Canada Post workers need socialist strategy to defy and defeat Liberals’ back-to-work law
By
Roger Jordan
24 November 2018
Working people across Canada must come to the defence of the 50,000 Canada Post workers whose months-long struggle against unsafe and precarious jobs, and shrinking real wages and pensions is now being criminalized by Liberal government back-to-work legislation.
All workers should support and encourage postal workers in defying the Liberals’ reactionary Bill C-89, recognizing that when postal workers challenge the state-employer assault on workers’ social and democratic rights they are fighting for the entire working class.
To prevail over the Harper clone—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—and his big-business masters, mail-sorters, letter carries, and other postal workers must seize control of their struggle from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. CUPW has done everything in its power to limit and isolate the postal workers’ struggle, and now intends to meekly submit to the government’s dictates and order an end to any and all job action.
At every workplace, postal workers should form rank-and-file committees of action, entirely independent of CUPW, to organize an immediate all-out national strike. Defiance of the government’s strikebreaking legislation raises the need for an independent working-class political struggle. The rank-and-file action committees must fight to make the postal workers’ struggle the spearhead of a working-class counteroffensive against austerity and wage and job cuts, the dismantling of public services, and the criminalization of workers’ struggles.
With the Liberals’ staunch support, Canada Post is demanding sweeping concessions from postal workers. These include increased use of temporary workers,…