Amazon’s message to workers is clear, writes Jim Stanford. Don’t even think about demanding better wages and conditions—we will shut you down and destroy your life. Photo by Elliott Brown/Flickr.

Terrorism is defined as an act of violence, usually harming innocents, that is motivated by a political or ideological goal.

By that standard, Amazon’s decision to shut all seven of its warehouses (euphemistically called ‘fulfilment centres’) in Québec, to avoid unionization at one of those warehouses, is an act of economic terrorism.

The lives of the 1,700 workers losing their jobs will be deeply damaged; some will never recover. The pain will be shared by their families and their communities.

Those workers were clearly innocent in the chain of events that led to the shutdowns. A union was formed and certified last year at one warehouse (in Laval). Workers at the other six warehouses were bystanders, but are now collateral damage in Amazon’s union-busting.

But even the unionized workers at the Laval warehouse are innocent—contrary to corporate apologists who say it’s their own fault for daring to demand better treatment. Those workers were simply exercising their democratic rights to organize collectively, and negotiate with their employer for improvements in their demanding, dangerous jobs.

It is a long-standing and accepted premise in Canadian constitutional and labour law that workers must have the opportunity to freely assemble in unions, so they can negotiate collectively with their employers. This is necessary to at least partially offset the inherent imbalance in power between individual workers and their employers.

After all, workers need their employer more than the employer needs any single one of them. Workers’ economic survival depends on finding and keeping a job, but employers can almost always replace any individual worker with someone else. In that unbalanced context, wages will tend toward subsistence, unless supported by collective bargaining power and/or labour regulation (such as minimum wages).

This power imbalance between workers and employers, common across capitalism, is extreme in the case of Amazon. Amazon is the world’s second-largest private employer: global employment in 2024 reached over 1.5 million workers. And that doesn’t count hundreds of thousands of others who work for Amazon in non-standard employment arrangements (and consequently aren’t deemed ‘employees’): like drivers in its gig-based Amazon Flex delivery network, and other precarious contractors.

In many communities, Amazon comes close to constituting a ‘monopsony’: that is, a firm so concentrated and powerful that it can dictate terms to its suppliers (like workers), in the same way that a monopoly can dictate terms to its customers. This power explains why workers at one of the most profitable corporations in the world have been unable to capture any of that extraordinary surplus for themselves. And why starting wages in a demanding, dangerous, and skilled job at an Amazon warehouse languish only slightly above provincial minimums.

To counter this inherent power imbalance, the rights of workers to form unions, freely negotiate, and take action in support of bargaining demands have been reaffirmed by repeated

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