By Doug Nesbitt
“We have to be fast like a robot. So we say we’re not robots,” says a former Amazon worker, Ibrahim Al Sahary, ahead of Amazon’s big discount “Prime Day” scheduled July 16 and 17. Amazon Prime Day and other Amazon sale periods are notorious among Amazon warehouse workers for speed-ups, cancelled breaks, terrible scheduling, management surveillance, and the inevitable injuries, discipline and dismissals that come with increased exploitation. As a result, last November’s Black Friday was targeted by protests in thirty countries, including strikes in the US, UK, Germany, Spain and Italy.
Amazon workers in Canada are now increasingly part of this global movement of Amazon workers as union committees have emerged in warehouses across the country. It was only a matter of time before a warehouse was unionized. That beachhead has now been established in Quebec.
Quebec
This past May 13, Amazon workers won union certification at the warehouse in Laval, a northern suburb of Montreal. With the support of the Immigrant Workers’ Centre, the workers have achieved the second Amazon union victory in North America after the major breakthrough on Staten Island in New York City in the spring of 2022.
The certified bargaining agent for the two hundred Amazon workers is CSN (Confédération des syndicats nationaux). The union was able to demonstrate a majority of the workforce had signed union cards, resulting in an automatic certification, which Quebec’s labour laws allow. This means if a majority of workers sign union membership cards, their freedom of association is respected and the union certified as bargaining agent.
Amazon has predictably disputed the certification, claiming at Québec’s Administrative Labour Tribunal that a labour relations representative did not perform their duties correctly in gathering the evidence required to confirm the certification. According to CSN, there is no evidence of Amazon’s claims. Even before the certification began, Amazon launched a legal challenge claiming the union certification process violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by depriving workers of the right to choose their bargaining representative.
British Columbia
Amazon has also challenged and partly derailed Unifor’s two warehouse drives in Greater Vancouver. On April 10, Unifor filed applications for warehouses in New Westminster and Delta. British Columbia’s labour laws allow for automatic union certification with a 55% super-majority, or a two-stage vote if the union achieves 40% card signing.
Unifor withdrew the applications on April 16 because Amazon demonstrated that employee numbers were greater than Unifor believed. According to Amazon, “seasonal” hiring had boosted the Delta warehouse employee rolls from 641 in April to 833 in May. On these grounds, Unifor filed an Unfair Labour Practice with the BC Labour Relations Board.
The BC Labour Relations Board ordered a vote at the two warehouses for May 31. Because of Amazon’s challenge, the ballots have been sealed and the stage is set for an ugly and prolonged battle over ballot counting. It remains to be seen how long Amazon can drag out these ballot challenges.
The sudden hiring spree and ballot challenges are common tactics waged by anti-union employers. By dragging things out, as they are in Quebec, the goal is to drive out pro-union workers, spread more anti-union propaganda, and ultimately defeat the union in the workplace itself.
Corporate “union avoidance” strategies are little more than a imposing a ruthless management dictatorship in the workplace, from the exercise of management rights to more insidious and disgusting behaviour. It’s all the more reason why workers must get organized in Amazon and why the unions cannot give up.
Alberta
The setbacks in BC follow similar defeats in Alberta where the Teamsters have taken the lead in targeting Amazon warehouses in Edmonton and Calgary. In September 2021, Local 362 filed an application for a union vote for YEG1 in Nisku, just south of Edmonton. A month later, Local 987 filed for YYC1 near the Calgary airport. Both efforts fell short of reaching the 40% threshold required to trigger a vote.
Local 362 resumed efforts in 2022 at YEG1, again filing in April 2022 but failing to secure a vote. The same local tried again with YEG1 in May 2023 and also YEG2/YEG4 in Acheson. In every case, the 40% threshold has been elusive.
Rankandfile.ca also learned that the Alberta drives sought only to trigger the union vote with a 40% threshold, whereas more difficult but effective organizing strategies focus on gaining a two-thirds super-majority signing union membership cards before filing for certification in jurisdictions that require a board-supervised union vote.
The necessity of “inoculating” Amazon workers against the company’s anti-union tactics and propaganda is also self-evident. According to one workers’ account of the first union drive at the Nisku warehouse, Amazon’s union avoidance strategy involved the deployment of “employee-relations workers” pestering workers about their right to talk to unions while also soliciting feedback for management. There are reports from the United States that Amazon managers have used “feedback” opportunities to identify potential union leaders.
Ontario
In Ontario, Teamsters Local 419 and Local 879 engaged in organizing in the massive logistics hub in Mississauga, Brampton, Milton and down through to Hamilton. Despite targeting at least four Amazon warehouses, the Teamsters in Ontario never reached the point of filing applications. It is not clear why the efforts have stalled in the past couple of years. Rankandfile.ca has also received reports of organizing by Unifor at the warehouse in Ottawa, but no applications have been filed from Ottawa.
