Another year, another Canada Post strike.
At least, that’s how I began writing this column.
But it’s not really accurate, is it? It conveys an oddly balanced impression of a deeply unbalanced labour dispute, and makes it unclear who, if anyone, is responsible for the looming strike.
Here’s a much clunkier opener, and the sort that smacks of bias to an uncritical reader, but it’s certainly closer to the truth:
Another year, another series of anti-worker actions by the rich folks on the board of Canada Post Corporation and the federal government, which will continue to undermine Canadian postal services, spread precarity, drive up costs for consumers and benefit their friends in private industry.
As journalists, we have an obligation to think critically about the language we use. In a time when truth and facts are under attack by rich people willing to spend enormous sums of money to skew and manipulate public perception on an “industrial scale,” it’s even more crucial that we be mindful of our language. By ‘we’ I mean journalists, scientists, medical professionals — basically any discipline or profession that relies on rigorous, critical thinking, investigation and analysis. We’re often rushed, under-resourced, overworked and underpaid. But if we are to do our job well, we need to think about these things.
When we write our articles under the pressure of deadlines, it’s easy to borrow others’ language, grab at the common phrases we all know and hear and insert them into the stories we write. Rather than wrestling with the nuances of apportioning responsibility, it’s much easier—and less risky, in terms of having to spend time defending what we write against potentially critical editors, readers, and the general public—to write in such a way that taps uncritically into the language of ‘balance’, that doesn’t assign blame, that doesn’t require going out on a limb to say, ‘here’s what’s actually going on and who or what is actually responsible for it.’
Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which Amnesty International, the United Nations and others have identified as a genocide, with at least 50,000 Palestinians killed in indiscriminate mass bombing and sniper attacks by Israel and tens of thousands of children facing imminent risk of starvation due to Israeli blockades. Yet media continues to refer to the genocide as the “Israel-Gaza War” (or the New York Times’ equally surreal “Israel-Hamas War”). It’s sort of like calling the Nazi Holocaust the “German-Jewish War.”
There is no war. There’s an ongoing 77-year campaign of murder, genocide and ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by Israel—a rich and powerful settler-colonial country armed and funded by even stronger Western countries—against a poor and dispossessed people who have few state allies and virtually no means to defend themselves, beyond a frail, disproportionately faint attempt at armed resistance and self-defense. There is no war, no balance there. There is one country slaughtering tens of thousands of helpless civilians in a campaign of hatred and slaughter that has no parallel in sheer scale and villainy since the Nazi Holocaust.
But you wouldn’t know it from most headlines.
Weaponizing ‘balance‘
Powerful people and institutions routinely justify their oppressive and violent actions by arguing they’re reasonably or proportionately equivalent to the event that prompted the response. These claims of equivalency are often inaccurate or false and represent a weaponization of balance, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness, as with Israel. But when media fail to identify false equivalency—and when they perpetuate the problem by invoking a ‘balanced’ approach to coverage, which often inaccurately assumes there are two sides to any situation deserving equal airing—they wind up supporting the violent actions of the powerful and distorting the actual truths that could help the public understand a situation and respond in an informed way.
The weaponization of ‘balance’ increasingly permeates our society, including here in Newfoundland and Labrador. It emerges when powerful institutions call police to suspend free speech or shut down protests in the name of ‘safety’ when really, there’s no actual realistic danger to anyone. It emerges when powerful and privileged public figures (like elected officials or university presidents) mischaracterize legitimate protest as bullying. It emerges every time armed police officers kill unarmed civilians, then claim self-defense. Responsible media should never take such claims at face value, especially when they come from the powerful.
Back to Canada Post
An inaccurate use of ‘balance’ also emerges in reporting of labour disputes. The post-WWII system of labour relations—a mixture of laws governing labour standards, union certifications, and strikes and lockouts—was intended to bring greater balance to the chaotic and often violent field of worker-employer relations as it existed prior to the mid 20th century.
The early 20th century backdrop of wildcat strikes, industrial sabotage, police violence, riots, assassinations and even gun battles wrought havoc on the economy, so governments ushered in laws to create a more orderly and balanced structure for resolving conflicts between employers and workers, and impose some standards for fairness and human rights in the workplace. But as corporate wealth has ballooned—as conniving lawyers have inserted themselves into labour disputes and right-wing governments have empowered corporations and police at the expense of workers and the poor—the aspiration of balance in labour relations has become deeply skewed over the past few decades. The use of back-to-work legislation, which deprives workers of one of the only counterweights they have—strikes—against outrageously wealthy and powerful corporations and corporate directors, is part of that.
Yet labour disputes continue to be reported as disputes between equals, a phenomenon exacerbated by the crisis in journalism, which has seen countless local newspapers and other outlets shut down. It’s also fuelled by the fact that dedicated labour reporters are few and far between these days; labour disputes are now often covered by business reporters who don’t understand the ins and outs of labour relations and the structural factors underpinning the labour movement.
When the federal government intervened in the Canada Post strike last December, it extended collective agreements until May of this year, after which point both parties were free to resume the conflict. But the feds also commissioned an inquiry into the dispute, ostensibly in an effort to offer clarity on the situation and produce recommendations for a fair way forward. A lawyer, William Kaplan, was commissioned to hold hearings, study the situation and produce the report, which was released last week.
