With the negotiating deadline for two new contracts passing on midnight Friday, 50,000 union postal workers at Canada Post began a national overtime ban.
The labor action does not constitute a nationwide strike or work stoppage, calming the fears of businesses that use Canada Post to ship mail and parcels after a previous month-long strike hampered the 2024 holiday season.
But although Canada Post will continue operating, the courier says its customers may experience delays.
Related Stories
Canada Post said in an update Friday that it has already seen parcel and mail volumes decline “significantly” as customers prepared for another potential labor disruption. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), which is conducting the overtime ban, said the uncertainty ahead of the action “has already pushed some customers to our competitors.”
More than three-quarters (79 percent) of small business owners rely on Canada Post services to do business, according to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Jan Simpson, national president of the CUPW, said in a bulletin that the union went with an overtime ban instead of a full strike to “minimize disruptions to the public, and lost days to members.”
The CUPW committed to the ban on Thursday night ahead of the expiration of the collective bargaining agreements with both its urban postal workers and its rural and suburban segment.
With the ban, union members will refuse to work beyond the typical eight-hours-per-day schedule, and won’t work more than 40 hours in a week. It is unclear whether the union’s activity will escalate, but the labor group said additional actions may take place if Canada Post changes current working conditions, suspends benefits or begins layoffs.
On Wednesday, the Crown corporation presented the CUPW with two separate offers that increased wages 6 percent in year one, 3 percent in year two, and then another 2 percent each in years three and four. The courier also tacked on six added personal days into the collective agreement.
For the urban union members, Canada Post is creating two new types of part-time delivery jobs aimed at helping the company compete in parcel delivery for seven days a week. This means letter carriers won’t be required to work weekend shifts. The rural change is vaguer, with the company saying it is streamlining its staffing model to support weekend delivery.
Additionally, Canada Post is proposing a dynamic routing model for its urban unit, in which where routes are planned and optimized daily to align workloads, prevent the overburdening of employees with volumes and create more predictable service for customers.
But the union said both proposals fell short, citing that the 13-percent wage increase over four years fails to keep up with rising costs of living. The wage proposal surpassed the 11.5-percent raise offer made during the holiday strike, but the union is currently seeking a 19-percent pay hike.
The CUPW also criticized the increased focus on part-time employees within the urban carrier unit.
“Instead of using regular full-time workers and existing collective agreement provisions for seven-day delivery, they want to introduce approximately 20 percent more part-time positions than the 10 percent that exists today,” said Simpson.
CUPW argued that the six extra personal days on offer are “window dressing” and already allotted in the Canada Labour Code. The union also posed concerns about deploying dynamic routing without established rules governing the system.
On Thursday, the CUPW proposed a two-week truce to continue negotiations without the threat of a strike or a lockout, but Canada Post refused. Final talks that evening included a federal mediator, but the meeting only lasted less than 30 minutes.
With the overtime ban in place, both urban letter carriers and rural and suburban mail carriers will return to the depot and drop off their mail after eight hours’ work, regardless of whether they have completed their routes.
The ongoing labor dispute has endured since the November-December strike, which ended on a back-to-work order from Canada’s labor relations board. This extended the prior collective bargaining agreements to the May 22 deadline.
After a series of on-and-off negotiations in 2025 which saw the parties walk away from the negotiating table multiple times, the CUPW authorized a 72-hour strike notice on Monday.
The strike notice followed an industrial inquiry commission report on the negotiations that painted a bleak picture of Canada Post’s financial health.
“Canada Post is facing an existential crisis: It is effectively insolvent, or bankrupt. Without thoughtful, measured, staged, but immediate changes, its fiscal situation will continue to deteriorate,” the report said.
Canada’s post office has incurred over $3 billion Canadian dollars ($2.2 billion) in losses since 2018, with the federal government having to loan $1 billion ($720 million) to the courier in January to ensure it “can maintain its solvency” through the 2025-26 fiscal year.
For the negotiations, the report suggested both parties to allow Canada Post to close more rural post offices, expand community mailboxes, and give the postal service flexibility to hire part-time workers for weekend parcel delivery.
