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Kelowna  

Postie says they'll still work

Patrick Ward, president of the Kelowna chapter of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, says the union was forced to issue a 72-hour strike notice Thursday after its 60-day strike mandate was set to expire.

“(The Ministry of Labour) requested a 24-hour extension of the strike mandate to allow them to get this mediator in place and negotiate a longer-term situation to try to resolve this without either party locking out or going on strike,” Ward said. “The union agreed, Canada Post refused, so we had to give our strike notice yesterday, under the law.”

Ward says if the union had let its strike mandate expire, it would have had to spend 30 days and up to $500,000 to redo a vote.

While the strike will take effect Sunday night at 11:59 p.m., Ward assures customers they will not see any disruption of service.

“The only action we're taking is a rotating ban on overtime, one province per day across the country,” Ward said.

“We will be at work, we will be working our scheduled hours, we will be working overtime as the corporation seems to use it as a staffing tool and waste money exponentially, the only thing they will be aware of is they will not be able to have us work overtime one day basically every two weeks.”

Ward does not expect the union to increase any strike action in the future “unless Canada Post comes back and does stuff to make it so we have no choice.”



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