Amazon Shuts Down Québec Operations After Unionization, Swears It’s Unrelated

Here are two separate pieces of information that you should definitely read as independent clauses with no suggestion that they are related in any way: Last year, about 300 Amazon employees at a warehouse in Québec formed a union. This week, Amazon announced that it will shutter its facilities in the Canadian province, cutting more than 1,700 permanent employees in favor of contractor labor.

The official line out of Amazon is that the decision to shut down its operations is entirely related to cost-cutting. Per a statement given to the CBC, the company reviewed its Québec operations and found “returning to a third-party delivery model supported by local small businesses, similar to the one we had until 2020, will enable us to offer the same excellent service and deliver even greater savings to our customers in the long term.” The closures are expected to take place over the next two months.

The union doesn’t quite see it the same way. In a statement, the union’s president, Caroline Senneville, said the decision “makes no sense, neither on a business level nor an operational level.”

The timing certainly doesn’t make much sense if you just consider Amazon’s recent investments in the area. The company opened its first fulfillment center in Québec in 2020, and then quickly expanded with five additional facilities that opened in 2021. The company operates seven sites in total in Québec, all of which opened under the guise that Amazon needed more laborers to speed up deliveries in the growing market.

But then the union came. Last spring, workers at one of the Amazon facilities in Laval, Québec unionized with the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (Confederate of National Trade Unions) in response to growing concerns among workers regarding their safety and compensation. CorpWatch, a watchdog group, found that the disabling injury rate for Amazon warehouse workers at one Canadian facility was 19.42 per 100 workers per year, nearly seven times higher than the average rate of 2.9 per 100 workers per year across all industries. In 2022 alone, 2022 Amazon Canada was ordered to pay out almost $5 million in damages for more than 1,300 workplace injuries suffered in its facilities.

The Laval facility union was waiting for Amazon to make its first offer on a contract, which they were expecting to receive this month. The workers were asking for a starting wage of $26 per hour, along with additional protections within the workplace.

That offer will never come. Instead, Amazon will farm out their work to contractors, who are routinely burdened with extremely long work days with delivery deadlines so tight they often don’t have time to stop to use the restroom and suffer from significantly higher rates of safety violations—all to save a couple bucks.