Unions in Montreal Demonstrate Against Amazon Closure

On February 15, over 3,000 workers attended a march organised by the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) to protest the closure of all seven of Amazon’s Quebec warehouses. 

The announcement that Amazon would shutter its Quebec based warehouses comes on the heels of the successful unionization drive by CSN at the Laval Amazon plant. A notable success of the manifestation was the fact that workers from many different unions, not just ones affiliated to the CSN, were mobilised against one single employer. 

Amazon, who raked in USD 59.25 billion in profit last year, used every trick in the book to try to prevent the workers at the Laval plant from organising. When the monopoly could not get its way, it decided to close all of its warehouse operations in Quebec. These closures have an immediate impact by laying off thousands, including many young workers, but it is also a clear threat to Amazon workers in the rest of Canada: unionise at your own peril. 

In an interview, the president of the Canadian Labour Congress, Bea Bruske, called the move to close the plants ‘disgusting’ and said this was ‘union busting’ by Amazon. However, the CLC has yet to issue a statement on the closures. Unifor, the largest private-sector union in Canada and not a member of the CLC, made a strong statement of solidarity with CSN and denounced the closure. Unifor is the only other union in Canada that has had public union drives at Amazon facilities. 

The Parti communiste du Québec (PCQ) and the Ligue de la jeunesse communiste du Québec mobilised for the march in Montreal and were visible to all with their red flags and distribution of statements. The statement of the PCQ strongly made the case that Amazon profits in Canada are possible through direct and indirect aid from the state. The PCQ statement also pushed the message that Amazon was never about filling a gap in service but rather an attack on our public services. The PCQ made the case that we should not only be calling for a boycott of Amazon, but we should defend and develop Canada Post as a public service. The PCQ put it clearly, “from online purchasing to distribution to warehousing, there is nothing Amazon does that our public postal monopoly cannot… while Trump seeks to impose the law of American monopolies, the time has come to defend the public monopoly on our public services. Thus, it is not only a question of boycotting Amazon, but of defending and extending the prerogative of Canada Post over parcel distribution activities.”

The YCL-LJC strongly agrees with the PCQ proposal to call for a public monopoly on parcel deliveries. We saw the Canadian Union Postal Workers strike last year was not just for better wages or working conditions for the membership, but rather it was on behalf of all working Canadians to have access to this fundamental public service. CUPW has put out its vision of what Canada Post could look like with a mandate to serve the public interest in its platform ‘Delivering Community Power’, which calls for important expansions in services such as postal banking.

As the YCL-LJC stated in its last political report, we must “agitate among the young workers and students for a public monopoly on social services, with universal, not tiered or qualified, access. We call for public monopolies on all social services to create new full-time quality jobs for young workers, push for democratic control over state expenditures and to raise the social wage: education, healthcare, childcare, transportation, culture, recreation, and more.” We young communists issue the battle cry: not only boycotts of Amazon, now is the time for socialization! This is our answer to the union busting, mass layoffs, and attacks on our public services by the ruling class.