Our union is only as strong as our members are unified around a goal and organized to achieve that goal. The Building Worker Power (BWP) campaign is the first time since 1988 that our union is fully committing itself to a deep organizing model of empowering our members to assert ourselves on our own workfloors.

Only by developing our organizing confidence locally can we build toward our ultimate goal of making fair collective bargaining the path of least resistance for both Canada Post
and the government.

Our Plan to Win

This is an incredibly ambitious campaign to change the very culture of our union, but this change will not be possible unless we see our situation clearly. Currently, our members mostly rely on, and expect, our leadership to prevent the boss from violating our rights. No matter how much of themselves our leaders dedicate toward representing our members, this top-down, individual-reliant approach will never be enough to prevent or put out the thousands of fires deliberately set all around us by the boss. Only our collective power as workers has a chance at winning.

First, we need to tell our members the reality of our situation, and how we need their help to turn things around. Whether its brutally low turnout for important contract votes, anemic picket lines, or a general lack of participation in many Locals, our union is nowhere close to being ready to do what is necessary in order to win. We must accept this and proceed accordingly. To this end, the BWP campaign has appointed Regional Organizers across the country. Their role is to visit as many Locals as they can, to hold workfloor meetings in as many facilities as they can to promote this campaign, update our contact lists to send campaign updates, and, most importantly, recruit workfloor captains to help further grow our capacity to fight. 

Finding Direction

By visiting every facility, we meet members directly where they are at; by recruiting captains in every facility, we establish an activist network where our challenges can be shared within and across different Locals and Regions, and coordinated into larger actions. Bad restructures and short-staffing are happening everywhere; what happens if we got every Local with the same problem together to coordinate training and a fight back strategy? Every visit and collected contact is logged to create a map of our progress. This map allows us to see where we’ve visited and had success recruiting, and where we need to still go and do
more work. 

Mass Education

Workfloor organizing, just like any other complex skillset, must be consistently nurtured and supported to be successful. No one is expected to feel comfortable or confident organizing a workfloor with no previous experience. Our Regional Organizers have been trained to assist Locals in running a one-day course designed specifically for this campaign to give members willing to take a stand all the tools they’ll need to effectively organize their own workfloor, such as:

• How to identify widely and deeply felt issues to organize around
• Identifying and recruiting other activists and leaders
• Building a team of collaborators to hold effective workfloor meetings
• Extensive roleplaying of confrontations with management
• Forming demands and escalating job actions based on realistic organizing capacity

The more members that know about the plan, the more members that will take the course; the more members that are armed with the skills, the more likely it is our members will begin collectively asserting their rights. Only by confronting lower levels of authority in these early days in modest, accessible ways, can we take the first small steps in building our confidence to one day take on the necessary battles ahead to win our negotiation demands or face down back-to-work legislation. 

A Structured Approach

Effective organizers do not over-promise and do not take on fights they do not have a good chance of winning. By mapping our Locals and recruiting captains, we establish a foundation by which we can conduct periodic tests of our capacity to coordinate and fight. We run these tests so that when we pick a real fight, we will be doing so knowing exactly how strong we are and how far we are capable of going.

If all it took for workers to win the day was a well written bulletin or a bombastic speech, the world would not be as unjust as it is, and our lives would be a lot better. This serious undertaking to build our capacity to fight properly must be methodical and relentless if we hope to have any chance of success.

An example of a structure test we may see in the next few months would be a petition demanding no government interference in our upcoming round of collective bargaining. To be clear, petitions don’t typically create meaningful change; the point of a petition in this context is to see how many members have been engaged by the BWP campaign and are willing to  respond to the smallest of asks. By launching a National petition like this and asking our Regional Organizers, Local, and Workfloor Captains to help collect signatures, we will get an accurate picture of how much solidarity has been built among our members, and what specific Local, facilities, and shifts we need to keep growing our forces.

Stronger Together

After decades of bad contracts, back-to-work legislation, and two nightmare years of the pandemic, our members are losing patience with their job getting worse and financially falling behind. This campaign is about taking all the frustration accumulating on our workfloors, bringing it together from every Local, and constructively focusing it into a 60,000 strong movement for change. 

If you haven’t done so already, Local Executives should contact their respective Regional Organizer to schedule days they can visit the Local to do workfloor visits promoting the campaign and arrange days to run the organizer training. Members can help by visiting the BWP website to sign-up for campaign updates, by contacting their Local Executives to make them aware of the need for this campaign to become active in their Local, or by volunteering as a workfloor captain. This campaign can work but only to the extent that our members get involved. More hands make lighter work.

In solidarity,

Roland Schmidt
3^rd National Vice-President