The player, the game, and my grandmother.

Don't hate the player.

Like many mothers I know, when my mother talks about her life at all, she has an unfortunate habit of cycling through a short list of rather horrific stories of her childhood - it's like a little playlist of trauma that's been the looping soundtrack to my life in her presence.

All of these stories have stuck with me since my childhood - they're awful like the time Cory got poked in the eye by an empty hook in the shop! - but this throughout this Canada Post strike, one of them has resonated particularly strongly with me.

My grandmother worked as an administrative assistant and my grandfather was a railroader (and a gambler), so with a large family, my grandmother was largely responsible for the family's finances. On top of raising all of her kids, working full-time, and volunteering at the library, she would pick up piece work in a (spoiler: futile) attempt to make ends meet.

At the time - this would have been the late 40s/early 50s in Toronto - there was a scheme where you could rent a loom and weave garments to sell back to the company. Now, of course, one was paid by the garment, not by the hour.

So, I dunno if you know much about weaving (iyknk!) but it is exceptionally difficult to do well, let alone perfectly unless you're super super skilled and have a ton of experience.

Inevitably, of course, my grandmother would send in the woven garments, and the company would keep them (and probably sell them) but said they weren't good enough to pay her. Over and over and over.

My mother has a distinct recollection of entering the room her mom wove in needing something, and witnessing my grandmother aching over this hulking loom in agitation and despair undoing her work again and again trying to fix a mistake, shooing her children away.

Of course, in the end, she lost money on the loom and the supplies and wound up deeper in the hole than when she started.

That's the game.


Hate the Game

As much as I'm a hardcore workers' right person, I've never been particularly naive about labour movements and unions - heck, I'm pretty critical of the co-op movement too! - but I've never encountered a strike that has left me so angry at basically everyone involved (except the workers).

Look, I love Canada Post. I am a sucker for a crown corporation. I miss the old Bell. I liked Air Canada. I have dated myself with this paragraph. Please look forward to my hot takes on Nortel in our next newsletter.

I don't know that I'm a proponent of mass industrial nationalization, but I do know that the fundamental issue with labour right now is that we're all playing by different rules and we've pitted workers against workers, workers against unions, unions against management, government against itself.

People will tell you a lot of things about what this strike was about, and to be totally honest, for most people, it is so boring and opaque that it doesn't matter.

How most folks feel about the Canada Post strike likely comes down to whether you were waiting for something in the mail, whether your last parcel went missing, how much duty they charged you at the post office when you went over the de minimis on that order from the USA, and how you feel about your own job security and relative remuneration.

To my mind, the lack of transparency seemingly built into the contract negotiation process left most Canada Post workers unclear as to what the strike vote was over - it sounds like the union management doesn't routinely disclose particulars to members - and given the calls we received from Canada Post management, there was a concerted effort to actively deceive customers about the issues involved.

As someone who follows these things closely - both because this stuff impacts us (and you) and because I'm apparently way too into crown corporations - my sense is that in a world where folks get paid $1.74 an hour delivering for Uber, the union asking for anything would seem like too much to management, and management asking for anything would seem like a descent into a massive loss of labour rights for the union.

So, fine, I'm mad at the union, and I'm mad at management, and I'm mad at Uber.

BUT

Canada Post wouldn't be losing billions, the union wouldn't be panicking, and delivery dudes would be making minimum wage if the same rules applied across the board.

So, as much as I get annoyed by the throngs of boys with their rented e-bikes on the sidewalks, I can't help but think they have an awful lot in common with my grandmother, and I can't bring myself to be mad at them either.

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