Canadian Workers Win First Walmart Warehouse Union North of Mexico

Eight hundred workers near Toronto have won the first Walmart warehouse union in Canada or the U.S.

“Honestly I was pretty nervous at first because I didn’t want to lose my job,” said 29-year employee Rodolfo Pilozo, a member of “Team Red,” the organizing committee behind the September victory.

The Walmart distribution center is in Mississauga, Ontario, an hour from the western New York border. Workers there began organizing last December to join Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union.

Forty percent signed union cards over the summer. Pilozo cited low wages and pressure to work dangerously fast as the main concerns that pushed him and his co-workers to organize.

The retail giant Walmart is not only the biggest private employer in the U.S., but also the biggest in the world. In Canada it has 400 stores and 100,000 workers.

Red-Shirt Wednesdays

Team Red initiated a red-shirt Wednesday, so workers could join even if they didn’t have a Unifor shirt, said Angela Drew Kimelman, an organizer with the union. She said the committee formed after a worker called the union’s organizing hotline.

“We started wearing red [Unifor] hats or red buttons on our shift, and other co-workers would come talk to us about it,” Pilozo said.

“Sometimes I would help hand out the leaflets in the parking lot. When other co-workers saw me and other workers there, and not just the union staff, they started rolling down their windows more and talking to us more.”

Public Organizing Committee

To protect its organizing committee, the union deployed an unconventional tactic: telling the company who was on it.

Unifor sent “protection letters” to Walmart, informing the company that a worker committee was active at the warehouse, naming many of its members, and stating that the union wouldn’t hesitate to file unfair labor practice charges if Walmart violated their rights.

Under Canadian labor law, a union may be automatically certified if the employer is found to have violated labor rights during the organizing campaign — for instance, by harassing worker-organizers or preventing them from talking about the union during non-work hours. This is similar to the precedent set last year in the U.S. under the National Labor Relations Board’s Cemex decision.

In Ontario, the union found the letters helped to get management to back off.

That isn’t to say Walmart ignored the union drive. The company put out its own messages to discourage people from voting yes — including, Pilozo said, hanging up a banner that told workers they could still vote no even if they had signed a union card requesting the election.

Walmart is notoriously anti-union — famous, among other things, for maintaining a special hotline for managers to call at the first inkling of union activity.

In the past, when workers in Quebec managed to organize a union at two stores, the company closed the stores, despite Canadian laws that make this illegal. In the U.S., two weeks after meat cutters at a Texas Walmart voted to unionize in 2000, the company announced it was eliminating its meat cutting department in Texas and five other states.

“You’re Just a Number”

Unifor was deliberate in reaching out to as many workers as possible in the warehouse, where a lot of the workers were new Canadians. The union recruited to the organizing committee a worker from the large Punjabi-speaking community.

“All our literature was translated into Punjabi,” said Drew Kimelman. “In some other countries, unions have different reputations. They’re not always seen as good.” It was valuable to have a member from this community join Team Red and be educated by the union, then speak to his co-workers in their own language from what he had learned.

Low wages were an important issue, but so were health and safety concerns, including workplace accidents and high indoor temperatures in the summer.

“My experience is, when you’re healthy, the company loves you,” Pilozo told the Mississauga News. “They adore you. But the minute you get injured, that’s it: you’re just a number.”

Unifor had a representative from its health and safety department meet with workers to discuss how the union could help resolve these workplace problems.

So far, the company has not made any legal challenges to the election. Next up will be the fight for a first union contract — something Walmart has managed to avoid in the rare cases when any of its Canadian workers have won representation in the past.

Unifor also hopes to use this win to organize other Walmart warehouses. It is already working on two on the other side of Ontario, in Cornwall.

The win at Walmart comes just months after the first successful union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Canada: a majority of the 200 workers at a facility outside Montreal signed cards to join the Federation of National Unions (CSN). Unifor is organizing at Amazon too.