Amazon’s decision to suddenly close all seven of its distribution centres in Quebec in the face of successful unionization looks like yet another example of the ferocious anti-unionism of U.S. corporations.
The extreme income disparity we see today is largely due to now-standard anti-union practices. Not only can companies discipline employees to expect less, they can also push governments to roll back corporate taxes and costly regulations or face the consequences. It is one of the reasons why there are so many billionaires today, Jeff Bezos included.
American trade unionists used to call companies that closed shop to rid themselves of unions “runaway shops.” It is an apt term. Workers would arrive one day to find the door shut or the gate locked. Laws had to be passed in Quebec and Ontario requiring companies to give advance notice — something that was strongly resisted in the United States.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, many Canadian manufacturers moved from the highly unionized cities to small towns and rural areas where wages were lower. But the unions followed in a giant game of cat and mouse.
For example, Lowney Chocolate Company, maker of the now discontinued Cherry Blossom (a sweet memory of childhood for many of us), shut its Griffintown plant in 1962, after it was unionized, moving to Sherbrooke. Determined not to let them get away with it, the local union pursued the employer and organized the new plant.
Unions were relatively lucky in Canada as there was largely no hiding. Labour laws were more or less the same across the country.
Nova Scotia, however, was an outlier as it convinced Michelin, an infamous anti-union company from France, to build three auto tire plants in 1971 with the promise that they’d keep the union out. A special law was passed requiring unions to win a vote at all three plants simultaneously to be certified. Something they have not managed to do.
U.S. unions were nowhere near as lucky. President Franklin Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, which made it much easier to organize. However, Congress then passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which permits individual states to declare themselves “right-to-work” states and thus make it considerably harder for unions to organize. The South did so quickly, and offered huge public subsidies for companies to move jobs there. It effectively industrialized the region and contributed enormously to the deindustrialization of the Northeast and Midwest.
There was a non-union paradise just down the U.S. interstate highway.
Things only got worse since the 1980s with global trade liberalization and free trade. North American companies off-shored much of their production to low-wage countries. Meanwhile, new trade agreements aimed to insulate investors from democratic interference, placing limits to democratic intervention in the economy.
It is not a matter of a bad actor, but a bad system. Amazon’s actions in Quebec last week are par for the course in the U.S. There, labour law once gave some protection against employers who closed plants because they were anti-union. But even this was overturned by the (otherwise liberal) U.S. Supreme Court in a series of decisions ending with First National Maintenance decision of 1981, which enabled companies to close for any reason. It made a mockery of the right of workers to unionize.
Unions have been eviscerated in the past few decades. According to Statistics Canada, the percentage of workers who belong to a union has fallen from 38 per cent in 1981 to 29 per cent in 2022. It is only this high because 70 per cent of the public sector is unionized. Things are far, far worse in the U.S. where unionization has collapsed to just 10 per cent. And, there too, it is only this high because one-third of the public sector is unionized.
