Amazon announced the closure of its seven warehouses in Quebec on Jan. 22, in response to the CSN’s unionization of its DXT4 warehouse in Laval. More than 4,500 jobs were lost as a result. This disgusting attack immediately sparked a wave of indignation across the province.
The fight to save jobs at Amazon is a taste of what could be in store for other workers in Quebec and Canada in the context of the trade war. No less than 56 per cent of Canadian companies recently surveyed by KPMG said they would lay off workers if tariffs were imposed.
Unfortunately, a month later, Amazon’s warehouses are in the process of closing. While the union representing the workers has brought the case to the Labour tribunal, it will likely take years to play out. Meanwhile, the jobs are lost.
This example offers key lessons for the labour movement in the fight against the closures and job losses that capitalists will try to impose in the future.
The union response
With only a few weeks before the closures scheduled for February and March, decisive action was necessary to prevent job losses.
Unfortunately, the CSN seemed to accept the losses from the outset. Their communications and actions showed no willingness to fight. The initial press release spoke vaguely of accompanying “DXT4 employees in all the steps and challenges that will have to be undertaken over the next few days.”
These words were not followed by any mobilization to save jobs, either those of union members or those in other warehouses.
In this vacuum a group of left-wing activists launched an “Ici, on boycotte Amazon” (“Here, we boycott Amazon”) campaign, the day after the closures were announced. The immediate aims of the boycott campaign were: “Stop warehouse closures. Maintain jobs for ALL workers. Respect union rights for ALL workers. Stop subsidies for Amazon.”
The campaign correctly put forward the goal of saving jobs. But how was this to be achieved?
The use of consumer boycotts is not a principled question. At times, boycotts can act as an excellent auxiliary to a workers’ struggle and be a good way of building a broad-based solidarity movement, for example during a strike, or even more so when scabs continue to operate a company that is on strike.
However, without collective action by the affected workers themselves, even the most successful boycott in the world won’t save jobs.
This is even truer when it comes to a behemoth like Amazon. According to recent statistics, no less than 64 per cent of online purchases in Quebec are made via Amazon. This vile company has its tentacles everywhere. It couldn’t be forced to backtrack on closures with only a boycott, which on such a large scale was going to take some time to have any impact anyway.
Unfortunately, the campaign was not designed to inspire independent action by the workers themselves, nor to apply pressure on the trade union federations to organize job action to defend jobs. It therefore had a serious weakness from the outset.
The CSN launches its campaign
Incredibly, in the face of such a blatant attack, the CSN leadership said virtually nothing in the two weeks following the announcement.
It was only on Feb. 4 that the CSN announced a campaign around the closures, taking up the Amazon boycott campaign, which had already been endorsed by the Conseil central FTQ Montréal métropolitain.
But the question was already no longer to save jobs.
In fact, the appeal to boycott Amazon was circulating in major newspapers right from the start. As the announcement of the closures came shortly after Trump’s threats against Canada, bourgeois commentators immediately saw Amazon as a prime target in the trade war with the U.S. Calls to buy from “our” companies rather than Amazon came from every corner.
For example, on Jan. 24, only two days after the announcement of the closures, the right-wing Journal de Montréal wrote: “Losing a few million dollars in revenue in Quebec will make little difference to Amazon. But that same money spent in our businesses directly enriches our economy. In the face of Donald Trump’s tariffs […], it’s in our interest to develop our economic sovereignty.”
The same argument was echoed by the CSN. Its president, Caroline Senneville, said:
“A few million less in sales for Amazon may not be much. But a few million more in sales for Quebec companies can make the difference between a Quebec company surviving, and a Quebec company progressing.”
On its Boycott Amazon web page, the CSN doesn’t talk about saving jobs or doing anything for workers, but about “encouraging local businesses by stopping buying from Amazon.”
It wasn’t difficult for politicians and governments across the political spectrum to join the movement. The CSN even contacted Federal minister François-Philippe Champagne who is now considering reviewing the government’s ties with Amazon.
