What we witnessed yesterday in Parc-Extension was the birth of a new labor movement,” said Mostafa Henaway, community organizer at the Migrant Workers Center, addressing last night’s rally organized by the IWC-CTI’s Amazon Workers Committee. “These workers—many of them immigrants and temporary foreign workers—are exposing how billion-dollar corporations exploit loopholes in Quebec’s labor laws to crush unionization efforts.”
Québec Solidaire MNA Andrés Fontecilla, who condemned the lack of protections, said on his Facebook page, “I was present yesterday at the rally organized by the IWC-CTI of Montreal’s Amazon workers committee in Parc-Extension. First of all, I was there to highlight the courage, strength, and determination of this mobilization for workers’ rights!
Henaway highlighted the cruel irony of Amazon’s practices: “While Jeff Bezos makes a warehouse worker’s annual salary in 11 seconds, his company withholds termination paperwork to deny unemployment benefits. This is wage theft disguised as bureaucracy.”
Fontecilla added that “Amazon is one of the richest companies on the planet. His CEO earns in seconds what his warehouse workers earn in a year.
Despite this obscene wealth, Amazon refuses to respect the most basic rights of its employees. His business model does not support the simple principle of the right to unionize. So Amazon chooses bullying, repression, and then mass firing to silence those who dare to stand up. And unfortunately, in Quebec, there is no framework for mass layoffs. Big companies can do whatever they want, no matter what.
Do you think it stops there? Of course not. I’ve learned that the company has not provided all the termination documents yet. This has consequences, for example, for ex-employees who cannot claim unemployment insurance! Amazon is washing their hands; this is unacceptable, and we will not stand idle!
Here in Quebec, women and workers have been fighting for generations to build a society where rights are respected, people are treated with dignity, and businesses—no matter how big—are held accountable. We cannot allow a multinational to dictate its own rules and trample on these hard-earned rights.”
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