TORONTO, December 8, 1997 -- York University's Centre for Research on Work and Society released a study today on the 1996 privatization of admail delivery services, including the findings of a survey of some of the 10,000 Canada Post workers who lost their jobs as a result.

The study, entitled "When Public Jobs Go Private: A Study of the Termination of Admail Workers by the Canada Post Corporation," relied on published and unpublished documents, interviews and commission testimony as well as a detailed, scientific survey of admail workers six months after their jobs ended. It examines privatization from the point of view of government policy, corporate action, and union response.

"When Public Jobs Go Private" is a university-based project of the Centre for Research on Work and Society (CRWS) at York University. The research team was led by University of Western Ontario sociology professor Dr. Jerry White, and included Dr. Carla Lipsig-Mumme, Director of the York Centre for Research on Work and Society (CRWS), and Russell Janzen, a PhD candidate from the CRWS. The $40,000 study was funded by the CRWS, York University, the Agnes Dark Fund for the Social Sciences of the University of Western Ontario, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

"This study shows how profitable admail was to Canada Post, how influential Canada Post's private competitors were in amputating the admail business from the Corporation, and how the competitors are now preparing to divvy up the windfall that privatization is sending their way," said White.

"Fourteen months after the decision to privatize admail, it is an important research and public policy exercise to examine the facts and fortunes of these 10,000 workers, and to evaluate some of the claims that were made during the debate over privatization," said Lipsig-Mumme.

"When Public Jobs Go Private" employed a telephone survey of 1032 admail workers conducted in all parts of Canada between July 3 and August 5, 1997. York's Institute for Social Research conducted the survey for the Centre for Research on Work and Society, and sought to determine whether and when admail workers found new employment, how job loss affected their families and family income, and whether there was inequality between men and women and different age and language groups in finding new jobs.

Among the findings of the survey, which had an 88-per-cent response rate: