In 1965, Canada’s postal workers did something so radical, so unprecedented, that it shook our country’s political establishment to the core.
They went on strike.
It was radical and unprecedented because up until then public employees had no right to walk off the job. But for two weeks, postal workers conducted an illegal wildcat action which, by the end of it, saw them winning the right to strike for almost all government workers.
Over the next few decades, you’d see the same pattern time and time again. In the 1970s, union leaders were jailed for defying back-to-work legislation. And in 1981, the union won the right for paid-maternity leave, a first for the public sector, and a right that would gradually expand to many other workers.
In other words, you can attribute many of our labour rights, and even key planks of the welfare state, to the resolve of posties past.
But the age of the noble postal worker appears to be coming to an end. The Liberal government announced major cuts to Canada Post’s core services last months.
And I know what you’re thinking.
This was all inevitable, wasn’t it?
After all, who sends letters nowadays? Maybe once-upon-a-time Canada needed a public mail service, but those days are long behind us. And sure, we’re all sad for the thousands of those people at Canada Post who will be laid off, but that’s just the way of the world.
That’s the narrative that you’re hearing regurgitated in comment sections across the internet and in quotes from business professors to the mainstream press.
But the ongoing labour dispute between Canada Post and its workers is far more complicated, and far more important, than that simplistic story.
Instead this is a story about the hollowing out of the Canadian state. About the gigification of work. About how the managerial class places their need to control workers over the viability of the actual businesses that they run.
So to talk about it all, we’re bringing on Adam D.K. King, a labour studies professor at the University of Manitoba and a labour columnist for The Maple, who has been following this story for years.
