Canada

Lessons from the strike at Canada Post

(«Proletarian»; Nr. 22; February 2025)

Back Sumary

 

 

After a month-long walkout, the Canadian government decided to break the strike of Canada Post workers. It was a relatively massive movement, since all 55,000 proletarians working at the post office nationwide – from Halifax on the east coast to Vancouver on the west coast – were on a general strike: with a few exceptions, mail completely stopped being delivered. Looking back on this month-long strike may be of interest to combative proletarians around the world, because, firstly, this strike is fully in line with a certain revival of workers’ struggles in North America and, secondly, certain political lessons can already be drawn from the struggle of Canada Post’s proletarians.

 

Media bludgeoning: the dominant ideology at work

 

From the beginning, the postal workers’ struggle was met by a ruling class united in its determination to crush the workers on strike and reject their demands. The media, in particular, carried out a grandiose ideological work in favor of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the general media coverage of the strike portrayed the striking proletarians as privileged, rich, spoiled babies who would beg the state for even more whims, whims whose financial burden would ultimately fall on the shoulders of that mysterious, intangible being - mysterious and intangible because abstractly positioned outside the fundamental conflict between classes: the taxpayer.

We were treated to a clever ideological reversal of social reality by bourgeois propaganda. Since at least the 2008 crisis, and even more concretely since the Covid-19 pandemic, the living and working conditions of all proletarians - including Canada Post workers - have been deteriorating on all fronts (increased pace of work, longer working day, widespread use of “flexible” working hours, real wage cuts, inflation, etc.). In other words, while the working class as a whole is drastically impoverished and loses the few reserves it could possibly have had at its disposal, the media have targeted a particular sector of the proletariat that has courageously decided to initiate the struggle to defend itself against capitalist exploitation, the very exploitation that is causing the constant deterioration of their living conditions.

These workers, who have set out to confront the bourgeoisie and its state using the proletariat’s “natural” weapon – the strike – at a time when the bourgeoisie’s profits have never been so high, are referred to by the media and politicians as privileged and spoiled children, holding society hostage and hindering its smooth running. But, in the end, the function of the media is to conceal the true enemy of the proletarians – the bourgeoisie – and to propose a fantasized enemy: the supposedly lazy, supposedly overpaid, supposedly parasitic worker who refuses to tighten his belt for the good of the Nation. In brief, a worker whom all sane sectors of the nation – labour aristocracy, petit-bourgeois and big bourgeoisie – unanimously condemn and fight.

In short, the media are advocating national unity against the proletarian struggles, a national unity that is even more vital to prepare as international imperialist rivalries intensify and the danger of war shows more concretely its face. In other words, the bourgeoisie is seeking to subdue all proletarians that are fighting to defend their exclusive class interests and thus put them back on the “right path” of defending the imperialist homeland.

This ideological reversal of social reality is also expressed in the various crocodile tears shed for the supposed collateral victims of the strike. Weeping tears are being shed because the post office strike is allegedly hampering the various Christian charities in their good works for the needy on Christmas Eve. “They are such egoists, these Canada Post workers who prevent good people from giving money to the poor!”, say the good Christians in unison. Behind this staggering hypocrisy, it must be reiterated that charity solves in no way the problem of poverty; it gives a clear conscience to the philanthropic bourgeoisie, who can then continue its exploitation of proletarians – the real material root of poverty – with a clear head.

Obviously, for the good Christian souls, action against poverty is a laudable goal, except – precisely – when proletarians decide to join forces and fight collectively to halt their impoverishment, as the postal workers did. The media also mourn the fate of the poor petit-bourgeois (owners of small and medium-sized enterprises, SME) who see their businesses slow down because of the strike. These “selfish” Canada Post workers are hindering them in their pursuit of the common goal of every petit-bourgeois: to one day become part of the big bourgeoisie, and to enrich themselves indefinitely from exploited proletarian labor.

There are two political observations to be made about this bourgeois media bludgeoning. Firstly, it reveals the hypocrisy of the ruling class, which shout from the rooftops that Canada Post is an archaic, loss-making enterprise, i.e. that it will no longer be of any economic use, and that we should therefore massively restructure this industrial sector full of “lazy” (read combative) workers. Of course, the same people who cry about the obsolescence of the post office service are also the same ones who complain that the worker’s strike is hampering the smooth running of the national economy. If they are no longer of any use, then how is it that the strike by these workers bothers the bourgeoisie so much? In reality, behind the managerial rhetoric criticizing Canada Post’s archaic operations, there is a full-scale attack on the working conditions of postal workers. Proletarians in struggle must become more clearly aware of the fact that the profits of the ruling class and their working conditions are inversely proportional: the more capitalist profits increase, the more the living and working conditions of the proletariat deteriorate.

Second observation: the ideal strike for the ruling class is a strike that does not disturb, a strike that in no way hinders the smooth running of capitalist society, in short, a strike that is not a strike at all. This is exactly why union collaborationism – labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, as Lenin correctly described opportunism (1) – has made a business out of harmless symbolic processions: isolated strikes, rotating strikes, scattered days of action, walkouts outside normal working hours – all sanctified moments of supposed escalation of leverage tactics.

The function of such means of action, which are antithetical to all forms of proletarian struggle, is well known to all proletarians who courageously enter the fight. The aim is to dissipate workers’ anger and combativeness in order to protect social peace, what union collaborationism shamefully calls social dialogue. But a real strike, the proletariat’s historic weapon for defending its working conditions, is precisely a strike that disturbs as much as possible, to oppose the bourgeoisie with the most vigorous balance of power possible. In this sense, by using the weapon of the general strike, just as some teachers in Quebec did at the end of 2023 (2), the postal workers’ strike, despite its certain shortcomings and its trial and error linked more to decades of union class collaboration than to a lack of militant generosity on the part of proletarians, shows the way for future struggles by all sectors of the proletariat throughout the world.

 

Crackdown

 

One could have thought that the government would have moved quickly to enact special law right at the start of the strike, proclaiming Canada Post workers as “essential workers” and thus violently taking away the workers their right to strike. However, unlike the last postal strikes in 2011 and 2018, which were quickly outlawed by the governments of the time, the current ruling class opted for a different strategy in the first instance. Canada Post management used the legal gray zone between two collective bargaining agreements to lay off several workers in retaliation for the strike. Obviously, the victims of these politically motivated layoffs were the newly-hired workers, the precarious, the part-timers, in short, the workers at the very bottom of the company ladder.

Management’s aim was none other than to create divisions among the strikers in order to weaken the strike. By attacking only the “little newcomers”, it was hoped to foster an aristocratic mindset among the older, more senior workers, which would disassociate them from their younger class brothers, reflexes of the “we do not give a damn about the young kids, what matters is only us, the fully-fledged employees” type. At the same time, they were hoping to get the younger, more energetic and most likely more combative workers off the picket lines. In cases like this, we must not hesitate to concretely put forward the solidarity and unity between all proletarians, regardless of status, which is an absolute necessity for the struggle. We must unconditionally challenge all layoffs, we must keep in touch with dismissed workers by inviting them to continue picketing, and we must avoid all forms of discrimination against those younger in age and seniority, including in our own ranks.

Although it lasted longer, the strike of 2024 was finally suppressed by the cleaver of a special law, just as it was in 2011, just as it was in 2018. Indeed, postal workers were obliged by the state to return to work after their one-month strike, and they effectively are not allowed to strike again until May 2025. This date is not insignificant: the government is aiming to kill two birds with one stone. By breaking a month-long strike today, the government has succeeded in demolishing the militant momentum and the economic balance of power that the workers on strike had managed to build. By formally restoring the right to strike in May 2025, the government knows full well that summer and the vacation season will soon be upon us, creating a situation that is hardly conducive to a resumption of worker mobilization. It has to be said that, for the time being, the government is winning all the way.

But it’s worth taking a brief step aside here to consider a fundamental difference between the current strike movement at Canada Post and those that immediately preceded it. During the strikes of 2011 and 2018, workers’ legitimate demands regarding their living and working conditions were partially invisibilized by the struggle to defend Canada Post as a universal public service. This was obviously a trap for proletarians working at the post office, since the political orientation put forward by union collaborationism, relayed politically by the reformist left, was the defense of the supposedly more progressive and fairer nationalized public capitalist enterprise. In other words, postal workers were being instrumentalized out of the legitimate and exclusive defence of their working conditions and pushed into the interclassist defence of the rights of Canada Post users. In other words, postal workers were being ordered to jump on the bandwagon of the national capitalist economy in its “welfare state” form.

