After more than two years of struggle, a slim majority of the National Executive Board is recommending tentative agreements with Canada Post.

These agreements address none of our major demands for either bargaining unit, and contain many of the same rollbacks members rejected during the July 2025 forced vote– the same forced vote the National Executive Board unanimously recommended we vote no to. 

Vote NO to the tentative agreements!

CUPW VOTE NO

THE KEY ISSUES

Why you should vote NO:

  1. Our key demands remain unmet for both bargaining units.

  2. The wage offer for both units is insufficient and comes with two big question marks for 2027 and 2028. How can we vote yes to an agreement that does not guarantee a raise for 2 out of the 5 years, and does not address the long-term, gradual decline of our buying power compared to out-of-control grocery and housing costs?

  3. The agreements involve substantial rollbacks, including more part time work. The Urban Tentative Agreement creates three new part time classifications/functions.

  4. The Urban Tentative Agreement drops the protection of 100 of the 493 corporate CUPW offices currently covered under the Urban collective agreement without knowing which offices will close or how many jobs will be cut. 

  5. The Tentative Agreements would see CUPW drop major National Policy Grievances, including the RSMC and Urban grievances concerning our 17 (instead of 13) personal days, and the withdrawal of an important judicial review of a grievance about sortation time for SSD routers.

  6. Canada Post’s “plan” requested by Minister Lightbound is being withheld from the public–seemingly because our negotiations are ongoing. We’re agreeing to roll backs and the dropping of protections for post offices without a clear picture of the government’s and CPC’s plan for the future of our public post office. 

  7. It’s been 10 years since we’ve had a negotiated contract addressing demands of the membership. In 2018 we were legislated back to work after a month of rotating strikes. In 2022 we signed extensions at the request of Canada Post in exchange for two years of 2% raises, and for promises of Group 1 staffing information and postal banking–two promises which never materialized. 

  8. Agreeing to rollbacks at this point in the bargaining cycle legitimizes the unfair collective bargaining process the Liberals and Canada Post put us through. This should remind members of the 2011 round of bargaining, during which CUPW won a legal challenge about our collective bargaining rights but the courts did not order any restitution because members had voted yes to the collective agreement.

Spotlight on key issues:

Not enough progress for RSMCs

Still no corporate vehicles, still no CPC provided replacements for all, still two separate and unequal collective agreements, and a transition to a fully hourly rate that will take so long it won’t be completed during the life of this collective agreement.

Devil is in the details of the Hourly Rate

This “Hourly Rate” proposal includes a variable work week. That means your 40 hour route can be scheduled for 9 hours Monday, 8 hours Tuesday to Thursday, and 7 hours Friday–making it much less likely that RSMCs will ever see the benefits of their newly negotiated overtime provisions.

In the Urban CA, any letter carrier route structured between 6-8 hours is a fulltime route. Even if your route is (under)structured for 6.5 hours, you’re paid for 8. Under this new system, RSMC routes built under 8 hours are paid just for the hours scheduled. 

There remain too many questions about this plan to maximize 40 hours routes. A January 9th Bulletin notes that “Installations with 10 or more routes will have a minimum number of routes guaranteed.” How many routes are guaranteed in these installations? It also notes that offices with less than 10 routes will have a 40 hour work week “where practicable.” Where is it practicable? How can you vote about the future of your work with so little information?

Little to nothing for Groups 1, 3, and 4

There is nothing to address the key issues facing Group 1, including the “open floor” policies, deletion and non-staffing of positions, the use of millions of temporary hours across the country, and elimination of day shift positions everywhere.

Workers in the MAM-10 and MAM 11 classifications are offered the opportunity to voluntarily transfer to the ELE-3 classification without a loss of pay, and the ELE-3 classification will undergo a “wage adjustment.” A training opportunity for Urban CUPW members in Groups 1 and 2 to join Groups 3 & 4 is also being framed as beneficial to existing Group 3 and 4 workers.

  No end to SSD, no limits on Centralization

Letter carrier work will continue to get worse. Routes will continue to get longer and working conditions will continue to get worse as long as SSD is rolled out to more depots. More points of call and more overburdening paired with later and later start times and working in the dark will increase injury rates. Demands for guarantees about the future of door-to-door delivery went unanswered–and in fact the government is “allowing” Canada Post to end door-to-door.

Post Office Closures

There are currently 493 retail offices protected in the Urban Collective agreement, and the Urban tentative agreement lowers that number to 393 retail offices. With the lifting of the moratorium on rural post office closures by the government and Canada Post’s clear messaging that they need to close these offices, this change doesn’t just allow the closure of these offices, it guarantees it.

Most disturbing is the way the authorization of the closure of 20% of CUPW retail offices was presented to the members, slipped into a bulletin without context. You will not know if the offices in your local are scheduled to be closed when you cast your vote for this collective agreement.

It will be nearly impossible to carry on the political fight to protect our public post office when we are giving up the one rock solid protection that exists for nearly 500 post offices across this country.

Dropping National Policy Grievances

Canada Post demanded CUPW drop a number of national policy grievances related to their systematic violation of our collective agreements.

These tentative agreements drop our RSMC and Urban NPGs arguing that we are entitled to 17 personal days after the addition of 10 days of paid medical leave under the Canada Labour Code in 2023. Along with dropping these grievances, we are agreeing to “lock in” 13 paid days instead.

This TA also agrees to drop judicial review for sortation time for routers. Right now, the work of routers is “unstructured” and CPC can arbitrarily decide how to assign the work, how many routes routers must sort in a day, etc. 

Part time work:

PTF vs PTU vs PDPT = WTF?

The employer’s dream of “Part Time Flex” letter carrier positions have been rebranded “Part Time Unstructured.” Forced extensions have been dropped but this new classification shifts more work to part timers in Group 2, when the demand was to move Group 1 away from this model. 

Far from negotiating an end to SSD, this agreement also adds Part Time Router positions, giving CPC more “flexibility” to make their poorly conceived and broken system work. 

All of this is intended to result in less overtime offered to Group 2 employees. It also risks full time relief positions in the medium and long term and makes it so the corporation has no need to fix badly overstructured walks.

These changes are also intended to create a more disposable and transient workforce at the post office, which does even more to undermine our solidarity and collective strength.

Weekend work

Part Time Parcel Delivery (PT PD) will work a minimum of 15 hours a week “mostly on weekends.” They won’t be letter carriers or Mail Service Couriers but instead a separate classification—making these positions ineligible for extensions.

As it stands, these positions will be delivering parcels from current Monday volumes if volumes don’t increase overall, endangering full-time weekday letter carrier work.

These weekend positions are also so unstructured there are many unknowns: How many parcels will these positions be expected to deliver?

Rollbacks for Temps and New Hires

Urban Temporary Employees

More part time positions in the Urban unit means more time stuck at part time hours, and less opportunity to earn a full pension during your career at CPC.

On Call Relief Employees

Future On Call Relief Employees in the RSMC bargaining unit are moving backwards, going from 5 steps to progress up the wage scale to 7, and will now start at 80% of the top rate instead of 85%. This effectively means a wage freeze for the worst paid members of either bargaining unit. Current OCREs will be promoted to the existing second step on the wage scale.

New Hires in both units

All new hires will now see 6 months of delay before access to medical and dental benefits when being made permanent.

Contact us.

cupwno.sttpnon@gmail.com