Canada post to cut door-to-door mail delivery????

[freefreefree]

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/door-door-...727.html?nhp=1

I hope this doesn't happen. We paid for the service

[Chantel]

If they need to cut costs, why not just cut delivery days down? Yes, it would mess with delivery standards somewhat, but they would save millions by delivering 4 days a week instead of 5.

Not to mention the millions they'll have to SPEND to make community mailboxes across the country.

[GeorgiaK]

This is nothing new, they have been talking about (and doing so) for a few months now.

[walkonby]

in case anyone was wondering??


CANADA POST
Postal workers come out as winners in legal battle

Judge said it was unconstitutional for Canada Post employees to be forced back on the job during the 2011 strike, just as deadline for new strike looms

Vanessa Lu Star Touch
Legislation brought in by the Harper government in 2011 ordering postal workers back to work was unconstitutional because it deprived unionized employees of their right to strike, an Ontario judge has ruled.
“Based on the evidentiary record, there can be no question that, on the facts of this case, the Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act abrogated the right to strike of CUPW members,” wrote Justice Stephen Firestone in a 48-page decision released last week.
“The question is whether the Act disrupted the balance between the parties. There can be no doubt that it did,” he wrote.
The Ontario Superior Court decision comes just as Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers are ramping up negotiations again, with a legal strike deadline or lockout looming in early July.
“This is a strong message to Canada Post management that they can’t expect to simply lock us out and wait for back-to-work legislation,” said Mike Palecek, national president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. “We haven’t seen a lot of movement yet, just concession demands.”
Jon Hamilton, spokesman for Canada Post, which had intervener status in the court case, declined to comment on the decision.
Talks are moving along since negotiators moved to an Ottawa hotel in mid-April with two conciliators assigned.
“The pace has picked up. Our objective is to reach a deal,” Hamilton said. “We believe a deal is achievable.”
Firestone noted that during 2011 bargaining, proposals were going back and forth, calling the process meaningful.
“There was clearly some prospect of a negotiated solution to their differences before any legislative intervention,” the court decision said.
The union filed the charter challenge shortly after the back-to-work law was introduced in July 2011. The legislation came after Canada Post shut down the post office, locking out the employees following weeks of rotating strikes.
“It took away the right to strike, which was exacerbated in this situation because the arbitration process they were offered was unfair and inadequate,” said constitutional lawyer Paul Cavalluzzo, who argued on behalf of the union.
The legislation set out the length of the contract, specific wage increases (lower than the company’s final offer), as well as conditions such as not affecting the company’s financial viability or pension plan.
“It gave the post office even more bargaining leverage at the expense of the postal workers,” Cavalluzzo said, noting the union began to pull back on its demands, preparing to take lower wage increases and make concessions.
Then-labour minister Lisa Raitt named an arbitrator, using final offer selection process, where the arbitrator chooses one position over another, instead of melding demands from the two sides.
That raises the stakes, given the winner-take-all scenario. Two arbitrators who were appointed were eventually rejected, one because he wasn’t bilingual and the other because he had acted for Canada Post in a long-standing pay equity case.
In the end, the two parties returned to the bargaining table and hammered out a settlement in October 2012, though the union insists it would not sign off on many of the items because of the back-to-work law.
The judge argued that back-to-work legislation can be appropriate in certain circumstances.
“If you are going to take away the right to strike, you have to substitute a fair, impartial arbitration mechanism, so that the employees are placed in an equal position to their employer at the arbitration table,” Cavalluzzo said.
For organized labour, the decision is seen as a substantial victory after the Conservative government repeatedly introduced back-to-work legislation or threatened to do so, sometimes even before a work stoppage began.
Examples include blocking pilots, flight attendants and machinists at Air Canada from striking even though they hadn’t walked off the job.
Cavalluzzo, who is involved in a separate charter challenge on behalf of the machinists at Air Canada, hopes the new Liberal government will rethink whether to fight that case.
Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, the country’s largest private sector union, praised the Firestone decision, saying it reaffirms that the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike are enshrined in the constitution.
“There is no question it will make governments think about whether to stick their noses in,” Dias said. “There is no question that the previous government believed their role was to side with employers.”
However, Raitt still defends her government’s intervention in the Canada Post dispute, noting how fragile the economy was then.
“We had to act because we did believe there was a pressing and substantial matter. Canadians needed to get their mail,” she said, adding she was pleased to see the decision doesn’t ban back-to-work legislation.
“Quite frankly, we were trying to help the corporation claw its way into some relevance in Canadians’ lives. Mail delivery has dropped off significantly,” she said.
George Smith, adjunct professor in the School of Industrial Relations at Queen’s University, disagrees with Raitt’s position, arguing that preemptive intervention was simply wrong, interfering with the collective bargaining process, which works.
“I’m not advocating that strikes should happen willy-nilly, but it is a right of unions and workers. Those rights are part of our democracy,” he said.
“In some cases, the government could and should intervene, but not preemptively,” said Smith, who has negotiated on behalf of corporations including Air Canada and CBC. “The falsehood that the Harper government was selling was that they were creating labour peace.”
When asked whether Ottawa would appeal the decision, a federal government spokeswoman said in an emailed statement: “We are aware of the decision and are carefully reviewing the judgment.”

[julies1949]

Most of us could manage quite nicely with once a week delivery.If they eliminate home delivery, again most of us would manage quite easily.If they do, hopefully those of us who are healthy will help out our less able neighbours by offering to pick up their mail.

[walkonby]

it does NOT look good for the workers right now.

CP has played their deceptive game once again, by refusing to negotiate with the union when there was plenty of time to reach an agreement, then filing for conciliation, now they will most certainly lock out their workers and the public will blame the workers for no mail. ( again! )

Canada Post refuses postie request to extend cooling off period











Wednesday June 29 2016


For Immediate Release

OTTAWA - Canada Post CEO Deepak Chopra has officially rejected a letter from postal workers asking him to extend the July 2 deadline for a lockout by a period of two weeks, which could mean that the profitable company is indeed preparing to lock out its workforce in the middle of a public postal review, spoiling the process.
“We only got their first real ‘offer’ last Saturday and it still contained a raft of cuts to our working standards that they know we could never accept,” said Mike Palecek, national president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
Canada Post’s haste to push matters to a head in the bargaining process while insisting on hefty cuts has had the CUPW crying foul from the beginning.
“Canada Post managers started this countdown to a labour dispute by filing for conciliation shockingly early on in the negotiations process,” said Palecek.
“They don’t really want to give us a chance to settle a deal. They want us out and they want the public to blame the postal workers for management’s decisions.”
In a letter handed out to postal workers late last night, one of Chopra’s human resources executives claims that agreeing to the union’s request to extend talks would only delay matters and produce further “uncertainty” for its customers.
“So they’re going to kill the mail and remove all uncertainty, I guess” said Palecek.
The profitable Crown Corporation, which netted almost $100 million last year and is in its 20^th year of profits, is trying to cut back workers’ pensions and remove job security protections, among other cuts. It is refusing to listen to union proposals for the expansion of services and pay equity for rural and suburban mail carriers, 70% of which are women.

[walkonby]

the latest news is that the Union will not submit it's 72 hr notice of a strike but instead they will first take the time to respond to the only pitiful last minute offer given to them by CP. So this means no strike would occur before Tuesday July 5th. Lockout though?? Who knows when CP will do that?