By Wa Lone
TORONTO (Reuters) -The Canadian Union of Postal Workers will resume mail delivery on Saturday and rotate which workers are on strike in a labor dispute that has halted mail services nationwide for about two weeks.
CUPW said the rotating strikes, starting at 6 a.m. in each time zone, will allow mail and parcels to move again while maintaining pressure on Canada Post, a government-owned company, to reach a fair collective agreement.
More than 55,000 postal workers walked off the job on September
25, hours after Public Works and Procurement Minister Joël Lightbound announced an overhaul of Canada Post that the union expects to result in job losses. The announcement came during a long round of negotiations that began in late 2023 and was interrupted by a postal worker strike last year.
“We did not take the decision to move to a nation-wide strike lightly,” said Jan Simpson, CUPW’s national president, in a statement late on Thursday. “Postal workers would much rather have new collective agreements and be delivering mail instead of taking strike action.”
Canada Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The postal service has struggled as its letter volume declines and it faces private-sector competition to ship parcels.
Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney said the postal service was a vital public institution but acknowledged Canada Post was in a difficult financial position. He said the corporation was losing millions of dollars and stressed the need for restructuring, adding that changes had been overdue for some time.
CUPW has rejected Canada Post’s latest offer and says the government’s intervention has worsened the dispute.
(Editing by Rod Nickel)
