Cousins & comrades,

Three quick points before sharing some very important local COVID19 updates:

1. All local elections and election voting have been postponed until further notice.
2. All general membership meetings will be postponed until further notice.
3. These links (CUPW, CPC) remain your best resources for updated, CPC-related C19 info.
   
   

C19 Updates

We continue to try our best at the local office to respond to every one of your many calls and emails, as well as keep you updated on this rapidly evolving situation. The biggest challenge we’re facing in the office is that the Government of Canada and even the CEO of Canada Post have been saying all the right things when it comes to what postal workers should be doing in order to work in a safe manner but that we’re not seeing consistent follow-through from the company at the ground level. I suspect this is mostly due to many in the management team feeling overwhelmed and that messaging is breaking down somewhere along the chain, not because they are against what needs to be done. Regardless, if CPC wants to claim they have the ‘right to manage’ they must competently uphold that responsibility at all times, especially during a crisis. In talks I’ve had with other locals in our Region (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) it has become clear that locals (and facilities within locals) are being treated radically different depending on how much pressure workfloors are putting on management. In locals like Moosejaw, workers collectively confronted management after over a week of CPC inaction to demand proper social distancing provisions be put in place and personal protective equipment be made available to receive it almost immediately. The experience in Edmonton has been that facilities that have pushed back against CPC dragging their heels have seen positive improvements made more quickly.

The expectation is that CPC will fully implement the safety demands that our office has voiced on your behalf before Wednesday, Mar 25. Postal workers take pride in being able to help Canadians navigate this crisis but we are unwilling to put the entire country at risk because CPC is too slow or disorganized to implement simple and reasonable safety measures. What we know for certain is that crisis is far from over and that we need to be prepared to make sure the voices of all of you on the front-line are being taken seriously. To that end, we have volunteers in every facility, on every shift, that will be coming by to ask you for your contact information. This is for two important reasons: 1) We need to update and re-establish our text-trees used during the strike in case this crisis significantly deepens and we needs coordinate a local-wide response; 2) Regardless how our members feel about the union, we need all of them to receive the vital information being shared via text-tree or our email list from updates to paid leave provisions, health advisories, etc. If you’re interested in helping with the easy, but fairly large task of collecting contact info, please say so to one of the volunteers going around – the sooner we can consolidate this information, the sooner we can make sure all of our members are receiving the same information, and, potentially, act on it.

Our Health & Safety officer, Rashpal, and I have been in regular contact with Edmonton upper-management about what CPC should be doing to properly manage this crisis situation. Below is a detailed update from the tele-conference we had with Michael Kobitowich (Edmonton Director of Operations) and his team this morning. Please take the time to read it through. If your work facility is not experiencing any of the developments that CPC is promising the best thing you can do is gather other concerned workers and challenge your management team for needlessly putting postal workers, and by extension, the public at risk. We made it very clear to CPC that Edmonton postal workers are frustrated and are openly talking about mass refusals of unsafe work in unsafe facilities unless CPC immediately gets its management team completely in-line and doing what their city director is saying they should doing. All of the proposals being made are reasonable, actionable and more importantly, essential, if we are to continue providing Canadians vital support without becoming the epicentre of contamination spread. Please stay tuned for more updates and please make sure you sign-up for the new (digital) contact form going around.

COVID-19 Consultation Notes (link here)