'The most fundamental right a worker has in Canada is to decide whether the workplace is unionized or not'
A group of Amazon employees is pushing back against being unionized in B.C.
They originally filed a decertification application with the BC Labour Relations Board on July 14, and a board-supervised vote was held about a week later, the Globe and Mail reported.
On Aug. 4, the board ordered binding arbitration to settle a first contract between Amazon and Unifor Local 114, which represents roughly 800 employees at the company's YVR2 fulfillment centre.
Days after the arbitration order, the group revived its campaign, asking the board to release the vote results before any collective agreement takes effect.
A letter dated Aug. 11, obtained by the Globe and Mail and circulated within the Delta warehouse, asserts that more than half of employees do not want union representation. It was signed only by a "representative for certain employees," and it remains unclear how many workers support it.
"The most fundamental right a worker has in Canada is to decide whether the workplace is unionized or not," the letter stated, according to the Globe and Mail. "And that right is protected by a secret ballot government supervised vote." Amazon has pointed to this unresolved question as grounds for its appeal.
Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said the company is appealing the board's order and asking it to halt the process until a separate decertification issue is resolved.
Ruling, certification order
Associate Chair Andres Barker had issued the ruling, rejecting Amazon's request to let the parties test their positions through a strike or lockout, and ordered instead that the agreement be settled by a single arbitrator, to be chosen by the parties within seven days or appointed by the board.
The board found that Amazon's own bargaining conduct, layered on a prior remedial certification for anti-union activity, justified stripping the company of its right to lock out employees.
Barker was careful to note that the outcome should not be treated as an automatic consequence of the earlier certification order. "The corollary of a remedial certification order should not be an automatic direction that a first collective agreement be determined by arbitration," he wrote, adding that each case turns on its own facts.
Mediator’s findings
A mediator appointed under Section 55 of the Labour Relations Code had already concluded in June that the parties could not reach a deal on their own, pointing to Amazon's proposals on productivity, quality, and attendance management.
The mediator found that Amazon sought to have the union accept existing policies as reasonable while reserving the right to change them to match non-union sites elsewhere, an approach he wrote "neuters the union from any input into these topics even though its members apparently have issues with them."
Amazon argued this reflected hard bargaining rather than bad faith, and that an employer is entitled to reject proposals it opposes, according to Canadian HR Reporter. The board, however, found that arbitration was independently justified under its longstanding Yarrow Lodge test, which permits imposed arbitration where a dispute is bitter and protracted enough that the parties are unlikely to reach a settlement on their own.
Amazon also argued that denying it the right to lock out employees violated its freedom of expression under section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, citing a 2016 Ontario decision on back-to-work legislation. The board accepted that a lockout could engage section 2(b) values in principle, but found that ordering arbitration in this case reflected a proportional balancing of the Labour Relations Code's objectives against the Charter right at issue.
