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Amazon Lays Off 4,500 Workers In Quebec To Bust Their Union

February 8, 2025 François L’Écuyer, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
Faced with the prospect of being forced to sign a labor contract as early as this summer, Amazon has gone to extreme lengths to evade its obligations under Quebec’s labor code. On January 22, it announced it is closing all seven of its warehouses in Quebec and outsourcing their operations. Is Amazon closing shop? Not really. It will continue selling its wares online in Quebec; It’s just that warehousing and delivery will now be handled by third-party contractors. But the 4,700 layoffs are very real: 1,900 Amazon employees across the seven warehouses are losing their jobs, including the 230 workers at DXT4, which became the first Amazon facility in Canada to unionize in May 2024.

Closures In Quebec Show Amazon Is Scared Of Workers Organizing

January 30, 2025 Pola Posen, Left Voice. , , , , , , , ,
The workers at a Whole Foods location in Center City, Philadelphia, voted to form the grocery chain’s first-ever union on Monday, marking an incredible victory for workers who have been organizing at the store for over a year. Whole Foods was bought by Amazon in 2017, and since then benefits, staffing levels, and working conditions have gotten worse. 130 workers voted in favor of unionizing with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), while 100 voted against. Through the union, workers are demanding a living wage (the starting salary is currently only $16/hour), better benefits, and more protections.

Québec Workers Conduct Largest Strike Ever

January 9, 2024 Shannon Ikebe, Labor Notes. , , , ,
One of the largest strikes in North American history happened this winter and the struggle is ongoing. In Québec, 420,000 public sector workers in health care and education, united in a “Common Front” (Front Commun) of four major union federations, spent seven days on strike December 8-14. This followed half-day and three-day work stoppages in November. In addition to the Common Front, 66,500 workers in one of the teachers unions—la Féderation Autonome d’Enseignement (FAE)—were on strike for more than a month and more than 80,000 workers with a nurses union, la Fédération Interprofessionelle de la Santé du Québec (FIQ), struck December 11-14.

Québec Public Sector Workers Are Ready For A General Strike

September 29, 2023 Lital Khaikin, Canadian Dimension. , , , ,
Fed up with the deterioration of public services under the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government, thousands took to the streets to demand fair pay, improved benefits, and better working conditions while unions negotiated new collective agreements with the province. The coalition of unions—including the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), the Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ), the FTQ, and the Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et services sociaux (APTS)—is known as the “common front,” or front commun, and represents over 420,000 workers in Québec’s public schools, health care and social services sectors.

How Co-ops Are Transforming Quebec’s Food Deserts

November 30, 2022 RuIrene Pratka, Resilience. , , , ,
Montreal, Québec, Canada - In French, the word for food processing is the same as the word for sweeping social change: transformation. Alex Beaudin dreams of doing both. Beaudin, 25, is the coordinator of Le Grénier Boréal, an agricultural co-op in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan, a village of around 450 people in northeastern Quebec, 550 miles northeast of Montreal. Longue-Pointe is one of about 20 villages strung like beads on a necklace, between Route 138 and the vast St. Lawrence River. The highway and the river are the villages’ lifelines, and depending on either one for supply shipments — as the Nord-Côtiers do — can be maddening. Ferry service is unreliable; a damaged ship can cause weeks of disruption.

Québec Student Strike

November 17, 2016 Stefan Christoff, www.beautifultrouble.org , ,
By Stefan Christoff for Beautiful Trouble - In 2012, Québec students managed to reverse a major tuition hike and a draconian anti-protest law through direct democracy, creative tactics, and mass demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people. In 2012, Québec students managed to reverse a major tuition hike and a draconian anti-protest law through the practice of direct democracy, creative tactics, and mass demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people.

Quebec Mayors Unite Against Bill They Say Poses Threat To Drinking Water

August 29, 2016 Staff, www.montreal.ctvnews.ca ,
By Staff of CTV News - Several Quebec mayors are vowing to fight a new law that they say would take away their power to protect their communities’ drinking water. Bill 106 is meant to provide a framework for energy exploration in the province but the mayors said it gives too much power to oil companies to push ahead even in regions that oppose them. “Right now, we have oil companies that have claims on territory,” said Anticosti Mayor John Pineault. “Those claims are going to change categories. They’re going to become a property if they wish.”

Quebec’s Strike Wave Rolls Toward A Showdown

November 12, 2015 Ashley Smith, www.socialistworker.org ,
Workers in the Canadian province of Quebec are mobilizing the largest struggle against austerity in North America. Public-sector workers across Quebec have hit the picket lines for a wave of strikes to defend jobs, wages, working conditions and public services. In the first round of rotating regional strikes from October 26-29, more than 400,000 unionists organized in the Common Front shut down schools, hospitals and government offices in and around Montreal. Independently, the Fédération autonome de l'eseignement (FAE) led its 34,000 French language teachers in three days of rotating strikes on October 26-28.

