Amazon shuts Quebec operations to stop union drive

Amazon, led by the ultra-rich Jeff Besos and followed by equally disgusting Amazon Canada bosses, sank to a new low on January 22: they shut down all of their Quebec warehouses in a clear attempt to head off the spread of a union drive that began in Laval, Quebec, in spring 2024. More than 1,700 workers will lose their jobs because of the decision. 

 

The first Amazon warehouse in Canada to become a union shop was such a threat to Amazon that it was willing to lose all its warehouses in Quebec – only 5 years after opening its first facility in 2020 in Lachine. This is a scorched earth tactic to stop a union drive. 

 

Quebec courts ordered the company to stop interfering with union affairs and to remove and destroy all the anti-union posters the company put up at its facilities and to pay moral and punitive damages. It is clear that this is part of the motivation. 

 

None of this would have happened without the courageous actions of the workers themselves, who risked their employment to fight for a union in the Laval warehouse and beyond. This is what Amazon is really afraid of.

 

Only a few months before, Socialist Worker spoke with a workerat another Amazon warehouse near Montreal about its impact and potential to spread. That worker called Amazon “the Ford of our times,” referring to the Ford Motors assembly line of the 1930s and 40s.

 

Like Ford, Amazon is setting new trends in how to maximize the exploitation of labour. In a capitalist society, that usually starts with intensified conditions in the workplace. If that doesn’t work easily, or encounters resistance, then employers use more overt tactics to assert their control in the workplace.

 

In 2020 when it opened its Lachine facility, Amazon announced that employees would work "alongside Amazon's innovative robotics technology to pick, pack and ship items to customers.”

 

These are precisely the conditions that pushed employees to unionize: “We scan boxes: every time we move a box in the physical world, we also have to move it in the virtual world. So, the managers keep track of how fast we work.  They give us these automatic warnings, especially in the first warehouse in the chain of the Amazon system. If you get a few warnings for being a “slow worker” you can get fired. But again, Amazon says it’s not us, it’s ‘automatic warnings’.” Even for those not fired, Amazon was rife with immediate and chronic injuries. 

 

When the Laval union was certified last spring Amazon contested by claiming unionization “does not respect the interests of its employees.” And now, it’s cutting more than 1,700 jobs across all its warehouses in Quebec, claiming this has nothing to do with the union but only with “cost-saving” – and because outsourcing Amazon deliveries will save customers money. 

 

This is union-busting, pure and simple. Amazon is not even making much attempt to disguise it.

 

The other way of looking at Amazon as the “the Ford of our times” is to remember what it took for Ford and the whole auto industry to unionize. In Canada the United Auto Workers went on strike for 99 days in 1945 in Windsor, Ontario to win formal recognition as the sole negotiator for all Ford employees. It’s also the strike that led to the Rand Formula, which gave legal recognition to all unions.

 

Amazon shows that bosses can strike back too, by closing their plants and trying to take their capital investment out of the reach of union drives. We have to follow wherever they go. 

 

Solidarity with the Quebec Amazon workers for trying to fight for decent work and wages. Shame on the billionaire Bezos for attacking the workers who make his wealth.