The demand for the defense of public services is a trap for workers in that it chains proletarians in struggle to the altar of “national well-being”, which is nothing more than the overall interest of the bourgeoisie in promoting the smooth running of capitalist society. Proletarians in struggle must never follow union leaderships when they try to bend over backwards to win media favour and avoid upsetting users of other workplaces. Proletarians in struggle must not look for solidarity in the interclassist multitude of public opinion; they will not find it there. True solidarity must be sought among other workers in struggle, as well as among those who are suffering and feel the need to fight without necessarily being able to enter the struggle immediately.

Rejecting the terrain of the defense of public service and fighting exclusively for the defense of working conditions represents, compared to the strikes of 2011 and 2018, a notable political advance for Canada Post workers, one that highlights the very relative but real resurgence of working class combativity in North America. It is also a political lesson that points the way for all struggling proletarians around the world, especially those in the public and parapublic sectors who are the most likely to face this kind of bourgeois blackmailing.

 

The bourgeoisie’s goal: create competition between proletarians in order to increase exploitation.

 

The current labour dispute is emblematic of the unanimous desire of all of the bourgeoisie to bring workers to heel and make them pay the price of the current economic crisis. In concrete terms, Canada Post intends to generalize flexible working hours, multiply the number of precarious statuses for newly-hired workers, inaugurate weekend work, increase work rates, lower real wages, etc., with the aim of making the public service more profitable. But Canada Post’s determination to impose such restructuring of working conditions did not come out of nowhere. In bourgeois circles, one is always inspired by the “best” of the competition, valuing innovation and new entrepreneurial practices. The yardstick for measuring bourgeois success is invariably the amount of profit made. It has to be said that in the parcel delivery market, companies like Amazon are the most successful.

This company, the figurehead of hi-tech capitalism, dynamism, innovation and a host of other antiquated bourgeois values, is nonetheless renowned for the bestial exploitation it inflicts on its workers in its gigantic warehouses - imposing absolutely infernal cadences - as well as on its workers on the roads, who work hours worthy of the 19th century. Let us reiterate once again the intrinsic link between profits and working conditions: Amazon makes humongous profits precisely because its workers are hyperexploited.

Canada Post management’s attack on its workers can not be understood in isolation from the fierce competition between different bourgeois fractions in the parcel delivery market. In fact, what Canada Post is seeking to do is put proletarians in various production and distribution sectors in direct competition with each other. The bourgeoisie deems that the Post Office is not profitable enough, so it must draw inspiration from the best in competition to increase profits. To achieve this objective, the exploitation of postal workers simply has to be increased, by imposing measures that drastically deteriorate their working conditions.

 

Demands and means of struggle

 

The post office workers have every right to take up the fight against these bosses’ attacks on their working conditions, which are designed to boost capitalist profits. They are not fighting to protect some supposed caste privilege, or because they consider themselves superior and more important than other workers, such as those at Amazon. They went on strike because they know instinctively that an attack on a particular sector of the proletariat is always an attack on the proletariat as a whole. And the proletarian riposte against the bourgeoisie can only come from a massive and united as possible strike.

Does the bourgeoisie want to pit the workers of Canada Post and Amazon against each other to worsen conditions for the proletariat as a whole? The fightback must be organized in solidarity with proletarians in direct competition, such as those at Canada Post and Amazon, but even more so with other sectors in struggle (daycare workers, hotel industry, etc.) or potentially in struggle in the near future. Once again, the preferred means of defending working conditions and expressing solidarity with other proletarians is, of course, the strike: with no advance notice, no predetermined duration and including all workers in a workplace. Above all, we must seek solidarity with proletarians in other workplaces – no matter which ones – and avoid seeking the approval of overly bourgeois and paralyzing public opinion.

