Canada Post is under attack. Political favouritism, privatized delivery, and precarious subcontracting are putting workers and public service at risk. From Intelcom’s exploitative practices to the government’s support of billion-dollar profits, André Frappier discusses how one of Canada’s most essential institutions is being dismantled, and who is benefiting.
Except the gig economy is far less efficient. All it does is take money from your pockets and put it in really rich people’s pockets.
What happens when you work as a gig worker? You lose benefits, you lose a union, you don’t get minimum wage, you’re just poorer than you would have been if you had that job before it went gig. Of course your job security is totally shot. But it’s not like the price of delivering a package went down. Of course it went up.
So somebody got that money that you’re no longer getting. Moreover, if you’re replacing a public service with a for-profit private service, then the people who own the company are going to make sure they get their cut. They’d like to pretend that they will streamline things, but in reality we typically find that they just charge more because nobody can stop them.