Amazon may be one of the largest and most lucrative firms in world history, ranking second only to Walmart last year and racking up $620 billion in revenue, but it relates to its workers like a cheapskate bully and to laws that might restrict its “freedom to exploit” like a petulant child, a child equipped with an automatic weapon!
The most recent example is the mega firm’s January announcement it is closing all its Amazon owned warehouses in Quebec. (It is one of the many bitter ironies that circle around the Amazon saga that some of these warehouses are known as “fulfillment centres.”) Faced with a workforce that wanted to unionize and provincial labour laws that made it harder for the company to stall endlessly in the way it has in the US, Amazon took its ball and sulked home. The squalid and punitive move cost over 1,700 Quebec workers their jobs and is clearly designed to intimidate Amazon workers everywhere.
“The Quebec decision shows the company is so committed to avoiding unions, it will incur the cost of lighting up its five years’ worth of infrastructure spending in smoke rather than sit down and negotiate with the workers,” Barry Eidlin, an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and author of Labour and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada told the Montreal Gazette.
“For Amazon, it’s really about control, not cost.” Quebec’s Labour Code, which would have forced Amazon to settle a collective agreement with its employees within a set amount of time, forced the move, Eidlin said. Workers at the Laval Amazon warehouse had voted to unionize after a two-year long campaign, joining the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) in May of 2024. The company’s legal ploys to get the provincial labour board to disallow Laval workers their certification failed in October, and Amazon announced its decision to close all its Quebec warehouses in January. Even the headline writers at the Globe and Mail, not a notorious pro-worker paper, could see what Amazon was up to, calling it an act of “union hate.”
“Workers at the Laval warehouse, many of them racialized, had cause to push for a union to improve working conditions,” Yanick Noiseux, associate professor at Université de Montréal and lead researcher on an extensive 2023 investigation into the working conditions for employees at Amazon and Dollarama warehouses told the Montreal Gazette. The report found employees’ work actions were tracked and they were expected to meet certain quotas, without being informed of what the quotas were, leading to uncertainty and high levels of stress.
The researchers conclude that warehouse workers at Amazon and Dollarama in Quebec were “squeezed like lemons.”
Amazon’s Quebec workers were subjected to aggressive and intrusive anti-union propaganda at the workplace, a recent finding of the province’s Administrative Labour Tribunal says. An August story on Radio Canada reports:
“The Court maintains that repeated anti-union messages and meetings with employees at the YUL2 warehouse in Lachine represent an obstacle to its unionization campaign.
Under the pretext of answering employees’ questions, Amazon’s aim was to thwart the unionization process.”
For example, the company broadcast messages such as “Unions cannot guarantee workplace changes , Unions charge you dues, or You do not have to provide your personal information.”
These messages were broadcast in a loop on screens reserved for human resources, placed on tables in the cafeteria, in the break room and even on bulletin boards located in the restrooms , the judge noted.
It will surprise no one that Amazon has conducted aggressive union busting campaigns across its global empire. As Jacobin Magazine recently observed:
“The corporate behemoth, valued at a staggering $2.47 trillion, is notorious for its union-busting. Amazon workers at the massive JFK8 warehouse voted for their union in 2022, but nearly three years later they have yet to get to the bargaining table, as the company’s army of lawyers has repeatedly thwarted government orders to bargain. Amazon routinely harasses and fires union activists a warning to other workers who might be thinking about stepping forward. And when faced with an obligation to bargain with groups of its contracted delivery drivers, Amazon has simply severed their contracts, firing them en masse.”
Of course, Amazon claims that the decision to cut and run from Quebec has nothing to do with fears of a unionized workforce, or with workers fed up with long hours, rushed work and intolerable conditions.
“Following a recent review of our Quebec operations, we’ve seen that returning to a third-party delivery model supported by local small businesses, similar to what we had until 2020, will allow us to provide the same great service and even more savings to our customers over the long run,” Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait wrote in a statement. “This decision wasn’t made lightly, and we’re offering impacted employees a package that includes up to 14 weeks’ pay after facilities close and transitional benefits, like job placement resources.” Anyone who believes this boilerplate claptrap should consider investing in the Brooklyn Bridge.
The third-party delivery model, which subcontracts delivery and warehouse work at Amazon, is a transparent ploy to mystify who is the real employer, despite the fact that Laval Amazon workers, like contract workers at Amazon facilities elsewhere, wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon vehicles and are to all intents and purposes employed by the sprawling mega company. Amazon sets policy and reaps the profits, but if you try to unionize, the company denies its relationship to its workers and insists the true employer is the small third-party delivery company.
As reported earlier on rabble, this corporate disappearing act has led to calls for the Canadian government to break its ties with Amazon, and to widespread condemnation by labour leaders and friends of labour.
The earnest young socialists behind Jacobin magazine agree with the condemnations and argue that the Quebec experience demands a new and more comprehensive organizing strategy to match the enormous reach and power Amazon can deploy. They write:
“What has happened in Quebec ought to put the entire labor movement on notice. Site-by-site organizing, the standard practice of US and Canadian unions, will be a failed strategy at Amazon. Besides the JFK8 experience, workers have organized union majorities at Amazon’s San Bernardino air hub, a warehouse in San Francisco, and at a dozen or so of Amazon’s 4,400 contracted delivery companies. The Teamsters union has led these campaigns. None have resulted in bargaining.”
In the face of the obstacles presented by monstrously large and powerful firms like Amazon, perhaps we need to up our support for massive organizing drives and enlist the support of sympathetic civil society groups and allies of labour to promote boycotts of Amazon services and products. How about a consumer boycott to support the currently ongoing unionization drives and a call to all unions to link together in a single united front against Amazon? The historic successes of CIO organizing in the past might provide models and inspiration.
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