Employees of an Amazon warehouse in Laval, which has around 200 workers, filed a request on Friday with the Administrative Labor Tribunal (TAT) which could confirm the creation of a union, we learned The newspaper.
“It’s thanks to us that Amazon is one of the richest companies in the world. We deserve working conditions that match our contribution,” judges an employee who wishes to remain anonymous.
According to him, it was the salary, the lack of job security and health and safety issues at work that motivated workers to regroup.
“Because of the pace of work, there is a gap between Amazon’s safety theory and reality, which means people get injured quite often,” he illustrates.
Employees, who are mostly new arrivals, rarely report their injuries because they fear losing their position.
“We don’t know what the criteria for permanence are. People therefore have the impression that they have to work hard to have access to permanence and therefore to insurance,” explains the man who participated in the creation of the union.
Very few successes
Workers at the DXT4 warehouse in Laval are those who have gone furthest in the process of creating a union at Amazon, in Quebec.
If the TAT approves their request for accreditation, they would become the first union members of the American giant in Canada.
Amazon employs more than a million workers in North America, but only those at the Staten Island, New York, warehouse are unionized.
Several other worker groups have failed in their efforts, including in Edmonton, Alberta.
“We know that with Amazon, it won’t be easy. We are ready to fight the battle,” says the president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN), Caroline Senneville.
The union center will have to prove to the Court that more than 50% of the warehouse associates, which excludes delivery workers, want to unionize.
“What we think will happen unfortunately is that Amazon will challenge the list of employees, the number of employees. We know that they are going to interfere, that there will be attempts at intimidation,” believes M.me Senneville.
In 2022, the CSN led unionization in another Amazon warehouse located in Lachine, but this has not yet been successful.
The central union had also contacted the TAT to denounce the company’s interference in the campaign.
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