Canada Post and Labour Activism: An Interview with Evert Hoogers

For the second feature, in Active History’s series on Canada Post, we sat down with Evert Hoogers, a retired postal worker, long-time union activist, representative, and organizer with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. Throughout our interview Evert shared his recollections, memories, and insider knowledge from a long career in postal work and as a labour activist.

Active History: Let’s talk about your initial involvement with the CUPW in 1972. Can you clarify how you came to be involved with the union itself in 1972 and then if you could tell us a little bit about the atmosphere of the union when you first joined.

Evert: When I started in ‘72, it was only five years since the certification of what was called the CPU, the Council of Postal Unions certification. It was only three years since the first negotiated collective agreement under what was known as the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the act that governed labour relations in the federal government. In 1965 there was a recognition strike…by the postal unions that forced this emerging legislation to include conciliation and the right to strike rather than simply compulsory arbitration. So at the time that I started in ‘72, the vast majority of the leadership of the Vancouver Local that I was in, were made up of people who had gone through the experience of that recognition strike and were a product of the understanding that when workers get together, when they unite, when they decide that they’re going to make their case known, that many things can be accomplished.

Now, there was a recognition that postal work was considerably different than most other federal work. It was blue-collar, it was in an industrial setting, whereas most of the other federal government employees were office workers of one sort or another. The other thing that was brought to my attention early-on when I started was how much the working conditions and work environment had deteriorated. One example that’s worth mentioning is that when I became a shop steward, we’d been receiving many, many complaints about the fact that there were no stools available or very few stools. There was a situation, in which, particularly for older people or people with one form or another of a disability were forced to stand for eight hours on end in front of a sorting case, sorting mail. Fighting to end this resulted in my first disciplinary suspension. The other thing that I was pretty immediately struck by when I started was the way in which the issue of automation was obviously looming. There was a lot of discussion about it among the postal workers at the time, and it eventually led to a real crisis. The situation that developed was that the Federal Government had rejected a fairly comprehensive proposal that was presented by a Postmaster General by the name of Eric Kierans. He was appointed in 1968 by Pierre Trudeau, and he actually came up with a plan to modernize the Post Office and to bring in…technological change but it was supposed to be done in a way which involved no adverse effects on the workforce, sharing benefits with workers, and was to be done taking into consideration a unionized workplace.

In fact, what happened was that this attempt to bring about a modernization of the Post Office—that included the establishment of a Crown Corporation to replace the Post Office Department—was rejected by the federal government and they maintained only the recommendation that automation be introduced. It was done in a very ill-considered and not well-planned-out way. Eventually, in 1974, new National President of CUPW, Joe Davidson, was placed in the position where he had to call a strike because part of this introduction of automation was that all the new coders operating the new automated equipment were to be paid considerably less than the manual sorting clerks and the mail handlers [and] it was going to be done without consultation. They simply announced that a new classification was being introduced. Under the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the union did not have the right to negotiate classifications. So, in response to that…a national strike was called, an illegal national strike that challenged this attempt to bring in cheap labour. We knew that eventually the manual sorters were going to all be replaced by sorters on the machine, the new classification, so a strike was called that was eventually resolved through a decision that was made by an arbitrator…Eric Taylor, who simply made sure that the new classification that was going to be introduced along with the automated equipment being revised, so that the wage structure would be identical to that of the manual sorters.

Active History: I think this would be a great time to explain that in 1972 Canada Post was a department of the federal government. I think there’s a lack of clarity [in the public memory] on how Canada Post, transformed. I was wondering if you could maybe speak to that in a little bit more depth?

