Amazon’s Union-Busting in Quebec Can Be Overcome

Terrorism is defined as an act of violence, usually harming innocents, that is motivated by a political or ideological goal.

By that standard, Amazon’s decision to shut all seven of its warehouses (euphemistically called ‘fulfilment centres’) in Québec, to avoid unionization at one of those warehouses, is an act of economic terrorism.

The lives of the 1700 workers losing their jobs will be deeply damaged; some will never recover. The pain will be shared by their families and their communities.

Those workers were clearly innocent in the chain of events that led to the shutdowns. A union was formed and certified last year at one warehouse (in Laval). Workers at the other six warehouses were bystanders, but are now collateral damage in Amazon’s union-busting.

But even the unionized workers at the Laval warehouse are innocent – contrary to corporate apologists who say it’s their own fault for daring to demand better treatment. Those workers were simply exercising their democratic rights to organize collectively, and negotiate with their employer for improvements in their demanding, dangerous jobs.

It is a long-standing and accepted premise in Canadian constitutional and labour law that workers must have the opportunity to freely assemble in unions, so they can negotiate collectively with their employers. This is necessary to at least partially offset the inherent imbalance in power between individual workers and their employers.

After all, workers need their employer more than the employer needs any single one of them. Workers’ economic survival depends on finding and keeping a job, but employers can almost always replace any individual worker with someone else. In that unbalanced context, wages will tend toward subsistence, unless supported by collective bargaining power and/or labour regulation (such as minimum wages).

This power imbalance between workers and employers, common across capitalism, is extreme in the case of Amazon. Amazon is the world’s second largest private employer: worldwide employment in 2024 reached over 1.5 million workers. And that doesn’t count hundreds of thousands of others who work for Amazon in non-standard employment arrangements (and consequently aren’t deemed ‘employees’): like drivers in its gig-based Amazon Flex delivery network, and other precarious contractors.

In many communities, Amazon comes close to constituting a ‘monopsony’: that is, a firm so concentrated and powerful that it can dictate terms to its suppliers (like workers), in the same way that a monopoly can dictate terms to its customers. This power explains why workers at one of the most profitable corporations in the world have been unable to capture any of that extraordinary surplus for themselves. And why starting wages in a demanding, dangerous, and skilled job at an Amazon warehouse languish only slightly above provincial minimums.

To counter this inherent power imbalance, the rights of workers to form unions, freely negotiate, and take action in support of bargaining demands have been reaffirmed by repeated Supreme Court rulings and other precedents.

Ludicrously, Amazon attempted to challenge the certification of its first union in Laval (a branch of the CSN) by citing Canada’s Charter of Rights: claiming that Quebec’s union certification rules (which allow certification on the basis of a majority of workers signing union cards) was somehow unconstitutional. The company was laughed out of court in short order. The certification of the Laval union was confirmed, and bargaining began.

Amazon routinely tries to starve out a new union by delaying or stonewalling bargaining; it’s successfully used this tactic with its sole unionized U.S. location (on Staten Island). This won’t work in Québec, however, thanks to the province’s first-contract arbitration system. If bargaining for an initial contract can’t succeed, the labour board imposes a basic collective agreement to set initial terms and conditions.

That allows the union to get a foot in the door, knowing it can then improve terms in subsequent rounds of bargaining. Critically, under Canada’s Rand Formula, this first contract also establishes a solid democratic and financial base for the new union: all workers covered by the new agreement will contribute to the union, building its capacity to represent workers, enforce the contract, and bargain better terms in the future.

Québec’s labour laws (with card-based certification, first contract arbitration, and anti-scab laws during work stoppages) are relatively favourable to unionization. This explains why Quebec has the highest private-sector union density of any province (23%), and the second-highest overall union coverage (39%, including the public sector), behind only Newfoundland and Labrador.

So it is fitting that Amazon’s infamous resistance to unionization was poised for defeat in Québec. A union had been formed, confirmed by the courts, and within weeks would have an operational collective agreement (imposed by the labour board). Success at Laval would likely be followed by copy-cat unionization at the other Québec locations.

It would also inspire workers elsewhere in Canada: such as B.C., which also has card-based certification and first contract arbitration powers, and where Unifor is conducting promising union drives.

In short, Laval would set an unacceptable precedent for this enormously powerful and profitable corporation. So it carpet-bombed all of its Québec locations. It claims the decision was unrelated to the union – a lie so outlandish no-one believes it, not even corporate apologists.

Amazon was motivated partly to avoid labour cost increases from a new contract at Laval (and, subsequently, at other locations). But its main goal was to send a powerful and frightening ideological message to workers at all its other locations – not just in Québec or Canada, but anywhere – by attacking 1700 innocent workers in Quebec. Don’t even think about demanding better wages and conditions. We will shut you down and destroy your life.

That is economic terrorism.

The usual suspects in right-wing business papers and social media proclaim the shutdowns were an inevitable consequence of ‘union greed.’ This is an Orwellian reversal of language. A union that demands wages modestly higher than statutory minimums from a company worth trillions of dollars, is challenging greed, not propogating it.