Montreal’s mayor cut ties with Amazon, saying: “Despite the delay for tariffs, Montreal is not letting its guard down. We’re going through our list of suppliers with a fine-tooth comb to find local or international alternatives. Let’s keep showing our support and buy local whenever possible.”
And now, the Legault government is demanding that public sector workers try to use Quebec suppliers instead of ordering online from large platforms.
The fight against Amazon has thus been completely co-opted. Rather than being a struggle for workers, the boycott campaign has become a struggle for Quebec capitalists against American capitalists. The loss of our jobs has become nothing more than an excuse for this government of the rich to come to the aid of its friends.
As if capitalists here treated their workers better! It’s incredibly ironic that the Legault government is involved in boycotting Amazon for its union-busting warehouse closures, when it has itself just tabled Bill 89 to break the unions.
As a result, the boycott campaign gave left cover to the CSN bureaucracy that had done nothing to resist the closures, and even gave François Legault himself the opportunity to appear to be on the side of the workers. Above all, it failed to save jobs or win concessions for those workers.
On Feb. 21, the CSN announced that it had filed a complaint with the Tribunal administratif du travail against Amazon. The complaint alleges that the company breached the Labour Code and calls for the closures to be reversed and jobs to be maintained.
This is too little, too late. History has shown that court cases seldom turn out in workers’ favour. Even when workers “win”, it comes years later after the damage is already done. This was the case when Walmart closed a store in Jonquière in 2005 after the workers unionized: the jobs were lost, it took 10 years in the courts before workers got some form of compensation.
How to fight closures and job losses?
With the trade war looming on the horizon thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of jobs will be on the chopping block. Therefore, the fight against the Amazon closures in Quebec provides us with an instructive example that we should critically assess if we are to save jobs in the future.
The fundamental lesson is that there is no substitute for the independent action of workers on the ground.
That’s why, from the outset, the CSN should have used its resources and mobilizing power to strike at the warehouses threatened with closure. What’s more, it seems that Amazon very quickly began redirecting its parcels to subcontractors, with a view to rapidly render the warehouses useless. By mobilizing the workers themselves, the union leadership could have kick-started a mass mobilization of all workers involved in any capacity in Amazon’s business in Quebec to completely paralyze their activities.
In such a context a consumer boycott could have taken on a radically different meaning. We can imagine that the federal Liberals and the CAQ would never have wanted to go anywhere near such a campaign supporting striking workers.
Many people have told RCP activists in recent weeks that methods such as strikes are unrealistic. But we’re not inventing anything new. Time and again, workers have fought closures through strikes and occupations, and won gains they would never have achieved otherwise.
In Saguenay, in 2004, Alcan plant employees refused to be laid off by occupying the plant, and continued production under their own control. Despite facing big fines, the union continued its action for 19 days. They succeeded in having their jobs transferred rather than simply lost.
Another inspiring example comes from Oshawa. When the plant closed in 1980, over 200 workers from the Houdaille plant illegally occupied their factory for two weeks to demand decent pensions and severance pay. The city’s 14,000 General Motors workers even threatened a general strike. As a result of the occupation, the workers wrested significant concessions from Houdaille and it led to severance pay being bolstered in Ontario law.
With the trade war looming, a new method is needed for the labour movement. Appeals to the courts take forever to produce results—if they do at all. And calls for boycotts, separate from or opposed to strike action and occupation by the workers themselves, are clearly insufficient to win. What’s more, such boycotts do nothing to raise workers’ confidence in their own strength, nor to raise their consciousness of the irreconcilable opposition between them and the bosses. Instead—as we’ve seen—they tend to put workers and bosses on the same side against another boss.
There are no simple solutions to the closures that the capitalists want to impose. Big struggles lie ahead. We can have no confidence in the provincial and federal governments to come to the aid of the workers.
Historically, it has been through the methods of strikes and occupations that jobs have been maintained or major concessions won. It won’t be any different today. The RCP aims to revive these methods and make this history known in the movement today, so we can win against the bosses—whether Canadian, American, Quebecois—who will try to make us pay for their losses and their trade war.