“The struggle for immediate demands (...) is a permanent terrain for rallying proletarian forces, for class practice, education and organization” (3) to then envisage a broader political struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state. Contrary to the various ultra-left deviations that deny the possibility of struggles for demands in the imperialist era, or that consider them all inherently counter-revolutionary, there is no contradiction between the legitimate struggles for demands of the proletariat on the one hand, and the ultimate goal of communism on the other (4). Fighting for demands can be the school of communism that Marx and Engels were talking about back in the day, provided, of course, that we put forward truly proletarian demands that will strengthen our ranks and permanently challenge on the immediate demands terrain the forces of union collaborationism, which will nip all struggles in the bud and galvanize the strength of the enemy class instead.

One of the best ways the unions currently use to blunt and dissipate struggles is to drag workers into the bourgeoisie’s favorite terrain, i.e. legal and juridical terrain. This is exactly what the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) is doing. Faced with the formal abrogation of its members’ right to strike, the union intends to challenge the legality of this measure before various courts and other commissions set up by and for the bourgeoisie. This is the road to defeat, since even if the bourgeois courts were to recognize the illegal and repressive nature of the present special law, it would take the bureaucracy months, if not years, to pass judgment. Workers’ anger will have long since fully dissipated.

In the best of all possible worlds, Canada Post workers should have rejected the special law and continued their strike, despite its now “illegal” nature. Obviously, the context, the level of combativity and the reality of militant forces did not allow for this option. So it is up to the postal workers to take advantage of the “truce” that has been forcibly imposed on them to refuse union demoralization on the legal front, and to continue the collective mobilization and rallying of militant energies in order to continue their strike movement at a later date.

Just as we must avoid the legal terrain, since it only dissipates workers’ energy and fighting spirit, we must equally reject the terrain of social dialogue claimed by the unions and left-wing parties. Behind this “good-sounding” formula (which one is not in favor of dialogue – social dialogue, moreover!) lies the ideological myth of a common destiny between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a very stubborn myth stipulating that if the former prospers, the latter will necessarily reap the rewards; all that is needed then is to agree, through constructive and positive dialogue, on the terms of sharing prosperity. In other words, behind social dialogue lies class collaboration. This banner, which is proudly displayed by the unions fully integrated into the state, aims first of all to conceal the fact that the bourgeoisie prospers precisely thanks to the exploitation of the proletariat; the proletariat must not expect any benefits from bourgeois prosperity, as it will only result in sacrifice, suffering, pain and poverty. Then this myth aims to immediately extinguish any sparks of class conflict, i.e., to harness any proletarians with the slightest inclination to protest to the chariot of national concord.

Proletarians in struggle must rediscover the historical thread of class demands if they want to resume the efficient path of class struggle, and thus perhaps win a few economic concessions that will undoubtedly provide temporary relief in the current difficult social context. These class demands are quite simple: real wage increases, drastic reduction in the length of the working day, fixed working hours, equal status for all proletarians (regardless of age, sex, race, nationality, seniority, etc.), refusal of imposed part-time work, refusal of weekend and night work (with absolute exceptions), major reduction in work rates, rehiring of workers dismissed for strike action, etc.

Not only these demands are an immediate balm for the many workers’ wounds caused by capitalist exploitation, but they enable the proletariat to regain its collective strength and unite around unitary economic demands. It is on this political terrain, with methods and demands that are truly class-based, that the International Communist Party intends to participate actively “in all of the struggles of the working class, including those arising from partial and limited interests, in order to encourage their development, but constantly highlighting their connection with the final revolutionary objectives and presenting the conquests of the class struggle as a bridge of passage to the indispensable struggles to come (…)” (5) for the destruction of this inhuman system and for the creation of a society without exploitation, without social classes, without money and without the state, a communist society.

 

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(1) Lenin, The Tasks of the Third  International, https://www.marxists. org/archive/lenin/ works/ 1919/ jul/ 14.htm

(2) See « Grève dans la Fonction Publique au Québec » in Le Prolétaire, # 552, février-mars-avril 2024, p. 19-20.

(3) Pour des méthodes et des revendications de classe – Orientations pratiques d’action syndicale, Paris, Brochure Le Prolétaire # 16, 1981, p. 4.

(4) “Theses on the Tactics of the Communist Party of Italy (Rome theses –1922)”, in Communist Program, # 8, February 2022, p. 20.

(5) “Theses Project Presented by the Left to the Third Congress of the Communist Party of Italy (Lyon Theses - 1926)”, in Communist Program, # 9, May 2023, p. 30.