Six months after a successful union drive in Laval, Amazon announced the closing of all of its Quebec facilities, axing 1800 jobs. This is a disgusting attempt to strangle union organizing across its facilities. Amazon has declared war, and the labour movement needs to answer in kind.
Amazon’s war on its own workers
Back in May, 300 workers at Amazon’s DXT4 facility in Laval signed Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN) union cards, making it the second unionized facility in North America. The company has been busy trying to destroy the union, ever since.
First, the company tried to scare the workers with anti-union posters. Then, it tried to drag the CSN through the courts, in a failed bid to undermine Quebec’s card-check rules. When that failed, the company fired 10 per cent of DXT4’s workforce last month.
Now, Amazon plans to close all seven of its warehouses in Quebec starting Feb. 8.
The 300 workers in DXT4 asked for a wage increase from $21.50 per hour to $26, paid sick days and a joint health and safety committee. But the company has blocked all of their demands.
“Amazon has done everything it can to prevent its employees from unionizing: fear campaigns, anti-union messages, contesting the Labour Code, disguised dismissals,” CSN President Caroline Senneville said. “Today, we learn that the multinational prefers to withdraw from Quebec rather than respect its obligation to agree on a collective agreement? This is totally unacceptable.”
Capitalists, like the ones who own and run Amazon, are the most tyrannical parasites that scientists have yet discovered. They do no work. They contribute nothing. And, yet they decide who works and who doesn’t. And, if their workers try to stand up for themselves, they retaliate with firings and closures.
Management no doubt understands that a victory in Laval would quickly inspire workers at other facilities. It is, therefore, keen to strangle the union, to send a message to the rest of its workforce across the world.
A facility closed is a facility occupied
Amazon’s vile, vicious attack can only be fought by mass mobilization.
With two weeks before the planned closures, the CSN needs to strike the Laval facility, and spread the movement to the non-unionized facilities. These facilities should be occupied by the workers and run by them, until Amazon backtracks.
The CSN and other trade unions also need to mobilize to support the Amazon workers. Any shutdown at Amazon needs to be reinforced by transit workers, postal workers and others to defend our class interests. Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the world. If workers successfully beat back their attack, it would have a tremendous effect on the whole labour movement.
Ultimately, this shows the need to smash the dictatorship of capital. If workers successfully unionize or get a significant win, these behemoths close it down—as we saw with Walmart in Jonquière in 2001.
These giants must be expropriated and all essential industries must be run by and for the working class as a whole. A socialist plan of production could harness all the labour, skill and technology that exists in society, instead of letting these parasites squander it.
