issues in general are also at the heart of the forced overtime issues. Although many inside and outside (letter carrier) workers regularly volunteer for overtime it is the outside workers that are also FORCED to do overtime. This means that unless you have medical documentation stating that for health reasons you cannot do the overtime, you are forced to do it or face disciplinary action. Did you make prior commitments for when you thought you would be off work such as picking up kids from daycare, or school or making a dentist or Dr. appointment?. To bad, you have to change your life at the last min. That being said, sometimes things happen that are beyond everyone's control, but I think you can agree that this shouldn't happen on a regular basis and there can be a better way to meet all of our customers delivery commitments.
When it comes to being a temporary employee, I think most of us have been there, working mostly contract jobs or seasonal work. The difference at Canada Post is that you just sit at home waiting for a phone call. Most people will go months without getting that phone call for some work. You might also work this week, but not the next 3 weeks, or at times, you may work for most of the year full time. You never know. You only get a call if and when they want you. This makes it very difficult to plan out any sort of life. Will you need a babysitter tomorrow? You probably wont know until the very last minute of that day.
You may have heard the term “overburdening” mentioned by the union in the news but what does that really mean? For letter carriers anyways, what that means is the overall work load and how the job is preformed. Canada Post to their credit were at the forefront of job efficiency measurement at a micro level. This is a very fancy way to saying every part of a letter carriers job was measured decades ago. Every foot of distance on our route, every stair, gate, door, etc. is counted and assigned a time value. Even how many letters per min we are supposed to sort is built into our day. Part of the problem is sometimes these values go missing and so do not get counted in the making of new routes. A more significant issue is that this system has not really been updated in decades despite the nature of how we do our job has changed a great deal.
Nearly everyone will agree the number of letters we write and send each other has been in decline for a long time, but think of how many offers you get from your bank, or the dealership where you bought your car or some other business looking to make you a customer. We still deliver all of those things yet most are not used in the calculations used to determine the size of our routes. This has caused the size of a letter carriers route to grow dramatically. Many routes are 3 times the size they were 20 years ago. A letter carrier typically walks 20 km a day (5 days a week) and up and down 3000 to 5000 stairs while carrying the mail, flyers and packets/parcels for over 100 houses at a time. This is a key reason why the injury rate for postal workers is 5 times higher then any other profession. It is also a reason why letter carriers have more back, knee, hip and foot surgery then anyone else. One simple fix to this would be to make the amount we deliver at one time less, such as 50 houses as opposed to 100 houses. The opposition to this is because adding even just 6 extra stops would mean having to make the route shorter by 12 min (we get 2 min per loop stop to load up our satchel with mail). I sounds like such a simple fix, and it is, but yet Canada Post says no. Part of the reason is that it would require updating and fixing 18,000 routes from coast to coast. An easy fix, but time consuming to implement and it is apparently less expensive to pay out disability cheques then to fix things. It is also much easier to make someone do more in the same amount of time and reduce jobs. In the end, it would also require hiring more employees but I guess they think it is such a horrible thing to employ people.
The subject of the multiple bundle delivery method as a health and safety concern has been an ongoing fight with little change despite several arbitrator rulings in favor of the employees. In order to fully explain the situation would require an essay unto itself but any letter carrier will gladly take the time to talk to you about it. All you have to do is ask.
On top of the mail and flyers, are all the things we deliver to you that you ordered from places like Amazon, or Allied express or Wish. Delivering those items as well as the use of our scanner have almost no time value associated with them. Despite every part of our job being measured to the second, the system has not been updated to properly i:nclude our new duties. We are simply required to do them. If we do not get all of the work done, we get questioned as to why with very little concern to things such as the weather conditions and can face disciplinary action.
This is a very simplistic overview of some of the issues currently being fought at the negotiating table, and I would hope it peeks your interest enough to ask your postal worker for more information.
We are your brothers and sisters, your neighbors and friends and in the end we simply would like to do our job feeling more like a person and less like a machine.
We want to work and we love our job. We love to be greeted by that lovable furball that wants to lick us to death when all we seem to have for you is a pizza flyer. We wear our uniform with pride and in the end only want to be able to go home happy and injury free and not feeling defeated and broken, wondering how we will make it through tomorrow.
Thank You for your time.