With support from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, the Peel Warehouse Workers Centre had been established in 2019 and set about organizing and salting in the same GTA logistics hub surrounding Pearson International Airport. Salting is when you get a job in a non-union workplace in order to organize a union. There have been no applications filed based on these efforts, and the Centre did not respond to recent Rankandfile.ca inquiries.
Working conditions
Amazon continues to expand in Canada. Its workforce has topped 41,000 up from 25,000 in 2021. In that same period, Amazon has expanded from 16 to 30 warehouses. Even with new state of the art facilities, working conditions show no signs of improving.
Just south of London, Ontario a new heavily-automated Amazon warehouse opened last October in the old Ford Talbotville assembly that was shuttered in 2011 with the loss of 1,400 union jobs. One Amazon worker reported the job was “relentless”, requiring pickers to handle 350 items per minute, heavy lifting for shifts lasting more than 10 hours, and aggressive management enforcement of breaks to five minutes.
After three months in operation, there was a death at the London warehouse. A fire alarm on January 14 led employees out into the cold. Temperatures were recorded at -15°C with -25°C wind chill. An hour after returning inside, 51-year-old DeSouza Bezerra died of a heart attack.
Bezerra’s death remains a mystery. The Ford government’s Ministry of Labour has told the Bezerra family they’ll have to wait until fall for any answers, including cause of death. Meanwhile, Amazon has been engaged in a public relations emergency over their version of events surrounding Bezerra’s death, such as denying allegations that management kept workers from staying warm in their cars.
It is not hard to imagine the callousness of Amazon management. The corporation has faced a lawsuit over the deaths of six Amazon workers in a December 2021 tornado in Illinois. Amazon managers were accused of failing to warn their workers of the tornado, having no emergency plan, and providing no safe shelter. The tornado ripped through the four-year-old facility, killing six.
Amazon Labor Union affiliates to Teamsters
South of the border, the Amazon Labor Union established at the Staten Island warehouse, JFK8, has voted to affiliate with the Teamsters. After its initial union victory in April 2022, the ALU has faced major obstacles. Soon after its victory at JFK8, it lost its vote 618-380 at New York City warehouse LDJ5. Then, in October 2022, it lost its vote at an Albany warehouse. All the while, the ALU has also been unable to win a first contract at JFK8 due to Amazon’s conduct.
With the ALU becoming an “autonomous” local of the Teamsters, it remains to be seen if the Teamsters renew their organizing efforts in Canada. The Teamsters are formally committed to organizing Amazon in North America based on the directions of the union’s international convention in 2021.
The ALU and Teamsters are not the only American union targeting Amazon. Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama almost won their vote in March 2022. The campaign was backed by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
Surveying North America, there are four major unions targeting Amazon: CSN in Quebec, Unifor and Teamsters in the rest of Canada, and the Teamsters and RWDSU in the United States.
Digging in
The union victories in Laval and Staten Island have established some clear lessons for organizers inside and outside the warehouses. The first is the necessity of digging in. Hustling up enough cards or petition signatures to trigger a certification vote can easily be derailed by Amazon’s fixing of the employee numbers. Digging in means aiming for super-majority of union support to mitigate inevitable turnover, hiring sprees and unfortunate backsliding of some union supporters under management duress. Beating Amazon requires a majority that won’t be swayed by the employer’s anti-union campaigns.
Union committees of warehouse workers are vital because they will become the core of a certified union. Committees are also necessary to learn from setbacks and defeats and respond with new tactics and strategies. The very recent union victory at the Volkswagen assembly in Tennessee is instructive. A union committee was kept intact and kept organizing despite defeated union drives in 2014 and 2019. “We have seen the enemy’s playbook twice, and they don’t have any new moves,” said autoworker Zach Costello of the anti-union efforts of Volkswagen in Tennessee. Costello and many others pro-union workers dug in and played the long game, learning as they went.
To date, organizing efforts have been piecemeal and sporadic. In BC and Alberta, applications with the labour boards have aimed to achieve minimum thresholds for a union vote, even in British Columbia where automatic certification is possible with a 55% super-majority. In Ontario, where half of Amazon’s Canadian warehouses are located, no union has enacted an overall organizing plan.
Amazon’s thirty warehouses in Canada will not be unionized by half-measures and happy accident. Labour will only organize Amazon through a concerted, long-term struggle against the corporation’s appalling working conditions, anti-union propaganda, and corrupting influence on government and society. Only organized workers can defeat organized money.
Power to you in organizing workers at Amazon!