With Canada Post management pushing for a lockout or strike once more, it is worth remembering the long history of postal worker struggles.
It has always been a physically-demanding job but it has only been made more difficult by a decades-long culture of management bullying and abuse.
In 1965, postal workers had enough and launched a historic wildcat strike when they didn’t even have collective bargaining rights or the right-to-strike. In fact, no federal government workers had these rights. It was this 1965 rebellion that forged a new union and forced the federal government to concede the same collective bargaining rights for federal public sector workers as had been given to private sector workers in the late 1940s.
They also had to take on their professional organization whose leaders opposed the strike and the desire of workers to establish a democratic union that fought for the interests of workers.
Here is Memory & Muscle, the story of that strike packed with postal workers retelling their stories and great archival footage of what really happened.