MONTREAL—Instead of preparing for upcoming bargaining sessions on their first contract, after a long-fought unionizing campaign, Amazon workers in Québec were notified Wednesday that they were all being laid off.
The warehouse workers at the DXT4 facility are represented by the labor union Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN). Like Amazon workers at facilities across North America and Europe, they began their union campaign because of low wages and poor health and safety measures at the warehouses.
“Awful working conditions, frequent work injuries, and low wages have become the norm for Amazon around the world,” the union said. In April last year, DXT4 became the first unionized warehouse in Canada after a two-year struggle.
According to Canada’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, Amazon Canada Fulfillment Services, the corporate entity that operates Amazon warehouses in Canada, recorded more than 1,300 workplace injuries in 2022, resulting in more than $4.4 million in required compensation payouts to workers.
However, as the U.S. government’s OSHA revealed, Amazon systematically suppresses its reported injury rate, so it’s likely much higher. The same culture prevails at the company’s Canadian facilities. Typically, when an Amazon worker gets hurt on the job, the worker is sent to a company in-house doctor. Not sending them to an independent doctor often means not reporting injuries.
Workers in Québec were expecting to receive the company’s opening offer in contract negotiations, but instead Amazon announced it will phase out all operations across seven sites in the province, which holds the only facility in Canada with unionized workers, over the next two months. All warehousing, order fulfillment, and logistics will be contracted out to a third party.
Union-busting at its core
The CSN, which represents 300 workers at the warehouse just north of Montreal, stated in a press release that Amazon’s decision is illogical and specifically targets the company’s sole unionized warehouse in Canada.
“There is no doubt that the closings announced today are part of an anti-union campaign against CSN and Amazon employees,” said CSN President Caroline Senneville. “This move contradicts the provisions of the Québec Labour Code, which we will strongly oppose.”
Québec labor laws are very strict on employer interference with the unionization process. Under sections 12, 13, and 15 of the Québec Labour Code, corporations cannot “hinder the activities of an association of employees nor intimidate, threaten, or retaliate against workers for exercising their rights.”
The move by Amazon to shut down operations in Québec, home to the company’s only unionized warehouse, but nowhere else in Canada led the union to conclude it was a blatant act of union-busting—not unlike the countless instances of violating U.S. labor law at facilities south of the border.
“This decision makes no sense whatsoever,” Senneville said. “Neither from a business point of view, nor from an operational point of view…. Amazon, one of the most integrated companies between the click of a mouse and home delivery, would entrust all its warehousing and distribution operations throughout Québec to a third party?”
Similar to warehouses in the U.S., such as JFK8 in New York and in BHM1 Bessemer, Ala., Amazon previously spent considerable time and resources trying to challenge the legality of the union.
Privatization schemes for maximum profit
It’s evident that Amazon’s intention is not to abandon Québec’s market. Instead, this move is a retaliatory measure intended to convey a message that any threat to Jeff Bezos’ non-union monopoly in Canada will not be tolerated. It serves as a warning to potential union organizers that they could face severe consequences, including massive layoffs. The timing is significant, too, with these mass terminations occurring shortly after the successful union drive at the DXT4 facility in Québec inspired other warehouse workers to follow suit.
All the while, the company has made it clear that it intends to revert to the pre-2020 model of operation, which involves outsourcing all distribution to “local” subcontractors: companies that will hire laid-off workers through precarious contracts without any opportunity for unionization (for example, temporary work agencies). For instance, Intelcom, one of Amazon’s subcontractors in Québec, has already announced that it will hire workers to perform the tasks required by Amazon.
Amazon often attributes all its success to Bezos’ business acumen, but some argue that many of the things the company boasts about, like its delivery and package logistics, could be carried out by a public postal service. Creeping privatization of the mail, in fact, has been a key driver of Amazon’s growth.
The contract campaign by the American Postal Workers Union and its allies in the U.S. stands as an example of resistance to this trend. The APWU has been fighting for a new contract that, among other things, prevents the Trump administration from privatizing the U.S. Postal Service.
Amazon’s “last mile” policy is all about orchestrating competition between the private and public sectors. The goal is to gradually allow private monopoly to replace public service, or more accurately, to strip any lucrative operations from the public postal service that can then be handed over to private companies like Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and so on.
Conversely, non-profitable operations would be left with public service enterprises. In other words, profits are privatized, while losses are socialized. At the same time, more “evidence” of public sector inefficiency is thereby accumulated—ammunition to be used in even more privatization schemes.
For instance, in Canada, Amazon has no warehouse or delivery operations in Newfoundland. However, the company is still very much present in that Atlantic province. The problem is that for such a small market located on an island, it is not profitable for Bezos’ company to make any investment in warehouses and logistics. Therefore, it relies on the publicly-owned Canada Post to deliver its packages while keeping the bulk of the profits to itself.
Canada Post’s share of the distribution market in amounts to 60%; the rest is in the hands of private monopolies, including Purolator, which is owned by Canada Post. Nevertheless, when Canadian postal workers went on strike (before being ordered back to work) last fall, Canada Post instrumentalized the situation to pretend that its operations were “not profitable.”
It was an attempt to force workers to lower their wage demands so that Canada Post could be “competitive” with the private monopolies (including its own Purolator company).
Privatization of public services in favor of private monopolies has been a global trend that comes and goes for decades, but it is recently back in vogue. For instance, Georgia Meloni, Italy’s right-wing premier, privatized Poste Italiane. In Britain, the Royal Mail is practically defunct.
Privatization not only offers public services to private corporate interests but also forces delivery workers from all employers to compete with each other, leading to lower wages and poorer working conditions that negatively impact the working class as a whole. Add in rampant union-busting and you have a dangerous recipe for austerity and despair.
Unchecked monopoly power requires a fightback
Amazon is a champion at blackmailing the working class and doesn’t pass up any opportunity for retaliation against workers who try to organize. It is also, however, a champion at blackmailing governments and public enterprises.
In Scarborough, in east Toronto, for example, Amazon forced Canada Post to build a new sorting plant on its own premises to handle Amazon packages. If it failed to do so, Amazon threatened to halt any and all cooperation with Canada Post. The Scarborough shakedown proved that Bezos and his company cannot, in fact, operate without the indirect help of public funding.
For that very reason, it’s crucial that labor pressures government leaders—whether in Québec, elsewhere in Canada, or in the U.S.—not to sign a blank check to Amazon or any private corporation. As history has demonstrated, the sole interest of these corporations lies in maximizing profits at the expense of working people.
Now is not the time to bow down to Amazon and other private corporations. Instead, it is the time to defend and expand public services, particularly the post.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
MOST POPULAR TODAY
Wannabe dictator Trump, on Day One, declares war on American families
1,700 jobs gone: Amazon shutters Québec operations after Montreal warehouse goes union
With Biden’s grant of clemency, Leonard Peltier’s racist political imprisonment has ended
UAW forces Stellantis to keep promises, wins back thousands of jobs
Comments