Honesty Unleashes Fury of Discipline
Canada Post invited us to come to the Regional Forum with
honest feedback. What they didn’t tell us was that if we
spoke up they would discipline us.
A management employee described the Regional Forum at the VMPP on June 25th as a “horrible” meeting for Moya Greene. What made it so awful from management’s point of view? First, employees at the meeting voiced their displeasure when the Vice-President insulted us about the time we take off due to illness or injury. Second, an employee told the truth about the amount of overtime letter carriers work. And lastly, the Regional Grievance Officer for CUPW, Ken Mooney, attempted to voice some of our concerns and ask a question.
Tough questions? Disagreement? A reality check about what’ s really happening on the floor? A highly-paid executive should have been able to handle these with grace. Instead, the President is reported to have given local management a tongue-lashing. Management then decided that the CUPW members who made them look bad in front of her would pay.
- CUPW Member #1 walked around the 3rd floor before the Forum and reminded her co-workers about the meeting. For encouraging letter carriers to attend the Forum she received a disciplinary letter for “disruptive behaviour” .
- Management told the meeting that they had laid off the term letter carriers because there is no work for them.CUPW Member #2 called out that this wasn’t true, and was invited to explain further. She said that she had worked many hours of overtime the previous week. For this reality check, our co-worker received a disciplinary letter for “disruptive behaviour”.
- Canada Post Acting GM for the Region, Marie Robinson is following up with her own opinion of disapproval for the reaction of postal workers who were in attendance at the Greene forum. Ms. Robinson has banned Ken Mooney, CUPW Regional Grievance Officer from all postal facilities in the Region for a period of five months. Our Regional Grievance Officer attempted to ask a question at the meeting, but before he could ask his question, the microphone was cut off. For doing his job as a union representative, management has banned Ken Mooney for “unacceptable behaviour”.
- CUPW Member #3 called out “let him speak!” when Moya Greene would not allow Ken Mooney to speak. For this, our co-worker received a disciplinary letter for “disruptive behaviour”.
- CUPW Member #4 called but “ohh” during the meeting when the audience of workers was being chastised. For giving some honest feedback, our co-worker received a disciplinary letter for “disruptive behaviour”.
There were many others who also voiced their feelings but escaped discipline. Bravo to all the people who spoke up! Managers who attempt to scare people into silence don ‘t inspire either trust or cooperation. Disciplining people for speaking up is both petty and mean. Management may decide to continue on the current path of shooting the messenger. Or, they can decide to actually start listening to what we have to say about our working conditions and what needs to change. The ball is in their court.
The thing they should keep in mind is this: if management at every level continues to ignore the problems we face on a daily basis, Moya Greene will hear about it. If management continues to harass us when we are sick and blame us for our injuries, the next meeting will also be tense and uncomfortable for the President.
From a Postal Worker: The Moya Greene Forum
Google the phrase “postal worker fraud cases” and you’ll find a hefty 663,000 hits. Google the phrase” ceo fraud cases” and you’ll find’ a more substantial 13,100,000 hits. At Canada Post, there is a single CEO overseeing approximately 60,000 employees. One can assume worldwide on average that for each CEO there are thousands and thousands of employees. Despite the high ratio of criminality amongst CEOs versus blue collar workers, Moya Greene and Douglas Jones, a vice president of Canada Post, seem to have deemed it appropriate to tour the country and give lectures to its employees insinuating, through examples of the actions of a few employees, that, in general, we are both liars and fraud artists, and that we don’t know what’s good (or bad) for us.
During the Regional Forum held June 25th at the VMPP, Mr. Jones spoke about a visit he had made to a mail processing plant during which time he’d polled employees as to their greatest health and safety concern. They unanimously said that it was the dust that most concerned them. Mr. Jones apparently found this answer incredulous. Rather than listening and acknowledging their concerns, he scoffed at the idea that they weren’t more worried about jamming their fingers in the machinery.
This anecdote as recounted by Mr. Jones is disturbing on a number of levels. The first is that he would ask employees about their concerns and then dismiss them so readily. The second is that he would not consider that every day workers at Canada Post conduct themselves in such a way as to prevent accidents and injury to ourselves. The third is that one is forced to conclude that the real reason he can dismiss dust as a concern is because he knows that workers around the world struggle to have environmental conditions acknowledged as a real health and safety issue. An employee with broken fingers can easily make a WCB claim, an employee with chronic asthma, itchy eyes or allergies has a greater difficulty laying responsibility on their workplace environment. Everyday at the post office, employees work with filthy equipment in dirty and dusty facilities.
I attended the forum hoping to raise a single question, namely, how does Canada Post reconcile the contradictions between their concern with health and safety and the high levels of overtime being requested daily of its full-time employees since the layoff of many temporary relief employees? I know that in my station alone several employees are regularly doing up to three sections of overtime daily. We are regularly admonished during staff meetings to watch our step, to eat properly, to take care and pay attention to our environment. That postal workers have one of the highest rates of injuries in the nation does not imply that we are careless, as Ms. Greene would have it, but rather these rates reflect the physical demands that are made on us daily. To expect full-time workers to fill vacancies on overtime and
maintain the same level of injuries on duty is ludicrous. This was a question on many workers minds at the forum, indeed it was the first question raised once the floor was turned over to employees.
The question was addressed to Moya Greene and it quickly became apparent that either Ms. Greene did not understand the situation at hand or she deliberately chose to address instead the issue of letter carriers putting in overtime on their own walks. Her answer, as many statements made earlier by her, insinuated that full time employees were making claims of overtime falsely. There were many outcries made by those present as it became clear that Ms. Greene was not going to answer the question and instead was going to take the opportunity to insult us once again. She then revealed that the reason so many temporary employees have been let go is that their studies show that when there are relief employees, regular employees take more sick time. I find her viewpoint extremely cynical as it demonstrates a lack of concern for the health of employees, again in contradiction to the much touted issue of health and safety.
Ms. Greene made a point of mentioning several times that there were instances of employees who had never worked a single winter at Canada Post in their entire careers. While I imagine this statement to be an exaggeration, I was at a loss to understand the relevance of mentioning single instances like this during this forum unless she did indeed want to imply that, in general, we lied when we requested sick time.
This forum was fraught with this type of insinuation and I left before the question period ended feeling both angry and disgusted by the insults put forth by Ms. Greene and Mr. Jones towards us. Upon hearing the following day of Canada Posts attempts to bar invited union representatives from the forum held in Richmond, even going so far as to call in the RCMP and then to hear that employees have been disciplined for speaking up at the meeting and, in one case, for not being at their work station during the meeting, only heightened my feeling that the working environment at Canada Post has become more toxic than ever.
Ms. Greene seems to believe that the current economic downturn is all the weight she needs to push us around. She made threats to the future security of our employment with several references to the demise of General Motors. There is no doubt that Canada Post Corporation needs to change with changing technology and the shifting economy but it will never be appropriate under any circumstances to speak to people the way she and the vice president spoke to us that day.
That same week I came home to find the latest issue of Contact in my mail. It came with a pamphlet on reducing blood pressure and a larger pamphlet titled “2008 Social Responsibility Report”. The phrase “Making the Connection” was emblazoned across the front and faintly underneath the words “between our employees and sustainability”. Ms. Greene clearly sees us not as those responsible for making Canada Post successful but as a liability. That Canada Post has chosen mental health as its charitable cause is too great of an irony. When I consider the gross contradictions between the stated concerns of the administration and its actions,and the resulting disrespectful environment this creates for the employees of Canada Post, I become all too aware of its effects on my own mental health.