In order to fully understand the threat to our working lives posed by Separate Sort from Delivery (SSD), we need to understand what it is and how it poses new risks and strains to Letter Carriers. Currently, a Letter Carrier sorts and prepares their own mail, then they go out and deliver it. Under the SSD system, a “Router” will spend all day inside and sort the mail for several other routes, while Letter Carriers spend more time outside and less time inside. You can see a basic visual representation of this below:
The longer a Letter Carrier spends outside, the further they walk. Additionally, they are exposed to extreme weather events such as heat waves, freezing temperatures and forest fire smoke for longer. This all has a serious impact on the health of Letter Carriers, and this is all structured on an “average volume” day. The longer a route is, the harder it is to complete on heavy volume days such as when property taxes or vacant home assessments go out to every address on the route.
From Canada Post’s own testimony during the National SSD Grievance:
“With the help of a document filed as Exhibit E‐3, Mr. Lefler stated, using the North Fraser depot as an example, that letter carriers have been working just as much since the implementation of the SSD project, the difference being that they work 35 minutes less indoors and 35 minutes more outdoors, while the number of routes has remained the same.” (Emphasis Added)
That was in 2019, then North Fraser had another restructure in 2022 that made the routes even longer!
One of the other major issues with SSD is that when the sortation is taken away from letter carriers and given to the routers, the time values used to calculate a fair 8-hour work day are erased. Someone in Ottawa manually deletes the information taken from the volume count, and the Union gets a report with zeroed out information. Routers work is no longer measured by time value, and when they are done their sorting duties, they are assigned additional work at-will by the supervisor, and can even be assigned delivery despite being “inside” workers.
SSD is taking away the fair and balanced system of time values, and taking us back 60 years of collective progress. The Corporation continues to push this system on us without National consultation, a violation of Article 38.02 and a slap in the face to every carrier across the country.
This contract, WE MUST FIGHT TO ELIMINATE SEPARATE SORT FROM DELIVERY
In Solidarity,
Jamie McCurrach, 1sr Vice President.