Evert: You mean how things were structured under the old Post Office Department? It was a very… complex situation. Because on the one hand the Post Office Department was its own department, but the Post Office Department dealt only with the day-to-day operations of sorting and delivering the mail. And in fact, the issue of the deteriorating plants, for example, the buildings, that was all dealt with by the Department of Public Works and the budget for that was their budget. The equipment and everything down to the pens that were used in the Post Office was determined and provided by the Department of Supply and Services and the negotiations that established wages and working conditions were done through the Treasury Board. It was a totally inappropriate way of operating and ensured that there was going to be a lot of conflict and division at the level of management. Indeed, the federal government during the time just resisted having to deal with the issue of the Post Office. In fact, in those days…even introducing a change in the amount that was charged for a stamp had to be done through an amendment to the Post Office Act. So, it was confusing and created a lot of problems. It was very difficult for the unions to get themselves organized to the point of being able to resolve them. And it seemed to me that only given a perpetual condition of threatening to go on strike were the issues of great importance dealt with at all.

Evert: There’s one further thing that’s worth mentioning… in 1975 when CUPW was negotiating on its own, separate from the Letter Carriers Union of Canada (LCUC), we came up with a collective agreement that had a breakthrough technological change clause that involved a guarantee there would be no adverse effects…. that there would be a consultation process that was meaningful, when new technological changes were brought in. And it was signed by the employer and when we got back to work, they reneged on it. They said, “no.” That the government Treasury Board said those clauses that were signed, that was not legal for their negotiators to sign them. So, this was, as you can imagine, one of the frustrations that led to the famous strike in 1978.

Active History: I guess that leads us into a discussion of the 1978 CUPW strike, which I think is probably one of the most well-known instances of the CUPW’s labour activism, especially because it eventually leads to the arrest of union leader Jean-Claude Parrot. Could you speak about the context of this strike, why it’s important, and then your own role and experience participating in it?

Evert: What I said about the situation that faced the postal workers after the ‘75 strike that was led by Joe Davidson, wherein the advances that we thought we’d made were reneged by the employer, by the Federal Government of Canada, it’s hard to imagine how frustrated people felt about that. In fact, what followed in 1976, my Local in Vancouver was the first one to actually go out for a day, followed by many other Locals who rotated out in protest against the reneging on the issue and the fact that the grievances around automation were piling up. We had a little bit of fun in Vancouver debating during that brief walkout, whether we would call it ‘Mackasey Flu’ in honour of the much-despised Minister of Labour, Bryce Mackasey, or if we would call it postal digitalis or something of that sort. Generally speaking, the reason that we went out was very serious and reflected the level of frustration that existed in that post-1975 period.

There was then also in early ‘78 a Canadian Labour Congress convention that I attended, where the fight continued between a leadership wanting to promote a tripartite sort of system with considerable opposition, not just CUPW, but a number of other unions, it was definitely a source of huge debate. And then in terms of our own negotiations that took place during that time, the Treasury Board was continuing to refuse the negotiation on technological change and a number of other critical issues, citing the Public Service Staff Relations Act. The result was that what we were really fighting for in 1978 was all of the things that we thought we had won in ‘75. The straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say, was when during the first day of the strike, legislation was passed saying that our strike was illegal. This was just too much to take. In the case of Vancouver, I was Local Vice-President at the time, and the executive decided that because we had full support for the strike, we were going to have a mass meeting to determine whether or not we should continue the strike and when we had the meeting, the result of it was that we got a higher vote to continue the strike in ‘78 than the initial vote to go out on strike. So, there was an incredible amount of solidarity and that continued during the next ten days or so. During that period twenty-two of us in Vancouver were charged with refusing to obey an act of Parliament. That didn’t stop the strike, but what happened was that the government decided that they would use something called ‘abandonment of position,’ as the tool to get people to give up the strike. No challenge to such a firing was possible. So, under those circumstances, there was no choice. Now we simply had to go back to work. But I remember how we decided in Vancouver that what we were going to do, is go in with our heads held high. So, we had hundreds of postal workers meet at the post office in downtown Vancouver, at the door of the post office, and we all marched in at midnight singing ‘Solidarity Forever’ and circulated around the post office building and then marched out. And it was a message that we wanted to leave to the superintendents and the supervisors that yes, we were being forced back to work, there was no doubt about it, but they could be assured that on the work floor they were going to be held to accountable. Now that was a very…I thought it was a highlight of my history in the union that I’ve always thought back on as being a moment that was worth remembering.

