Postal workers took to the streets on Tuesday, not to deliver mail, but to protest service cuts by Canada Post.
This week Canada Post reduced mail delivery to three days a week - Monday, Wednesday and Friday - citing a 50 per cent drop in mail volumes since postal workers began rotating strikes two weeks ago. In Prince George approximately 50 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and their supporters held a rally outside the Canada Post office on Fifth Avenue Tuesday morning.
"Canada Post has decided to reduce our hours and reduce service to people in Prince George and Canada," Prince George Local 812 president Tami Brushey said. "Our evidence suggests that Canada Post is exaggerating the drop in mail volumes. There are truckloads of mail waiting to be delivered."
Letter carriers have been cut back to 24 hours a week, Brushey said. Inside workers have been cut to 20 hours for full-time employees and part-time employees are down to 15 hours a week.
"The temps at the mail processing plant and depot have been told to go home and they haven't been called back for over a week," Brushey said. "You take a 16-hour pay cut every week, that's pretty tough for people trying to support a family. It's our opinion that Canada Post is looking to force us to an all-out general strike."
The union's rotating strikes have only affected 30 per cent of Canadians, she said, while the service cuts affect all Canadians living in cities. Rural postal workers are covered by a separate collective agreement and rural service continues five days a week.
Canada Post spokesperson Jon Hamilton said the service cuts reflect the reduced amount of mail in the system.
"I think most Canadians are seeing less mail in their mailbox," Hamilton said. "So now we're in a situation where our volumes are drying up."
Further delays to the national mail service were likely to stem from the latest strikes - this time the postal union chose to hit Montreal and Toronto, Canada's biggest cities and chokepoints through which flow about 60 per cent of the country's letters and parcels.
"That's going to have a lagging effect as well on our ability to deliver," Hamilton said.
"That's going to have a downstream impact across the country. Now it's really having an impact on our ability to operate."
Speedee Your Office Experts owner Dave George said cuts to mail service will hit his business' billing department.
"In terms of cash flow, it could be pretty significant. It'll hurt small business more than anybody," George said. "It'll slow down the receipt of our accounts. Two days isn't the end of the world, but it'll just slow things down."
The strike has George looking at computerizing his billing to reduce the impact of mail slow downs.
Local lawyer Saundra Elson, of Fatt & Elson Barristers and Solicitors, said she's virtually stopped using mail for legal correspondence since the rotating strikes began.
"It took two-and-a-half weeks to get mail delivered around the corner. Normally we get in-town delivery in two days," Elson said. "We have mail that goes out daily in the office. In the last few weeks that has gone down to almost nothing, unless it absolutely doesn't matter when it gets there."
Elson said she used couriers for time-sensitive legal documents before the strike. Now almost all her legal correspondence goes by courier.
"It has a cost for my clients. If I have something hand-delivered... the client, instead of paying 50 cents for stamp is paying four to five dollars for a hand delivery, " she said.
