National Post (National Edition)
INSIDE Canadian Union of Postal Workers picks up surprisingly far-flung causes.
Surprisingly radical postal workers union funds controversial causes
Earlier this month, The Rose, a women’s newsletter issued by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, declared that through its support of Israel, Canada is complicit in “war crimes.”
Alongside claims that “patriarchy was introduced into First Nations cultures through European colonization,” the publication asserts that Canada “is allowing Israel to terrorize occupied people, breach international law, normalize home demolitions … and steal resources.”
Almost immediately, Jewish groups issued condemnations of the threepage document as “a racist propaganda tool filled with half-truths,” according to the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.
Representatives from all three major parties joined the chorus, with the most colourful coming from Liberal leader Bob Rae: “I continue to be astonished by the extent to which ideas which should be on the ‘loony tunes’ margins of politics have now been adopted by a union which represents thousands of its members.”
If it seemed like a disproportionate response to an obscure three-page pamphlet, it is partially because Jewish groups, among others, had learned to keep a close eye on the postal workers.
In 2008, CUPW was the first national Canadian union to label Israel an “apartheid state” and call for a boycott of Israeli goods; they have dispatched CUPW representatives on Gaza blockade-runners and in 2010, they even publicly denounced a Canada-Israel friendship stamp.
But its Israeli activities are only the tip of the iceberg for the surprisingly radical union tasked with representing one of Canada’s meeker professions. Be it women’s conferences in Bolivia or peace gatherings in Toronto, CUPW has long helped to fund a litany of international causes that, admittedly, may have only the most peripheral connection to the business of delivering mail. Critics may charge that union stepped “beyond its mandate” in its latest Israeli condemnation, but really, it sounds just about right for the CUPW.
The writer of the “war crimes” post is Ruth Breen, a Fredericton mail carrier who in 2011 was among a group of postal workers — some of them shouting “Heil Harper!” — who had the police called on them when they refused to leave a Conservative constituency office.
Her post for The Rose was written following a CUPW-funded trip to Gaza; the second international trip she appears to have taken on behalf of the union. Two years before, she jetted 12,000 km to join marchers outside the UN Climate Change Conference.
And Ms. Breen is only one of many to carry the CUPW flag to protests, conferences and fact-finding trips on five continents. Postie delegates have been found at May Day celebrations in Cuba (“It is vital that we affirm our support for the Cuban people and revolution even more clearly and openly,” Mr. Lemelin declared following Fidel Castro’s 2006 transfer of presidential powers to his brother), they have been parachuted into South America and Africa to agitate against mail privatization and most recently, a CUPW delegation was sent to an annual Free Palestine conference in Brazil.
“We don’t hide this part of our work,” CUPW president Denis Lemelin told the Post by phone from Ottawa. Indeed, the union’s website maintains a detailed calendar cataloguing CUPW participation in international events.
“We feel it is important to do this work to show solidarity with workers around the world,” he said.
Most of these trips are financed by the union’s International Postal Fund; a war chest topped up each year with a $200,000 payment from Canada Post – and first secured as part of a 2000 collective agreement.
“Union dues are tax deductible, so this is a complete abuse of public funds,” Conservative MP Mark Adler wrote in a public letter drafted last week, adding “CUPW’s radical political behaviour does nothing to help postal workers in Canada.”
CUPW does not see it that way. “A union is not living in a vacuum, just like an employer a union is living in a world that we have to understand and in which we have to intervene,” Mr. Lemelin said.
The sentiment has seen CUPW at- tempting to exert influence on some surprisingly far-flung issues.
In 2006, after then-president Vicente Fox sent Mexican federal police into the state of Oaxaca to calm escalating violence between state officials and protest groups, he received word from Canada that “Mr. President, CUPW cannot accept such ruthless repression.”
Five years later, amid accusations that Egypt’s Mega Textiles was using violent tactics against striking workers, the postal workers fired off a stern letter reading: “The Canadian Union of Postal Workers is asking you to stop resorting to violence.”
