Found this on a tattered, smudged sheet of foolscap one day & came to decide, on the basis a considerable amount of effort was poured into crafting the text, it merited safekeeping. Hence, the body of the text has been copied and preserved as follows:
“Wake up”
“Urban external postal workers in Metro Van & BC, still enjoy doing traditional postal routes. Some of us still enjoy being able to go home “early”, ( leaving work once your work is finished) but that’s about to end very soon, & that is very sad.
We’ve been hearing about Postal Transformation for several years, & it continues to spread across Canada, scheduled to arrive in BC in 2015, maybe sooner. It entails the end of the ways we’ve all done our jobs for many decades, erasing or greatly changing almost every aspect of a letter carrier’s/MSC work day. Many carriers across Canada regularly work up to 12 hours a day.
But before that happens here, cpc has been arbitrarily adding to our routes, resulting in fewer routes at depots, & generally speaking, much longer work days for those of us remaining.
For SVDC, the last round of pre-PT cuts is coming. They couldn’t wait for the hammer of PT to fall, to get in one final kick in the carrier’s derriere. The 2009 restructure left many routes completely unrecognizable as RMOs began with a clean slate. Some carriers lost customers we’d known for 12 years. Among other losses, most routes lost their paper cases, lost relay boxes, and mobile routes lost the travel time to return to the depot for their lunch break. The depot was “standardized”. Householder delivery rules kept getting changed for the worse. Posties embraced the PDT, with all the extra hassle, time, & responsibility involved, without a whimper. Christmas dinner became pop & chips. Nobody even raised a fuss at the introduction of video surveillance by parties unknown, for purposes unknown.
And in the past year, the depot’s atmosphere grows increasingly strained, for reasons known to anyone on the floor ( to posties who work there).
But through all of this, a strange apparent state of nonchalance has managed to persist. A footloose bliss of innocence? Perhaps willful ignorance? It’s hard to know which. It’s as if many carriers are totally unaware of what is about to happen to them, despite repeated bulletins, warnings, and various “heads-up” by cpc. Partly this reflects the human species’ tendency to expect that what occurs today, will continue tomorrow, despite clearly being told that is not so. But it’s nonetheless perplexing.
Generally speaking, postal workers could do a better job of updating their edit books, & hope for heavier mail loads during volume counts, but you get the creeping suspicion that ultimately our fate is up to the whim & daring of RMOs and cpc managers. They have shown with every restructure that whatever they think they can get away with, they will undoubtedly try. And carriers have continued to live up to cpc’s hopes by “making it work”, road-running & flouting every life-ring of job protection clauses they can think of.
All in the insatiable drive to finish their day sooner. Complete with a recipe book of excuses to somehow justify their behaviour, which, whether they choose to admit it or not, nevertheless impacts all of us. And our families. It truly is a surreal landscape.
Thus, it’s a very safe bet the clear & consistent pattern of longer routes & longer work days will continue. Even after the first blast waves of PT hit.
In any event, it’s never a bad time to pause, be aware, and realize that these last weeks are fleeting & will be gone all too soon.
These final days may then be savoured more richly down the road, whatever the future holds.
In the meantime, I continue to wait for the alarm clock to go off, to hear voices saying “wake up!”
silvercharm 