After four weeks on strike, CUPW postal workers have been ordered back to work by the Liberal government.
Once again invoking the obscure section 107 of the Labour Code, the Liberals are asking the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to order the workers back until May 2025.
This action is unprecedented in the history of the Canadian labour movement. Indeed, the back-to-work order does not even impose binding arbitration.
Instead, the government wants to set up a “Industrial Inquiry Commission” (IIC) with a “broad mandate” to review the entire structure of Canada Post. Until then, striking is prohibited.
Let’s call a spade a spade. What we have here is the dictatorship of capital.
CUPW reacted this morning, stating:
“The Union denounces in the strongest terms this assault on our constitutionally protected right to collectively bargain and to strike.
“This order continues a deeply troubling pattern in which the government uses its arbitrary powers to let employers off the hook, drag their feet, and refuse to bargain in good faith with workers and their unions.”
CUPW is right to denounce this vicious attack. In Canada, the right to strike is not worth the paper it is written on. Until recently, back-to-work legislation broke strikes—which was antidemocratic and bad enough. Now, without the shadow of a parliamentary debate, the right to strike is eliminated at the stroke of a pen.
Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon is trying to cover his tracks by saying he’s waiting for the CIRB’s decision, but we can already confidently predict that the board will “discover” that bargaining has reached an impasse and force a return to work.
Negotiations between Canada Post and CUPW represent an irreconcilable struggle. Management is invoking its financial losses to impose Amazon-like working conditions, and workers want to resist this and preserve the gains of the past. It is likely that the government isn’t imposing binding arbitration because an arbitrator wouldn’t offer the bosses the drastic counter-reforms they want. Instead, the IIC will do the dirty work of “reviewing” Canada Post’s structure “from both a customer and an industrial point of view”. Nothing good will come of this for workers.
We are at a potential turning point for the labour movement in Canada. It’s time to draw a line in the sand. The CUPW leadership has a duty to mobilize its troops to defy this back-to-work order.
Otherwise, what good will the month-long strike have done? Why this immense sacrifice?
We can’t back down now. It’s time to defy the dictatorship of the bosses.
Faced with a monumental attack on the right to strike and bargain in November 2022, Ontario school support staff affiliated to CUPE defied back-to-work legislation. The threat of a solidarity general strike forced the Doug Ford government to back down.
That is exactly what is needed in the current situation. All labour federations need to actively support defiance. There’s no doubt that the mood is there to step up the fight against this hated, worn out, hypocritical bosses’ government.
Defy the back-to-work order!
Solidarity with CUPW! All union federations must be mobilized!
