8mo ago

Workers at Canada Post Are On Strike. Here’s What Postal Workers Are Fighting For.

pressprogress.ca

23 comments

Since so many of these leave the details out.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1542q49wzgo
The union wants a 24% pay increase over the next four years - higher than the 11.5% increase proposed by employer Canada Post.
and
The latest strike comes as the Crown corporation deals with big financial losses of C$3bn since 2016, primarily due to the fact that people are sending fewer letters than before.
In its 2023 annual report, the operator said its financial situation is “unsustainable", and had projected that it will run out of cash unless it borrows C$1bn and refinances its existing debt.
- Side note, but I always hate how it's described as "losses". No shit providing mail delivery is a service. It's nice to aim to reduce the cost as much as possible, but when you're looking at something like Canada where there are countless remote and difficult to reach communities, regular communication and parcel delivery is going to cost money
  
  Now now! What would Capitalism say if it heard you?!
  
  Presumably it should be self sufficient, by charging for some services.. Remember every letter required paid postage.
  If everything competing with it has shift work, no benefits and cheaper vehicles. Then something is wrong with us paying for daily delivery of fliers and given out pensions to a low skill job.
- Losing almost all the urban Amazon business to Bezos inhouse shipper was a pretty hard blow.
- I really don't understand why they are still delivering mail 'EVERYDAY'
  Any snail mail could easily be delivered once a week.
  Anything real important that needs to be delivered faster can be (and is already) delivered by courier.
  They also need to up their package game.
  Take a page out of Amazon and up your logistics game already.
  Relying on adverts/junk mail has never been the answer.
  
  "A page out of Amazon" being underpaid workers in terrible working conditions I assume?
  
  They’ve already been considering ending daily mail delivery, but they require a legislative amendment by the federal government to allow them to make any of the changes needed to keep their operations afloat. Here’s an article from earlier this year
  I doubt it’ll be allowed anytime soon with an election on the horizon, but any sitting government that introduces the changes will be receiving a lot of backlash from opposition and rural residents.
  The previous government allowed for community mailboxes to be setup to replace door-to-door delivery to make deliveries more efficient, and that got repealed because the poor elderly folks and people in the middle of nowhere would have to get some exercise to collect their mail. We all know what happened after the liberals got voted in, so I doubt much will change besides Canada post requiring subsidies in order to be able to operate by the very legislation that’s making them lose money.
  
  delivering mail ‘EVERYDAY’
  You mean 'every day', right?
And in the US you can also put outgoing mail in your box and they’ll take it. Super convenient. Why can’t they do that here too since they’re already there?
- Community mailboxes do this already.
- They did in rural areas 20 years ago. I grew up on a rural road and it was totally a thing to send mail by putting it in the mailbox and raise the flag.
  Maybe it's just a rural thing for people with individual mailboxes, or maybe they stopped doing this, but it was possible a few decades ago.

23 comments