It is unknown how many of New York’s Occupy Wall Street protesters had even considered the plight of Canadian mail carriers — whose members
A union is living in a world we have to understand, in which we have to intervene
make an average starting wage of $24 an hour — until the CUPW sent over letters asserting that “our struggles are intertwined.”
In the last three months alone, CUPW letters written “on behalf of our 54,000 members” defended Hugo Chavez as a democratic champion, and praised Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence as a heroic figure resisting “the moral bankruptcy of the Canadian state.”
Critics allege these political actions are the will of a token few at CUPW headquarters. “I think it’s only three or four people at the top and the 54,000 postal workers don’t care,” said Avi Benlolo, president of the Wiesenthal Center.
A Jewish postal worker echoed the sentiment in a December letter to the Jewish Tribune. “Where were you during the lock out? Did you help us financially? No!” Tamara Morrison wrote of postal union brass. “Instead, our money was being frittered away on cockamamie nonsense that has nothing to do with us.”
Mr. Lemelin says he is merely fulfilling the will of the majority. Any of CUPW’s most controversial policies, including the 2008 decision to pursue sanctions against Israel, were first approved by a majority of the 700 delegates that make it to the union’s annual convention. In the 1980s, a bloc of disaffected postal workers once attempted to strip the executive of any activist powers, but their bid was unsuccessful.
In his 2009 autobiography, former Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove wrote that he was “all for” union leaders taking up activist causes, but criticized union leaders who had taken the Israel file too far.
“Now and then, someone in the labour movement makes a wrong turn or fires a salvo at the wrong target, which casts a pall over the entire movement,” he wrote. “One thing you can’t do as head of a union is to allow the most vocal, and usually most radical, minority to dominate your thinking on issues or the decision-making process.”
As far back as the 1970s, CUPW was known among trade unions for harbouring extreme leftists, if not fullblown communists.
Long time CUPW head Jean-Claude Parrot did not deny the charge in his own memoir, but rather celebrated the postal workers’ openness to leftist causes.
“You know, I have been called a Communist, a Maoist, a Trotskyite, a Leninist, a Marxist, a Péquiste, and many other names, but I’ve never been called a Liberal or a Progressive Conservative, and I’m very proud of that,” he once told a public forum.
The reputation earned the union close scrutiny from the RCMP, who may have even tried to infiltrate their ranks, as well as special scorn from Dennis McDermott, head of the Canadian Labour Congress.
“The Marxist-Leninists are accommodated in CUPE and CUPW … I have declared war on them. Otherwise, they will destroy the labour movement and the country if they have their way,” he said in 1979.
Thirty years later, while the country remains intact, the labour movement that Mr. McDermott oversaw is a shadow of its former self. Union membership stood at 38% in 1981, but has now fallen to just under 30% — with a disproportionate number of those workers employed in the public sector.
Canadians’ attitudes on unions appear to have changed as well. A 2008 Angus Reid poll found that while 59% of respondents saw unions as “necessary and important,” 72% thought unions were “too involved in politics.”
And while CUPW often notes that it backed the right side on South African apartheid — a cause many unions were initially afraid to touch because of its communist links — many of the postal workers’ hardest-fought political battles have failed.
NAFTA, a policy that CUPW claimed would end the ability of governments to “make decisions for … the common good” without corporate permission, is set to celebrate its 20th anniversary. And, despite a Parti Québécois premier in Quebec City, the concept of an independent Quebec – which first received official CUPW endorsement at the time of René Levesque – has largely retreated to the political wilderness.
The CUPW once held the power to halt virtually all written communication in Canada, but their latest strike, in 2011, went along with little notice until it was quashed by a government back-to-work order.
For Mr. Lemelin, it is all the more reason to double-down on solidarity.
“It’s a class struggle we’re in with this Harper government. Canada Post is linked with other large corporations like Air Canada, all the banks, all the credit groups ... and they’re attacking the labour movement,” he said.