The “Longue Durée” Of The Québec Spring

April 30, 2015 Pierre Beaudet, www.socialistproject.ca , ,
This new “Québec spring” is neither a marginal nor a momentary reaction to any particular government's policy. In 2012, there certainly was the specific trigger of the tuition hike prompting a major student strike. But a closer look at what happened shows that several steps in the prior decade allowed for the movement to gain strength. In 2000 for instance, the Québec women's federation (Fédération des femmes du Québec, FFQ) organized a very important movement for advancing the condition of women. In 2001, the “Americas People's Summit” in Québec City and the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) promoted by the Canadian and U.S. governments led to the renewed wave of protest across the hemisphere, and the eventual defeat of the FTAA.

Montreal Students Now Fighting Austerity With ‘Occupy’ Reboot

April 25, 2015 Brigitte Noel and Simon Coutu, www.vice.com , , ,
In an effort to breathe new life into the somewhat dwindling anti-austerity movement, nearly 100 students have set up a makeshift campsite outside a Montreal CÉGEP school. In Quebec, protests against the provincial Liberal government's austerity measures have been becoming smaller yet increasingly creative, with events like a non-mixed feminist march, the UQAM occupation—which led to violent mayhem and the arrest of more than a dozen students—and a "die-in" in opposition to health-care cuts that would threaten access to abortion. But CÉGEP de Saint Laurent students—most between 16 and 20 years old—claim these methods are no longer cutting it, and have opted to build a more "permanent" symbol of their dissent. As of Thursday, more than 60 tents lined the school grounds.

Anonymous Shuts Down Montreal Police Site Against Brutality

April 13, 2015 Waqas, www.hackread.com , , ,
The infamous online hacker group Anonymous’ Quebec branch has taken the credit for penetrating the Montreal Police department website and the officers’ union. On Friday, at 10:30PM, the Montreal police website went down and minutes later the Montreal police brotherhood also was shut down. The Police department website remained off until Saturday. According to a tweet from Anonymous, the group targeted police because of the brutality accusations when thousands of students took to the streets to protest against the recent austerity measures. The hacker collective also identified that it will “ruin the life” of an officer who was seen pepper spraying protesters in Montreal.

Protesters Stage Night Occupation Of UQAM Building

April 9, 2015 Rene Bruemmer and Monique Muise, www.montrealgazette.com , ,
More than 250 students at the Université du Québec à Montréal occupied a building Wednesday night where, during the afternoon, police arrested 21 protesters. Shortly before midnight, 150 remaining students said they intended to stay the night. Police had massed discreetly outside, but said they had no intention of intervening. School administrators called for police aid twice during the day to dispel demonstrators who were attempting to disrupt classes. On their second visit of the day, police arrested 11 women and 10 men at around 3 p.m. During a tense standoff between students and police officers in the basement of the J.-A.-DeSève building on Ste-Catherine St. near St-Denis St., professors stepped in between lines of police officers and students, and managed to defuse the situation.

Protests Shut Down Austerity At Point Of Production

April 7, 2015 Jonathan Leavitt, www.truth-out.org , , ,
On March 21st, the first day of spring, Quebec students went on strike over the Liberal Couillard government’s austerity policies; those numbers swelled to over 60,000 striking students by Monday the 23rd. Approximately 140,000 total Cegep (pre-university vocational college), college and university students will hold strike votes with renewable mandates this spring. As the constituent power and momentum of the strike builds one general assembly at a time, at least 105,000 students have voted to shut it down at the point of production on April 2nd.Printemp 2015 is attempting to unite striking student unions with 400,000 public sector workers in contract negotiations in a province-wide “social strike” May 1st.

Quebec’s Long Struggle To Build A Democratic Left Party

April 6, 2015 Pierre Beaudet and Richard Fidler, www.rabble.ca , , , ,
In 1971, I worked at the Montréal Central Council of the CSN, where my mentor Michel Chartrand was president. Maligned as an anarcho-syndicalist, he embodied the left opposition in the CSN. He enraged the right wing in the central, which split in 1972 to found the Centrale des syndicats démocratiques (CSD). Chartrand was even beaten up by some thugs during a meeting of the CSN Confederal Council. His relations with Pepin were not cordial. Pepin never indicated any support for him during his lengthy imprisonment under the War Measures Act. Chartrand criticized him above all for not really believing in the "second front." Notwithstanding his outspoken personality in public, the private Chartrand was a humanist, an assiduous reader with a great love of art and a fine taste for good food and wine.

Four Reasons Québec Is On The Streets Fighting Austerity

April 1, 2015 David Gray-Donald, www.rabble.ca , , ,
Night demonstrations -- a fixture in the 2012 Quebec student movement -- were held on Tuesday in Montreal and Quebec City, and again on Friday in Montreal, with thousands filling the streets as well as hundreds of armoured police. The mobilization against austerity measures was met by strong police reaction. On Thursday of the same week, the Quebec Liberal government tabled a budget "balanced" by large cuts to education, health care and other social services spending. A Popular Protest Against Austerity and the Petro-Economy was held on Saturday March 21 with between 5,000 - 10,000 taking to the streets of Montreal. The event was repeated with another large turnout on Saturday, March 28, with more protests held in Montreal and around Quebec.
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