Walmart warehouse workers in Mississauga became the first in Canada to unionize with Unifor on Sept. 10, beating back the company’s notorious union-busting methods.
There are rumors that workers at other Walmart facilities are looking to sign union cards too.
Rising profits, rising discontent
Walmart’s sales and profits have soared over the past year, effectively as the retailer of last-resort for discount essential products like food and clothes.
Predictably, this has put a strain on the company’s staff. While they are paid little more than minimum wage and have few benefits, their workloads have increased and their workdays have gotten longer. They can see that without their labour, nothing moves. And yet they are struggling to make ends meet, while the retail giant reaps record profits. This is a finished recipe for discontent.
Walmart is one of North America’s largest employers. It has spent years building up an infamous union-busting regime—flying its self-described anti-union “SWAT team” from store to store to threaten pro-union workers.The company’s founder, Sam Walton even boasted about its “union free” “culture” where management has absolute control over all of its sites, free from the “divisive” influence of the workers movement.
But, increasingly, this “culture” is breaking down.
Union drives spreading
In Mississauga, one of Canada’s most-important logistics hubs, the union secured a decisive majority. Nearly 500 of the facility’s 800 workers voted to unionize. And, just 300 voted against.
Unifor has called the Mississauga vote a “beacon of hope for unorganized workers across the country.”
As one local newspaper observed: “the successful campaign in Mississauga has spurred interest from Walmart employees in other regions.”
Already, workers at Walmart’s Cornwall warehouse—which operates logistics for most of its stores in Eastern Ontario—appear set for their own union vote. As the Cornwall Seeker summarized it, these workers are tired of Walmart’s “high-paced, physically demanding environment” and they are looking to follow the Mississauga plant’s lead.
Inevitably, Walmart will try to block these efforts and undermine prospective union drives. Over the past few decades, the company has managed to strangle union drives in Windsor and Jonquiere, Quebec.
But this only means we cannot succeed without a determined fight.
The labour movement needs to seize on this momentum and initiate the broadest possible organizing drive. Walmart may have a history of threatening to close a few unionized stores and shift its operations to fight union drives. But it cannot close all of its facilities.
Walmart, moreover, cannot operate without its warehouses. These sites are massive and—given their dependence on the location of highways, airports and the like—they are especially difficult to relocate. Logistics hubs like Cornwall and Mississauga also have enormous potential for the labour movement, if union leaders carry out a determined campaign to unionize them. These areas have grown steadily on the basis of low-wage logistics and warehousing. Increasingly the workers in these areas are looking to organize—to fight wage cuts, speed ups and layoffs.
The labour movement must welcome these workers into the fight to improve wages and conditions for all.
Victory to the Walmart workers!
