The battle lines have been drawn in a growing feud between Amazon and workers in Quebec as the union prepares to announce a lawsuit in retribution to the company’s province-wide facility closures.
On Jan. 22, the U.S. e-commerce giant said it will close all seven of its facilities in Quebec over the next couple of months, laying off about 2,ooo permanent and temporary workers — a number the Ministry of Labour has since confirmed will actually exceed 4,500 after including delivery service partners.
Caroline Senneville, president of Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), said it will be presenting its legal challenge on Tuesday.
“Our legal department is working really hard and has been for the last few days, and we will be able to announce on what grounds the company breached labour code and what legal action we will take,” she said.
Senneville said this could include a fight for worker compensation on top of their package with up to 14 weeks’ pay.
Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait said the decision to shutter all Quebec facilities “wasn’t made lightly,” and was a way to provide “even more savings to our customers over the long run.”
Senneville said big corporations have a history in Quebec of closing down when unions come about, citing the departure of a Walmart store in Jonquiere back in 2005.
“They were found guilty (of trying to destroy or weaken a union),” she said. “Closing shop because a union has come in is illegal.”
Agrait has consistently denied the closures are linked to the recent unionization push in the province after one of the company’s warehouses in Laval, Que., managed to unionize back in May 2024, becoming the company’s first Canadian warehouse to do so.
“Of course Amazon is going to deny it until the end,” Senneville said.
However, while the CSN prepares to challenge the multinational company in court, DT Cochrane, a senior economist at the Canadian Labour Congress, said the power imbalance between a giant like Amazon and a union is so large that whatever fight a union puts up against them is too insignificant to affect any change.
“The company has incredible amounts of resources to devote to this legal battle that unions simply don’t have, especially when you think about the workers at the center of these battles,” Cochrane said.
“It drags out over years and years, those workers will have moved on to other jobs out of necessity, and so you’ve lost the very group of people who are most immediately being harmed by what corporations like this are doing.”
Big companies know that this imbalance exists, and are more than happy to exploit it, Cochrane added. It’s part of the cost they want workers and unions to include in their calculations for whether or not they pursue that kind of legal action.
“Even if they do pursue it all the way to the end and the union wins a favourable decision, what will the ultimate cost for Amazon be? Probably next to nothing compared to what they see as the cost of letting workers get away with this kind of organizing,” Cochrane said.
Amazon has said it respects its employees’ decision whether to join a union.
“Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union. They always have. We favor opportunities for each person to be respected and valued as an individual, and to have their unique voice heard by working directly with our team,” the company said.
“The fact is, Amazon already offers what many unions are requesting: competitive pay, health benefits on day one, and opportunities for career growth.”
The union claims this isn’t true. Senneville said there’s a pay gap of $8 on the hourly wage between Amazon warehouse workers and other warehouse workers in the province.
And when it comes to health and safety, she claims the company even discourages workers from going to the province’s health compensation board.
The union said the warehouse that managed to unionize in Laval saw 160 out of 200 workers report injuries within a year.
Senneville added workers are told to take some Tylenol, a couple days off and are discouraged from filing any workplace injury report.
“And those workers are mainly immigrants. So they don’t know our laws. They don’t know that they have rights even though they’re not unionized. The company makes it so that they don’t exercise their rights even as regular workers,” Senneville said.
The CSN is expected to announce its legal challenge on Tuesday morning.
Amazon to close Quebec warehouses, denies it’s over unionization
