Walmart workers at Ontario facility vote to join Unifor

Walmart workers at a Mississauga, Ont., warehouse have cleared a key hurdle in their fight to become the retailer’s first unionized depot in Canada.

Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, announced Friday that a majority of the 800 workers at the site west of Toronto had voted in favour of unionization earlier in the week.

The vote must still be certified by the Ontario Labour Relations Board before the workers can elect a bargaining committee and seek a collective agreement.

Walmart Canada is reviewing its next steps, company spokesperson Stephanie Fusco said in an email.

The retail giant has the ability to fight the certification, a move Unifor’s president was expecting.

“They employ a lot of lawyers, so I’m sure they’re all thinking about what it is they can do here right now because this is a pretty big win,” Lana Payne said in an interview.

Michael Lynk, a professor emeritus of law at Western University, figured Walmart could have limited ways to try to fight the certification because a union as experienced as Unifor would have likely followed laws stringently and ensured it had enough support to move forward.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if (Walmart) may try to find arguments to raise at their forthcoming hearing of the labour relations board, but my experience is that those arguments rarely ever are successful,” he said.

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“What Walmart will now do is probably turn to how to get as cheap a collective agreement as possible.”

It’s a battle the company has waged before.

When store workers in Windsor, Ont., and Jonquiere, Que., organized in the mid-2000s, Lynk said the company was able to get the upper hand on the unions and, in each case, the union was subsequently decertified.

The Jonquiere store closed in 2005, with Walmart saying it was unable to reach a tentative agreement with the union. In the case of the Windsor store, Lynk said the union lost most of the support of the unionized workers and was never able to get a first collective agreement.

The Mississauga unionization drive is different because it has targeted warehouse workers in picking, packing and maintenance jobs, whose ranks have steadily climbed with the growth of e-commerce.

Many of these employees have long bemoaned challenging working conditions, a lack of benefits and poor pay when compared with the gargantuan profits their employers make.

At the Walmart distribution centre in Mississauga, Payne said workers were trying to organize since December in order to improve their health and safety, scheduling, vacation allotments and wages.

“Corporations like Walmart make a lot of money and basically workers are saying, ‘We just want a fair share here,'” Payne said.

Fusco said Walmart’s culture is founded on “transparency, honesty, and direct dialogue with our associates, without involving individuals outside of our organization who don’t know our culture or our business.”

What Payne heard from Walmart workers, however, was similar to the refrain during unionization drives Unifor has been involved with in recent years at Amazon.com Inc.’s warehouses as well as efforts seen at Starbucks and Indigo Books & Music locations.

Many of these companies have staunchly fought unionization drives. A push at a warehouse operated by Amazon in Metro Vancouver, for example, has left Unifor with a sealed ballot box while the e-commerce giant quibbles over the legitimacy of the vote.

While unionizing workers at warehouses belonging to such wealthy retail giants can be difficult, the large number of staff at these facilities make organizing both attractive and economically viable, Lynk said.

Plus, finding success at one of these facilities could translate to wins at others.

Payne expects the vote at the Walmart warehouse in Mississauga to inspire staff at the retailer’s other sites along with workers in similar roles at other companies to want to sign union cards.

“What these workers have done with their courage and their determination has shown a lot of workers everywhere what’s possible right now,” she said.

“That’s how big this is.”