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New Orleans In the modern economy, warehouse, distribution, and logistical work has become critical for both big box stores, e-commerce, and transportation systems moving goods between all of these nodes and customers. Some 1.2 million workers are directly employed in this sector now according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Fifteen years ago, when we were running an organizing campaign around Walmart with its workers, we tried to both encourage unionization among warehouse workers and prevent construction of new warehouses to pressure the company. They had more than twenty different types of warehouses depending on the goods and locations. Now Amazon in its dominance of e-commerce has millions of square feet of warehouse space. UPS, FedEx, and don’t forget the US Postal Service have massive computer driven and robot staffed distribution operations to link those systems with transportation by air and land. Walmart and Amazon trucks are also everywhere.
Organizers have long theorized that these warehouse and distribution centers are choke-points in the economy that might offer leverage to workers organizing. Reading case studies on these efforts in Choke Points: Logistic Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain, edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Emmanuel Ness, it was hard to feel encouraged despite the valiant efforts of workers in a number of countries, victories have been hard to win and even harder to sustain. All of this despite the well-reported abysmal condition of the workforce in these locations both here and abroad.
Talking to Mostafa Henaway, the lead organizer of the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal on Wade’s World, about the recent report their organization had done on the condition of workers in this industry there, reinforced the difficult situation of these workers. This is a significant employer in Quebec. Dollarama, the Walmart-wannabe there, has six warehouses with 20,000 workers. One of the common issues throughout North America is the number of temporary workers in these facilities frequently surpasses the complement of regular employees. The IWC estimates there are 63,000 temporary workers in Montreal area in warehouses with a disproportionate number of refugee workers in the equivalent of the HI-B program in the US, except that the employer has more control including holding the visa, making advocacy and organizing even more difficult for such precarious workers. Sectoral bargaining is allowed in many occupations that can assure minimum wages and the payment of health and social security benefits, and IWC sees this as the best policy solution. The IWC report has gotten wide publicity and is featured in the coming issue of the journal Social Policy, so they are hoping that momentum will build for reform.
In the US, the Imperial Valley of California outside of Los Angeles has been ground zero for the last fifteen years for warehouse and distribution development and worker organizing. The Warehouse Workers Center has become the key advocacy organization, emerging from the organizing efforts developed by the Change to Win Federation and SEIU, and has faced the same challenges. Nonetheless, there’s too much kindling to prevent workers getting fired up and making something happen as this sector continues to grow in our economy.