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As Amazon prepares to shutter its operations in Québec, laying off over 4,500 Amazon workers and partnered delivery workers, Science for the People, No Tech for Apartheid, and the Tech Workers’ Coalition stand in solidarity with affected workers and endorse the “Ici, on boycott Amazon” campaign at boycottamazon.ca.
The recently unionized DXT-4 warehouse in Laval, Québec was set to become the first Amazon warehouse in the world to win a collective agreement, which would have improved the working conditions of hundreds of employees and given workers greater democratic power over operating decisions. On January 21st, faced with spreading labour militancy and unique provisions in Québec’s labour code, Amazon chose to shutter all seven of its Québec warehouses in a stunning move meant to punish unionized workers and send a clear message of intimidation to Amazon employees worldwide. This decision must be understood as a brutal and calculated offensive against the growing tide of militant labour organizing, and an injury to workers everywhere.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) identifies Amazon as a critical pressure target. In addition to perfecting automated surveillance and demerit point-based hiring and firing systems at its warehouses, Amazon provides cloud services used by the Israeli military to facilitate the automated targeting and mass killing of Palestinian civilians.[1] Now, the very same union-busting and surveillance technologies perfected at Amazon’s warehouses are being deployed by US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport migrant workers and families, despite growing internal resistance from Amazon’s own employees.[2]
Amazon must be made to pay dearly for its systematic union-busting and its complicity in genocide and deportation. To that end, we call for:
1. A consumer boycott: We call on our members and our readership to follow the demands of the BoycottAmazon.ca campaign which presently include a Canada-wide consumer boycott: stop purchasing from Amazon, close your Amazon accounts, and end Prime Video subscriptions immediately.
2. An institutional boycott: We call on workers to ensure that their research groups, institutions, and places of employment stop purchasing goods and services from Amazon. We call on workers across Canada to seek an organizational endorsement of the Boycott Amazon campaign within your respective unions, institutions, and places of work, which should include a resolution to discontinue all institutional services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
3. Class solidarity: We call on the privileged stratum of technology workers to develop solidarity with all strata of the working class by following BoycottAmazon.ca’s campaign demands, by joining local picket efforts, and by organizing work refusals, tech disruptions, work slowdowns, education on surveillance technologies, and counter-recruitment actions that target Amazon’s operations.
4. Political education: We call on all workers and organizers to learn from, replicate, develop, and materially support the successful labour organizing strategies of Amazon warehouse and logistics workers on the ground. Amazon has pioneered union-busting strategies and surveillance technology that will shape the battle terrain for organized labour and migrant workers for years to come, which is precisely why successful organizing campaigns at facilities such as Laval’s DXT-4 and Staten Island’s JFK-8 must be studied, popularized, and replicated around the world.
Until every last Amazon worker is unionized! Until Palestine is free!
Support the campaign at BoycottAmazon.ca!
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