Joanna Poe / Flickr.
Report sides with Canada Post Corporation
Far from being a balanced assessment, the Industrial Inquiry report—I read all 161 pages but a shorter summary is available here—basically sides with the corporation. All Canadians should be deeply concerned about its recommendations, including an end to daily, door-to-door mail delivery and allowing the corporation to close rural post offices. It also recommends allowing the corporation to increase its use of casual and temporary workers, paradoxically dismissing the union’s concern that these workers won’t be treated well, and without any explanation of how a casual or ‘temp’ job can be a “good job” in the real world. The report wants to make it easier for the corporation to raise postal prices, eliminating the safeguards that presently exist to protect consumers.
It speaks the patriotic rhetoric of preserving a “nation-building” public service, while rendering recommendations guaranteed to destroy it. It evinces little understanding of what a ‘public service’ is, or of government’s actual ability to strengthen a public service through funding or regulatory means (such as cracking down on and regulating the use of substandard private parcel delivery companies).
The report dips into the fantastical at times — an extended foray into the tired and discredited fantasy future where parcels are delivered by drones. It calls for allowing the corporation the freedom to explore and experiment with new models. But when it comes to the union’s proposals for new models, such as postal banking, the report dismisses them in exactly opposite language: “it is hard to imagine thinking that it is a good idea for an effectively insolvent business to expand into non-core unproven activities with no market and revenue projections.”
William Kaplan. Toronto Metorpolitan University.
Yet the report wants to give many of those very powers to Canada Post. It says on one hand that, “in other countries, postal banking is well established, and profitable,” yet on the other that the union’s (CUPW) proposal to introduce this to Canada has an “air of unreality (even if some dated polling results indicate varying degrees of public support when some of them were presented in the abstract).”
It would be hard to manufacture more biased language.
The only substantive reason given why this internationally successful postal banking model would not work in Canada? Canadians “increasingly bank on their phones.” The report points to the widespread closure of bank branches as indication that postal banking would not work here, completely ignoring the fact that the closure of those branches is an ignominy that’s created countless hardship and fury on the part of Canadians, while serving to increase profits for banking elites.
The report also refers, in an appendix, to the 877 submissions it received from municipalities, businesses, community groups and individuals, the majority of whom leaned in favour of CUPW’s position and concerns. Even submissions from small- to medium-sized businesses warned of the catastrophe which an end to daily mail delivery would bring. Yet in the end Kaplan’s report appears to side with the corporation in opposition to all this strong public interest in continuing to fund a vital public service.
The postal ‘dispute’ is no longer just about protecting a union’s collective agreement; it’s a last-ditch effort to save the public postal system in Canada. Canada Post Corporation and the Industrial Inquiry are poised to deliver Canadians into a nightmarish future without rural post offices, no daily mail delivery, costs that will continue to spiral higher ever more quickly, and a greater reliance on sub-standard private parcel delivery.
Back to balance
The purpose of Canada’s labour relations system is supposed to be about maintaining some kind of loose balance, between the overpowering wealth of corporate employers and the needs of Canada’s working class. Yet over the past three decades we’ve seen this system disintegrate because corporate wealth has grown exponentially without any realistic legislative checks on corporate power to protect working Canadians and their unions.
The system is out of balance.
Labour disputes are no longer disputes between equals, if they ever were. They represent collusion between private industry backed by immense wealth and rich government representatives who wield legislative power against relatively helpless and increasingly poor Canadian workers whose only futile option is to go on strike and forgo a paycheck until the government legislates them back to work. It’s a broken system that benefits the rich, the corporations, and their wealthy allies in government.
So let’s not call the looming Canada Post strike a ‘labour dispute’. Instead, let’s call it what it is: a brazen attempt by rich corporate directors to privatize, precaritize and ruin one of our country’s core public services – the Canadian postal system. When we write about strikes, let’s not uncritically objectify them as alienated disputes between two equal parties; let’s acknowledge when and where corporate power overwhelms that of working-class rights, and let’s talk about the issues being fought over because they increasingly affect all of us.
Above all, let’s remember that the language of balance—especially where no balance exists—serves to benefit the wealthy and powerful who gain from obscuring their disproportionate power and privilege in situations like this. A completely false and manufactured impression of balance in the Palestinian genocide has no doubt contributed to our governments’ shameful failures to act to protect Palestinians against Israeli war crimes. But this language has an impact on domestic issues as well.
We live in a world increasingly characterized by ever more extreme income gaps, obscene wealth accumulation, flagrant violations of human rights and basic decency. We’ll never start moving toward a solution if we can’t even honestly talk about the problem.
Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer and radio producer/podcaster based in St. John’s, NL, and is the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023). She’s a founding editor of TheIndependent.ca, and a contributing editor with PopMatters.com. Her writing has appeared in a range of popular and academic publications, including Briarpatch, CCPA Monitor, rabble.ca, Canadian Theatre Review, Journal of Gender Studies, and more. She was the recipient of an Atlantic Journalism Gold Award in 2017, and finalist for a Canadian Association of Journalism Award in 2018. She also has a background in labour organizing, and queer and trans activism. She is presently Program Director at CHMR-FM, a community radio station in St. John’s, NL.
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