The same week the postal workers’ strike was outlawed, the automaker General Motors announced the slashing of 14,500 jobs across North America, including that closure of its Oshawa, Ontario, plant. Meanwhile in France, the “yellow vest” movement, driven by opposition to deepening social inequality and the austerity agenda of the Macron government, continued to swell despite a brutal state crackdown.
The assault on postal workers mounted by the Liberal government, now joined by the courts and police, has been made possible chiefly due to the impotence and complicity of CUPW and its “allies.”
Adamantly opposed to making the postal workers’ struggle the spearhead of a political and industrial counter-offensive against the austerity policies of the ruling elite, CUPW has from the outset systematically worked to isolate and demobilize postal workers.
Despite being armed with an overwhelming strike mandate, CUPW President Mike Palecek refused to call a nationwide strike. Instead, he restricted postal workers to a campaign of regional rotating strikes, which he himself acknowledged were aimed at having as little impact on Canada Post’s business operations as possible.
More fundamentally, Palecek and the entire CUPW bureaucracy maintained a deafening silence on the threat of the Trudeau government outlawing the strike, although it was obvious that Canada Post was relying on government intervention to enforce its attacks, as it has for decades. Even after Trudeau all but publicly announced that such a law was being prepared, Palecek and CUPW continued to evade the issue for another week-and-a-half.
This is because the CUPW bureaucrats feared any discussion of the impending clash between postal workers and the government would have exposed the need to expand the struggle, rally support from the working class and transform the strike into a working-class political struggle against the Liberal government and big business as a whole.
CUPW pursued this disastrous strategy because it, like the CLC and the rest of the trade union bureaucracy, enjoy close political ties to the Liberals and the entire establishment, including the pro-capitalist New Democratic Party, and is terrified of the eruption of a genuine working-class challenge to capitalist austerity.
Palecek stumped for Trudeau’s election in 2015 on the basis that he represented a “progressive” alternative to Stephen Harper’s Tories. He opposed any and all job action during the 2016 contract dispute, claiming that nothing should be allowed to “disrupt” the work of a Liberal-appointed task force studying the future of the post office. Predictably, that task force lined up behind the demands of Canada Post management. And even as the Liberals were ramming their strikebreaking law through parliament, Palecek and the CUPW continued to plead with them to live up to their phony “progressive” promises, while issuing not a single appeal to the working class for support.
After ordering workers back to their jobs without a single issue having been resolved, Palecek proclaimed that the struggle was entering a “new phase,” and that the union would challenge the Liberals’ outlawing of the strike in the courts. These are the same courts that have repeatedly upheld antiworker laws—such that the right to strike has all but become a legal fiction—and have now criminalized even the token “community pickets” organized by CUPW’s allies.
Recent events demonstrate the correctness of the World Socialist Web Site’s insistence from the beginning of the Canada Post dispute that if workers are to achieve their just demands, they must broaden their struggle and transform it from a collective bargaining dispute into a working class political struggle.
This requires a political and organizational break with CUPW. At every workplace, postal workers should form action committees to prepare a national strike in defiance of the Liberals’ strikebreaking law and relaunch their struggle as part of a working-class counter-offensive in defence of all public services and workers’ social and democratic rights, including the right to strike.
