Western Standard - October 10, 2025


Canada post workers to start rotating strikes

Topics
rotating strike negotiations
Mentioned
Wycliffe O'Dour Joel Lightbound
Time to SMASH the Alberta teachers’ strike Taxes, Crime & Rezoning： Calgary needs a clean sweep

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

134.33

Word count

821

Sentence count

58


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we speak with Wycliffe O'Dour, President of the Calgary Local Chapter of the Canadian Union Postal Workers, or CUPW. Wycliffe talks about why the union decided to go on a rotating strike instead of the nationwide strike that had been going on since September 25th.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. My name is Leah Muschett. I'm a reporter here at the Western Standard,
00:00:13.680 and today our guest is Wycliffe O'Dour. He is the president of the Calgary Local Chapter of
00:00:19.720 Canadian Union Postal Workers, or CUPW. Okay, so the big issue today is obviously yesterday,
00:00:27.240 the CUPW announced that they're going on rotating strike instead of the nationwide strike that they
00:00:34.180 had since September 25th. So Wycliffe, thank you again for joining me. And would you mind telling
00:00:41.200 us why the union decided to go on rotating strike instead of the, yeah, switching it over to that?
00:00:47.760 Yeah, thank you so much. Yes, so the union made this call in regards to going into rotating because
00:00:56.800 they had had a meeting with the minister. And so then they chose to use a different strike method.
00:01:08.080 There's different ways of striking, rotating being one of them or a ban on a flyer delivery. And so
00:01:16.960 they've decided to do this now. Mm-hmm. Okay, that makes sense. So in terms of the, yeah,
00:01:25.360 switching strategies basically. So does the union believe that nationwide strike just wasn't working?
00:01:34.800 So they did have a meeting with the minister. The reason why our members were out on strike was
00:01:40.560 because of the announcement that the minister had. They met with the minister. And so then there's a
00:01:47.520 follow-up meeting coming up next week. And so then they, they were able to change the strategy.
00:01:53.920 Okay. Um, I know Black Rock, Black Locks reported, um, that the union released minutes in the newsletter
00:02:03.760 of the first meeting with the minister and, uh, the minister of public works and procurement, Joel
00:02:09.760 Lightbound, who said that he was going to keep the service cuts. And like, he was, wasn't negotiating that.
00:02:16.320 So did the union still have hopes that this is still negotiable, uh, in terms of moving forward?
00:02:23.920 Well, even, uh, he was not able to rescind that and, uh, he made it very clear, but, uh, we are,
00:02:30.400 we are hoping that, uh, or rather pushing so that, uh, he gets to know why, uh, we make a stand as it is. Right.
00:02:40.080 And so the follow-up meeting, uh, is what will determine how, uh, things are going to go. Uh,
00:02:46.960 our members are hoping that, uh, this government will listen to us and allow us to engage because
00:02:53.600 this government, uh, after the minister's announcement, uh, the employer, uh, went back and
00:02:59.920 gave us an offer that was, uh, that was, um, that was rejected by our members and, uh, uh, and actually
00:03:07.920 made it even worse than previously offered. Okay. Like on that note, do you know how long,
00:03:17.280 or can, has the union been talking about how long they estimate the negotiations are going to take
00:03:23.440 before another deal is put forward? Uh, no, we don't know. And, uh, uh, the problem is, uh, even after
00:03:33.600 our members rejected the last offer, Canada Post took almost 50 days before they could respond. And
00:03:40.800 when they did, uh, let us know that they will provide us with an offer, uh, that didn't come in. And
00:03:48.000 when the minister made the announcement that, uh, after the announcement, the Canada Post itself
00:03:53.440 let us know that, uh, they were going to tweak this, uh, offer that they had, uh, in order to, uh,
00:04:00.320 take into consideration the minister's, uh, announcement, uh, which, uh, our members felt
00:04:07.120 betrayed, uh, since, uh, we were in negotiations and the minister seems to have taken sides with the
00:04:13.680 employer. Okay. Well, also then, could you tell me a bit more on what the union is, like, wanting
00:04:24.160 um, out of the new negotiations, like, I guess the most?
00:04:30.400 So Canada Post last offer, uh, they wanted to have more part-time employees, right? And so, uh, we
00:04:42.000 want to reduce that, uh, the percentage that they were asking for was almost 55%. Uh, currently it stands
00:04:50.400 at 75% full-time. And so then, uh, we were up against, uh, precarious work being introduced by
00:04:57.280 Canada Post in a crown corporation. Okay. Well-
00:05:03.120 Well, the issues that we want addressed, uh, because of the current, uh, system that they are,
00:05:09.680 they are using, which is, uh, uh, we see a, uh, a high increase of injury rates.
00:05:15.520 Uh, a high increase of what, sorry?
00:05:18.240 Injury of our members.
00:05:20.400 Oh, injury. Okay. I really appreciate you coming on today, Wycliffe. And thank you very much.
00:05:27.440 Yeah. Thank you to Ohagunemio.
00:05:30.240 Thank you. Okay. Well, if you guys enjoyed this video, you guys can subscribe to our YouTube
00:05:37.120 channel, Western Standard. And also if you guys would like to actually check out our website,
00:05:44.240 you can do so it's $10 a month if you subscribe or a hundred dollars a year. So you should do that
00:05:50.800 because we got news and you want news. Um, yeah. So thank you very much and goodbye.