And the conventional corporate narrative that if workers demand too much their employers will simply leave, does not apply in this case. Amazon is not leaving Québec: it can’t, if it wants to continue serving Québec customers. Unlike a factory or a call centre, Amazon cannot shift this work to some desperate low-wage developing country. The customers live in Québec, and want their packages delivered to their doorsteps.

Instead, Amazon is trying an end run around Quebec’s statutory labour rights. It plans to outsource logistics and delivery of packages to “Québec small businesses.” These are smaller firms which contract for the outsourced delivery functions. Most use gig-based models of employment, where drivers and other workers are paid on the basis of completed tasks (rather than receiving an hourly wage), and where their continued engagement depends immediately on customer demand (shifting the risk of fluctuations in business activity onto the backs of the workers).

These smaller delivery contractors are decentralized and much harder to unionize than a centralized warehouse. Gig-based workers are excluded from many standard labour protections (such as minimum wage, CPP/QPP and EI programs, and workers compensation). And their status under union and collective bargaining rules is not clear. Some precedents (such as a Foodora case in Ontario in 2020) suggest gig workers do have the right to unionize. But successfully using that right will be a long and challenging road for gig workers and unions.

(Foodora, of course, committed its own act of economic terrorism when it shut down its Canadian operations shortly after the right of its Ontario workers to unionize was confirmed.)

Despite Amazon’s daunting, concentrated power, it is wrong to conclude (as the company hopes workers will) that its exploitation is irresistible. Understanding that its strategy involves not leaving Québec, but rather tapping into a pool of labour excluded from the same rights and powers as its waged warehouse workers were, informs obvious priorities for a fightback.

Employers have long tried to avoid unionization by shutting down unionized workplaces or subsidiaries, and opening up other ones – often under a nominally separate corporate entity. Rules regarding successorship rights have been implemented to close off this union-busting. Those rules need to be stronger, but an ambitious government and labour board in Québec could invoke these principles – perhaps through the automatic certification of the contractors that Amazon plans to hire. That would nullify Amazon’s hoped-for cost savings.

Another approach would be to mobilize Québec’s unique ‘decree’ system. This is a long-standing provision that allows collective agreements to be negotiated (usually by multiple employers and one or more unions) and extended to multiple workplaces across a specific industry or region. It is useful in providing basic contract protections to workers in very decentralized, hard-to-organize industries (such as security guards or motor vehicle repair shops).

The use of decrees has faded in Québec over the past generation, but the tool still exists, and the case of decentralized delivery services would be very well suited to its revival. It would potentially even be possible to design and enforce a decree solely for workers delivering Amazon packages: a focused counter to this company’s unique role in the industry. This would short-circuit Amazon’s attempt to defeat labour law by tapping into hyper-precarious gig labour.

Of course, Amazon has benefited from many direct and indirect public subsidies in Canada. These include preferential electricity rates from Hydro-Québec for Amazon’s power-gobbling data centre near Montreal, large government purchases of computing services from Amazon’s AWS operation, and even the federal government’s arrangement to use Amazon during the pandemic to distribute emergency health equipment and supplies.

A government with ambition (and pressed by popular outrage over Amazon’s actions) could use this support as leverage to extract better behaviour. (At time of writing, media reports indicated the federal government was threatening to cancel contracts with Amazon to pressure the company to reconsider.)

The concentration of wealth in Amazon, and the company’s close links with the incoming Trump administration (which is attacking Canada on multiple other fronts) makes this issue a potent opportunity for progressives and unionists to expose the true sources of workers’ hardship and exploitation.

On the same day it announced the Québec closures, Amazon’s share price rose to an all-time record of $235 U.S. That implied a market capitalization of $2.5 trillion, also a record – and ranking the company as the fourth-richest in the world. Two days before the closure, Amazon’s Chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, sat in the front row at Trump’s inauguration, applauding Trump’s anti-democratic manifesto (including his threats against the sovereignty and territory of Canada and other countries).

In the first 80 days after Trump’s election, Amazon’s market capitalization grew 20% (or $420 billion U.S.). Bezos’s personal 9% share of the company gained $36 billion in value, making him now worth $210 billion. Amazon’s market cap is now worth $1.6 million U.S. for each of its 1.5 million workers worldwide – but the company is determined to prevent any of them from recapturing even a bit of that capitalized surplus.

Amazon does not report financial data for its Canadian operations. It issues a fluffy annual “impact report” boasting about its good deeds, that does not even mention the terms “revenue” or “profit.” Based on Canada’s assumed share (pro-rated on relative GDP) of Amazon’s overall North American segment, I estimate the company generated over $700,000 revenue, and $30,000 operating profit, for each of its 45,000 Canadian employees.

The lines connecting the U.S. oligarchy, corporate monopoly and monopsony power, the erosion of democracy and sovereignty, and attacks on workers’ living standards, couldn’t be clearer. Amazon’s actions make it obvious that workers’ problems in Canada stem from corporate power, not the false scapegoats (from carbon prices to immigration to ‘wokeness’) propagated by the populist right.

Amazon’s closures are an egregious, cruel, and anti-democratic attack on all workers, that demands a strong response from unions and social movements in all parts of Canada.