Evert: I do want to mention too that there was a considerable amount of dissent over the ‘illegal’ 1978 strike within the Canadian Labour Congress. Although many unions, in fact I would say most unions were willing to support us during that period, the top levels of the CLC administration including the president at the time, Dennis McDermott, was horrified by the decision that we made to resist and publicly declared that we were…trying to lead the union movement down the road to anarchy, as he called it, and insisted that the CLC could not support this. This was something that I think he lived to regret because the result of it was that more support for CUPW developed in the labour movement than what he had expected, much more support.

Active History: And do you have any insight or kind of a hypothesis as to why the CLC wouldn’t have been supportive?

Evert: Oh yes, I think that what we were dealing with the division in the labour movement certainly hadn’t just sort of sort of developed overnight. There was a considerable struggle for years inside the labour movement around whether or not, as we had earlier discussed, the issue of tripartism, the issue of cooperation between government, labour and corporations, could resolve things without that sort of level of fight that was represented by what CUPW was doing. So, it wasn’t surprising there was some resistance of the CLC leadership that followed from the role that CUPW played…in which we really led the demand for change in the labour movement and support for militancy.

Active History: Do you recall your initial reaction to that Crown Corporation announcement?

Evert: Well, I think the reaction of most of us was, well, we were looked upon with considerable disdain by politicians on the right. But…the fact that we decided to confront the situation in ‘78 was the reason why Trudeau finally gave in on the Crown Corporation. So, it was generally considered a victory.

Active History: I think we’re wrapping up, and we wanted to ask you as a closing question if you could share one favourite memory from your time with Canada Post.

Evert: One?

A[n] element that I think is quite interesting and that captures, for me, some of the important elements of what the union has done and my involvement in it was our discovery that it wasn’t only postal supervisors that were watching over what the union was doing, but so was the RCMP and CSIS. There is a book that was written about this called State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies. It includes a chapter that I wrote about discovering the RCMP security police and later CSIS were involved in checking out and surveying the union. It was pretty clear that from the beginning, from ‘65 onward, the RCMP was taking a particular interest not just in strikes but in day-to-day organizing. The files that we were able to recover which were very much ‘severed,’ as they call it, not too much information was released…but we were allowed to see what showed that they were following the day-to-day activities of the union. I have in front of me one of those pages that is largely blacked out but it says, [according to] the RCMP officer who was writing it, that, “when any particular person makes too much trouble in the Post Office, that person is either fired or moved to an undesirable position which results in the person quitting.”

Active History: Wow, what year is that [document] from?

Evert: February ‘73.

Active History: Thank you for sharing that with us. That’s fantastic. Is there anything just in general that you’d like to put on the record for Active History before we end the interview? And it’s been a fantastic interview, thank you so much.

Evert: Well, I just want to mention something about the bringing in of rural and suburban postal workers, a struggle begun during this period, because…in a way, I see the rural postal workers up until they became unionized as being the precursors of the gig economy. They were considered to be independent contractors even though they were utterly dependent on the Post Office. They had no rights; they had to make bids on jobs, and to make matters worse they were forced to deliver bids on their own jobs that were being made by somebody else, who, if they were underbid would take over their job. It was a horrible situation and went on for many, many years. And eventually when even though the attempts started back in the ‘70s to move the rural contract workers into a union, it really wasn’t possible until after the members, and the merger of the membership between the letter carriers and the inside workers happened in ‘89.

Active History:  Definitely worth bringing up. Thank you for that. I think that concludes our interview but thank you so much for joining us, for answering all of our questions, and giving us so many interesting memories and information. It’s really been fantastic.

Evert: You’re welcome.

For more on the surveillance of CUPW activism see Evert Hoogers, “In Whose Public Interest? The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and National Security” in Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies (Toronto, ON: Between the Lines, 2000).