Unifor launches union drive for Amazon warehouses in Toronto area

Unifor is launching an organizing drive for thousands of Amazon AMZN-Q workers across warehouses in the Greater Toronto Area in an effort to replicate its success in unionizing a facility in British Columbia last year.

Amazon has more than 1,000 warehouses globally, mostly concentrated in the U.S. and Canada. Only two of them are unionized – one in Staten Island, N.Y., and the other in Delta, B.C. However, neither has a collective agreement that can be enforced yet. Amazon and Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, are embroiled in a tense legal dispute in B.C. over terms of a contract, while a separate group of workers in that warehouse is trying to decertify the union.

The organizing drive launches on Wednesday and will involve simultaneous outreach to workers in all Amazon facilities across Ontario.

“If there are workers in the world that need to be unionized right now, it is Amazon workers,” Lana Payne, Unifor national president, said in an interview. “They are up against one of the biggest, richest, most powerful corporations in the world and the way to counterbalance that is for them to be able to have a say in improving their own working conditions.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Payne said Unifor has been talking to Amazon workers for months. The move to formalize union drives across all GTA warehouses was urgent and necessary, she said, citing working conditions at Amazon facilities.

Specifically, she referred to rising injury rates among workers. Data from Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board shows that injury rates at Amazon facilities across the province nearly tripled between 2020 and 2025.

Brandon Hart, who has worked at various Amazon warehouses across the GTA since 2017, said that observing worker injuries and the speed at which they work to pick up and load boxes motivated him to begin pushing for improvements to worker safety.

Two years ago, he joined a facility health and safety committee run by Amazon managers at YYZ9, a warehouse in Scarborough, east of Toronto. He began organizing workers to speak up to highlight what he believed was a “serious lack of accommodation” for injured workers.

Jevorne Dickson worked at an Amazon warehouse in Bolton, Ont., between 2022 and 2024, before getting injured when a heavy box fell on her foot. She has been out of work since, unable to find a job that allows her to work part-time hours, given her limited mobility. She is trying to rally current employees at the Bolton warehouse to join Unifor. She described her work as a box picker as “gruelling.”

“I worked a 10-hour shift with a 30-minute break. You have to work fast. There were some days where I would do 30,000 to 40,000 steps … it takes a toll on your body,” she said.

Airline executives praise Ottawa’s proposed labour disruption provisions at C-39 hearings

Unifor has considerable experience organizing warehouse workers in Ontario. This past September, the union successfully negotiated a first collective agreement for more than 800 Walmart workers at a distribution facility in Mississauga, Ont. The two-year contract secured wage gains of $5 an hour in workers’ first year, and a 3-per-cent wage bump in the second year.

But forming a union in Ontario is not straightforward, and involves multiple layers of voting. Workers are first required to sign cards authorizing the union to represent them, and if at least 40 per cent of workers sign, the provincial labour board will hold a vote. If a majority of workers vote in favour of unionizing, then a union is certified as a bargaining agent for that workplace.

Unions and labour experts have long criticized the two-step process, saying that it effectively makes it more difficult to form unions, especially in workplaces where employee turnover rate is high.

British Columbia introduced single-step certification in 2022, meaning that a majority of workers only need to sign a union card once before a union is certified by a labour board. At the time, the provincial NDP government said the legislation was designed to minimize interference by employers in union drives. Since then, B.C.’s unionization rate has increased from 28 per cent in 2021 to 30.5 per cent in 2025, according to data from Statistics Canada.