Amazon is at war not only with its own employees, but with working people in general. Ever since the spectre of unionization began to haunt its warehouses in the late 2010s, the company has pursued aggressive campaigns to crush the labour movement.
The massive corporation has swollen to a size that has allowed it to operate with relative impunity on the world stage. It guzzles public money, mangles its workers, crushes small businesses, and attacks the meagre legal protections that workers have won through over a century of struggle.
The e-commerce monopoly announced on January 22 that it would close all of its Quebec warehouses. The announcement came as Canada's first union, of Amazon employees, was poised to legally force the company into negotiations. Amazon decided it would rather put more than 3,000 workers out of a job than allow a union to get a foothold in even one warehouse.
This latest development provides a good opportunity to look back at Amazon's activities in Quebec and abroad.
DXT4 workers take on a giant
Amazon opened its first Quebec warehouses in 2020. It expanded its Quebec operations quickly over the course of 2021. In 2022, union drives kicked off at several facilities. The first and only warehouse to successfully form a union was the DXT4 warehouse in Laval.
The STTAL (Syndicat des travailleuses et travailleurs d'Amazon Laval), which represented the DXT4 workers, was certified in May 2024. Immediately, Amazon challenged the certification at Quebec's labour tribunal by contesting the province's labour code, which it claimed was unconstitutional. Amazon lost that case.
At the negotiation table, Amazon stonewalled the STTAL. The union responded with demonstrations in front of the warehouse. In early January, Amazon laid off 30 workers at DXT4. Contrary to Amazon's claims, workers remarked that the layoffs appeared to have no connection with seasonal hiring patterns or seniority.
On January 16, Amazon made its first and only salary offer to the union: a raise of $0. The STTAL rejected the offer, and less than a week later, Amazon announced the closure of all its Quebec warehouses. Amazon deliveries in the province are set to be taken over by non-unionized subcontractors such as Intelcom.
Untenable working conditions
A key issue for the STTAL was workplace health and safety. Amazon is notorious for pushing its workers to their physical limit. The breakneck pace of work in its warehouses results in stunning injury rates.
The majority of Amazon warehouse workers have witnessed an acute workplace injury on the shop floor, and 60% suffer from musculoskeletal issues, according to a report from GIREPS and the Immigrant Workers Centre. The fever pitch of Amazon's peak season has also resulted in numerous workplace deaths.
Things are no easier for Amazon's delivery drivers. Many of them work through subcontracts and so have no recourse to hold Amazon accountable for labour law violations. Amazon's obsession with speed and disregard for safety hits drivers especially hard, as the company expects packages to be delivered regardless of extreme weather conditions.
Amazon's multimillion-dollar union-busting machine
Long before it came to Quebec, Amazon had had a great deal of practice crushing union drives at its warehouses. Reporting in the United States shows that the company spends millions of dollars per year to hire anti-union consultants and fly them to warehouses where unionization campaigns are underway. The job of these consultants is to harass workers and coerce them not to join a union.
Amazon has engaged in these same practices in Quebec since 2022 when union drives kicked off at Montreal-area warehouses.
The company also wallpapers its warehouses in anti-union propaganda. In August of 2024, Quebec's labour tribunal found that these anti-union practices at one of its Lachine warehouses had violated the province's labour laws.
In countries like the U.K., where unions operate on an open-shop basis, Amazon has posted QR codes throughout its warehouses that link workers to a cancellation form on their union's website.
Another favourite practice of Amazon is to dilute the concentration of pro-union workers through hiring blitzes ahead of elections and certifications. The North Star has reported on such hiring sprees in England in 2023 and in British Columbia in 2024. The latter case has led to B.C. Labour Relations Board hearings.
In Quebec and in the United States, Amazon has sought to destroy elements of labour law regimes that are favourable to unionization. This includes constitutional challenges to the Quebec Labour Code and its ongoing attempt to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board in the U.S.
In those rare cases where workers have managed to form unions, such as at DXT4 in Laval and JFK8 in Staten Island, New York, Amazon refuses to negotiate. JFK8 workers formed a union in the spring of 2022 and are still without a contract, thanks to Amazon's stalling.
Laying waste to public postal services
Amazon's gig economy model for parcel delivery is wreaking havoc on public postal services. Before Amazon built up its delivery infrastructure, it relied heavily on Canada Post to fulfill its orders. Now that the multinational has established it network of non-unionized, precariously employed delivery drivers, it is able to undercut the Crown corporation's parcel delivery rates.
This has shifted a great deal of delivery work from once-well-paid unionized Canada Post workers to low-paid delivery drivers with significantly worse working conditions. Faced with diminishing revenues resulting from package deliveries, Canada Post bosses have responded with proposals to cut services and sell off portions of the corporation. Such an erosion of the public postal service would hit postal workers and rural Canadians especially hard.
A similar phenomenon is taking place in the United States. Speculation of privatization of the U.S. Postal Service has been looming for months. The apparently friendly relationship between Donald Trump and Amazon's ex-CEO and top stockholder Jeff Bezos is certainly not reassuring for American consumers, who could see sharp increases in delivery costs if USPS is forced to compete with Amazon in the private market.
Public money, private profits
While is Amazon undermining labour protections in the countries where it operates, it is also sucking up public subsidies in Quebec and abroad. A report from UNI, an international union federation based in Switzerland, estimated that Amazon received $325.6 million in public subsidies for a data centre in Montreal. Amazon's Canadian data centres also receive discount rates on electricity from public utilities.
In 2017, Amazon announced it would build a second headquarters and sought bids from cities across Canada and the United States. Some governments offered generous tax incentives. Toronto's representative, banker W. Edmund Clark, bragged about how Canadian tech workers would work for lower salaries than their American counterparts. Several Canadian city councils engaged in embarrassing publicity stunts to attempt to woo the multinational to set up camp in their backyards.
South of the border, Amazon had received more than US$4.18 billion in subsidies as of 2022. Seventeen countries across five continents (six if we include New Zealand) have given Amazon public tax dollars to build warehouses, data centres, and other infrastructure.
Public subsidies and tax breaks for large corporations are often justified on the basis of job creation. The logic goes something like this: "If we make our country/province/city attractive to big companies, they'll move their business here and create jobs, which will stimulate our economy."
However, as we have seen in Quebec, there is no imperative for companies to give anything back to the people whose tax dollars funded their infrastructure, or even to treat them fairly. When the workers at DXT4 dared to demand a liveable wage and a safe workplace, Amazon closed its doors and ran off with the public money.