Eight hundred workers at an Amazon warehouse in Delta, B.C. are fighting to defend their union. While there have been other attempts to unionize at Amazon, workers at Delta could be the first to actually force Amazon into a collective agreement. Of course, the $2.5-trillion company is doing everything it can to stop them. Their latest move is a decertification campaign.
Amazon’s history as an aggressively anti-union company is well known. While workers at the Staten Island fulfillment centre famously formed the Amazon Labour Union in 2022, the company has been stonewalling them ever since. They are still without a contract to this day.
Meanwhile in Canada, Amazon closed all seven of its warehouses in Quebec in 2025, following a union drive with the Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN), resulting in the loss of 1,800 jobs.
The struggle of the workers at the warehouse in Delta B.C. began in 2024. By February, Amazon had deployed a “rapid response team” of managers pulled from across North America to come to B.C. to intimidate workers.
The workers were subjected to a barrage of anti-union messages and meetings from Amazon. The fulfillment centre went on a hiring spree to try to flood out pro-union sentiment. They tried to put on a friendly face by temporarily relaxing productivity quotas and throwing pizza parties. In May 2024, the union vote was held but Amazon piled on a series of legal challenges. All of this backfired in July 2025 when the Labour Relations Board found that Amazon committed unlawful anti-union activities; and automatically certified the union.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Amazon stalled in contract negotiations for a year, refusing to budge on even the most basic demands. They did not want to let the contract determine the wages at all! On Aug. 4, 2026, the B.C. Labour Relations Board (BCLRB) ordered binding arbitration to force a first contract. Mere days later, a group of unidentified “workers” began demanding decertification for the union and Amazon is asking the BCLRB to stop the bargaining until this issue is resolved.
As part of this blatant maneuver, Amazon put up a website filled with anti-union rhetoric to try to sway the workers. In their video message, they say that Amazon wants to “maintain the flexibility and operational model that has served us well.” We have no doubt that Amazon wants to maintain the brutal quotas, overtime hours, and unsafe work practices that have served “us” well; neglecting the fact that “us” in this case is the bosses.
The complete untrammeled exploitation of their 1.2 million employees in North America is central to the incredible profits reaped by their shareholders. This is why they are prepared to go all the way to the end to stop unionization. That means that the workers must be prepared to go just as far to defend their interests.
The way to fight against a boss like that is not in the courts, but with class struggle. The 800 workers have the power to shut down the warehouse with a strike and hit Bezos where it really hurts—in his wallet.
But the struggle cannot stop at a single warehouse. Amazon could just close up shop in retaliation, like it did in Quebec. If Bezos tries to shut down warehouses, the workers should occupy them, and UNIFOR, which this union is part of, should put its full weight behind building a movement to demand that Amazon be expropriated, with no compensation. If an employer is allowed to close up shop when workers unionize, it’s the entire union movement that is threatened.
If Bezos is willing to lay off thousands of workers in order to protect his ability to hyper exploit the working class, we should take away his right to rule. By nationalizing Amazon under workers’ control, we could guarantee good jobs for all Amazon workers, and use its infrastructure to plan the economy for need instead of for profit. Politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Avi Lewis have already popularized the demand for public grocery stores—this presents a golden opportunity to expropriate Amazon’s infrastructure and start building massive public grocery store infrastructure now! That is the socialist solution.
