Amazon’s Retribution in Quebec Should Be a Wake-Up Call
In response to a successful unionization effort at a warehouse in Quebec, Amazon is shuttering its operations in the entire province. Its punitive behavior demonstrates that traditional organizing methods won’t work on the corporate behemoth.
An Amazon fulfillment center in Canada on December 22, 2021. (Artur Widak / NurPhoto)
Just how far will Amazon go to throttle unions?
The corporate behemoth, valued at a staggering $2.47 trillion, is notorious for its union-busting. Amazon workers at the massive JFK8 warehouse voted for their union in 2022, but nearly three years later they have yet to get to the bargaining table, as the company’s army of lawyers has repeatedly thwarted government orders to bargain. Amazon routinely harasses and fires union activists, a warning to other workers who might be thinking about stepping forward. And when faced with an obligation to bargain with groups of its contracted delivery drivers, Amazon has simply severed their contracts, firing them en masse.
Last week, however, saw Amazon hit a new low in its union-busting: to avoid having to negotiate a union contract at one warehouse in Quebec, the company shut down its operations throughout the entire province.
Workers at Amazon’s DXT4 warehouse in suburban Montreal won union certification last spring. Under Quebec’s provincial laws, this victory obligated the company to bargain a contract with them. And unlike in the United States, where employers can and often do drag out negotiations for years, Quebec law mandates first contract arbitration for newly organized unions. This meant that, like it or not, Amazon was compelled to reach an agreement with its workers.
Faced with this prospect and with incipient organizing underway at other Quebec worksites, the company announced it was shuttering its entire Quebec operation — seven warehouses — and laying off two thousand workers. “Following a recent review of our Quebec operations, we found that returning to a third-party delivery model supported by local small businesses . . . will enable us to offer the same excellent service and deliver even greater savings to our customers in the long term,” an Amazon PR agent told the CBC.
That is patently disingenuous. Contracting out the work to a slew of other businesses will be more costly and less efficient for Amazon, which has mastered industrial practices of cutting costs and speeding deliveries through scale and centralized systems of control.
Amazon has a relatively small footprint in the province; a typical Amazon fulfillment center in the United States has more workers than the combined payroll of the company’s seven Quebec facilities. But the Quebec throwdown sends an unmistakable message to workers everywhere: organize, and no one in your vicinity is safe.
Not Your Mother’s Union-Busting
What has happened in Quebec ought to put the entire labor movement on notice. Site-by-site organizing, the standard practice of US and Canadian unions, will be a failed strategy at Amazon. Besides the JFK8 experience, workers have organized union majorities at Amazon’s San Bernardino air hub, a warehouse in San Francisco, and at a dozen or so of Amazon’s 4,400 contracted delivery companies. The Teamsters union has led these campaigns. None have resulted in bargaining.
Certainly Amazon’s relentless union-busting is to blame, but organizers also need to do some critical power analysis. The company is so big and adaptable that no union, by organizing and even striking a few worksites, can cause enough economic pain to force Amazon to respect workers’ rights and bargain contracts. Place is ultimately not a critical factor for Amazon. The company leases 90 percent of its facilities, and its robotics deployments are quite mobile: the Kivas could march themselves right out of any fulfillment center and head to a new one. With the one exception of its main air hub, centrally — and strategically — located in Northern Kentucky, it’s likely that Amazon would cut bait on basically any one component of its network that might be an entry point for unionism.
This starkly underscores the need to organize throughout Amazon’s entire network, and to think like the company thinks: not about its individual nodes of distribution but about the overall flow of goods through its network. Amazon is not going to come to the table because a few facilities are organized. Symbolic actions and moral appeals, while beneficial to mobilize the public and embolden workers, will not make the company flinch. Amazon will only entertain the possibility of unionism if labor can exercise a degree of control over the movement of goods in its network. That is really the one thing this corporate behemoth cares about enough to play ball. Absent that, it will respond with only denial and devastation to worker demands and legal bargaining requirements.
This is a herculean task, but today’s labor movement does not have the option of taking a pass on the Amazon challenge.
Do-or-Die Organizing
Amazon is a company aiming to do it all: end-to-end logistics, parcel delivery, grocery, health care, car sales, home entertainment and surveillance, and cloud computing. No industry is untouched by Amazon’s ambition. The largest corporations in the country have always set the standard for labor relations. So as long as companies like Amazon continue to be anti-union fortresses, it’s going to be impossible to translate workers’ current high approval of unions into true mass organizing and a reversal of the downward union density trend.
The clock is ticking here. In 2023, Teamster members at the logistics giant United Parcel Service (UPS) won significant wage gains in union bargaining. The UPS contract is the single largest private sector collective bargaining agreement in the United States, covering 330,000 workers. But the same year, Amazon leapfrogged UPS in terms of total package volume. This would have been an unimaginable feat just a decade ago. The UPS contract is up in July 2028, and between now and then it’s likely Amazon will continue to outpace its unionized rival. If there is not serious Amazon organizing underway by the time the Teamsters get to the 2028 bargaining table, then UPS is almost certain to demand major, lasting concessions from the workers. The effects of a round of concessionary bargaining at UPS will ripple out through the entire labor movement.
Amazon can be beaten, but it’s going to take strategic coordination among its approximately 1.7 million US workers (including regular employees and contracted delivery drivers). The company runs an incredibly efficient operation, but also a rather delicate one. Its speed, volume, and scale give workers tremendous power — if they can organize and strike together to effectively disrupt operations. But to do that, union organizers will need to set aside outdated assumptions and practices that worked in other industries and at other times. They will need to aim much, much higher in their organizing ambitions, and imagine an organizing movement on a scale to match the class adversary. Major regional-, national-, and international-scale organizing is needed — not valiant but isolated and unsuccessful forays against the behemoth.
Amazon workers in Quebec, New York, California, Illinois, Georgia, England, India, and elsewhere have shown tremendous bravery and creativity in organizing and striking in recent years. But the Quebec smackdown ought to dismiss any remaining illusions about the scale of organizing that is needed. Are unions up to that challenge? That remains to be seen. But the Quebec experience thrusts that question into the spotlight for labor in 2025.