Walmart warehouse workers in Ontario unionize

MISSISSAUGA, Ontario—First it was Amazon. Then it was Starbucks. Now, it’s Walmart. Exploited, underpaid, and overworked people at monster firms are unionizing—if necessary, store by store and warehouse by warehouse.

The latest to join the parade are Walmart warehouse workers in Mississauga, Ont., an hour’s drive west of Buffalo, N.Y. More than half of them signed union election authorization cards to affiliate with Unifor, a big Canadian union of industrial workers.

There are 800 workers in the warehouse, one of 400 Walmart warehouses in Canada. Workers in another Walmart Canada warehouse, in Laval, Quebec, unionized in May under that province’s labor law, Labor Notes reported.

Under Ontario labor law, as under labor laws in almost all other Canadian provinces, unionizing is much easier than in the U.S. In Ontario’s case, it includes card-check recognition. Ontario labor law also has strict curbs on bosses’ tactics to delay and deny first contracts.

That’s important for workers. The Mississauga Walmart workers, like their U.S. colleagues, are underpaid, overworked, and exposed to safety and health hazards on the job. A contract, the workers told local media, can force Walmart to solve those conditions.

And Ontario is Canada’s most populous province, with one-third of the nation’s population. Quebec has another quarter.

As in the U.S., safety and health on the job was a big issue in Unifor’s organizing drive in Mississauga, which began last December. In mid-September, the Ontario Labour Relations Board formally certified the union to represent the workers.

Worker Rodolfo Pilozo told Mississagua’s daily paper that he’s suffered multiple neck and back injuries since he first went to work at Walmart, in 1995. The company pressured him and other workers to return to their packing and sorting jobs too soon after they were hurt and offered inadequate training.

“They treat you like a number,” he said.

Walmart also underpays them, Pilozo added. When he first went to work at the warehouse, its pay kept pace with that of other Mississagua-area firms, and he had enough to live on. His family of four now survives because both Pilozo and his wife work, including part-time jobs. The problems with pay and safety prompted him to join the organizing drive.

News of the Mississagua union’s success even penetrated Walmart’s home state, Arkansas. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, its sole statewide daily paper, ran a story about Unifor’s win.

It quoted Unifor’s Ontario Regional Director Samia Hashi as saying Walmart “did their best to spread falsehoods about the protection of a union, but workers saw through the thinly veiled intimidation and chose unity over division and fear.”

And while the Mississagua workers told local media that democracy and communications within the warehouse had declined over the decades, Hashi pointed out unions “are the most effective way to have a say in your conditions at work.”