While this project remains largely focused on Amazon, for our next two articles we are focusing on another logistics giant, Walmart. Before Amazon revolutionized logistics for e-commerce, Walmart did the same for retail with its lean warehousing and supply chain system. Walmart remains one of Amazon’s main competitors internationally and in Canada. In these articles we will be analyzing Walmart Canada’s unique logistics network, Unifor’s growing campaign to organize Walmart Canada’s logistics workers and the significance of Walmart’s responses to these efforts. We believe these events have major lessons for logistics sector organizing that we intend to draw out in our analysis.
On January 30th, Walmart made the bold move of selling its entire transportation fleet to Canada Cartage, which is Canada’s largest third party logistics fleet provider. In their company announcement of the purchase, Canada Cartage claimed they were selected so Walmart can “focus on its ambitious growth strategy of expanding its stores and supply chain across Canada.” What they, Walmart and most press coverage of this sale fail to mention is that Unifor had recently unionized 96 Walmart fleet drivers in Surrey, BC in November and were scheduled for bargaining with Walmart on January 31st, the day following the sale. Canada Cartage’s purchase of their fleet simultaneously delayed bargaining for the Surrey drivers and future bargaining of the 280 additional Walmart fleet drivers in Nisku, Calgary. These drivers were in the midst of a union drive at the time of the sale that was successfully ratified just one week later on February 6th. This development was surprising considering Walmart, in both Canada and the US, has been moving away from 3PL’s by consolidating control over their fleet business in recent years. While Canada Cartage has framed the sale as a natural development of Walmart Canada’s existing growth strategy, those of us in the labour movement must understand this as part of their strategy to counter union organizing.
Unifor’s driver certification campaigns are part of an unprecedented string of successes for Walmart union organizing in North America. This started with the certification of over 800 Mississauga warehouse workers in September 2024 and continued with the Surrey and Nisku driver certifications this year. The Canada Cartage sale is a strategic response from Walmart to divide drivers and warehouse workers, both unionized and non-unionized, while complicating Unifor’s bargaining processes. This has left Unifor waiting to negotiate contracts for the unionized drivers with Canada Cartage while also simultaneously negotiating with Walmart for a contract for over 800 Warehouse workers in Mississauga. For this analysis, we break down some of Walmart and Canada Cartage’s existing fleet services to speculate on how their involvement could alter Walmart Canada’s transportation and delivery network. We then discuss some of UNIFOR’s past and ongoing organizing to speculate on how this sale could impact future campaigns.
How the Sale Could Alter Walmart Canada’s Transportation Network
Walmart Canada’s fleet consists of over 900 drivers. Their trucks primarily transport merchandise from Distribution Centres to Walmart stores across Canada, while also delivering some online customer orders. In the US Walmart has made additional investments in their own vans and in-store parcel stations for last-mile delivery, but Walmart Canada primarily relies on various gig-economy platforms and 3PL’s to get online orders to customers. These include drivers from Instacart, DoorDash, Uber Eats and Walmart’s self-created Spark app, along with other third party operators like Dragonfly, Uni Uni Logistics and FedEx. Compared to these outsourced and dispersed last mile delivery methods, Walmart Canada’s 900 fleet drivers were an attractive target for union certification campaigns due to their direct and full-time employment with the company.
Canada Cartage is one of North America’s largest supply-chain service providers, with over 4000 current employees before the addition of Walmart’s 900 additional drivers. The most obvious service Canada Cartage will be carrying out for Walmart is DC-to-store deliveries. This is one of Canada Cartage’s specialties and has been the primary function of Walmart fleet drivers who will now be working for the company. Canada Cartage already has transportation terminals in most major cities that could potentially be added to Walmart’s existing fleet terminals for their operation. They also have a truck division solely for cold storage and ambient merchandise in Western Canada and Brampton, which could potentially add extra capacity to Walmart’s existing grocery transportation abilities if they ever chose to use these in addition to their pre-existing fleet. These services are part of what they refer to as their transportation business, which is one of Canada Cartage’s two business segments.
The deal specified that Canada Cartage will employ former Walmart drivers and trucks as part of a dedicated operation to ensure business continuity. This implies their role in Walmart’s supply chain will remain largely the same while driving under a new company name. At the moment it is unclear, however, as to how much continuity or change drivers will experience in their work conditions. What we do know is that Canada Cartage has a history of underpaying and manipulating their workforce that consists mostly of recent immigrants. A class action lawsuit was filed in 2013 against the company on behalf of workers who they had forced to work overtime without fulfilling their contractual obligations to pay them overtime pay. The lawsuit included both driver and warehouse workers along with other employees. One of the truck driver plaintiffs, who had his pay arbitrarily reduced from $19.50 to $17.34 an hour in 2012 without notice, stated in 2021 that Canada Cartage “took advantage of workers’ lower education levels and ‘reverse engineer[ed]’ their paychecks to make it look like they had been paid overtime.” After a quick scan of various online trucking forums, we further learned that they have a reputation for frequent vehicle breakdowns, crashes and poor safety conditions. This history of exploiting, cheating and endangering their workforce casts doubt that Canada Cartage will respond in good faith to Unifor’s demands for predictable scheduling, ending wage freezes and ensuring more job security.
Another interesting possibility is if Walmart decides to use additional services from the second segment of Canada Cartage’s business, Canada Cartage Logistics Services (CCLS), which specializes in e-commerce fulfillment and last-mile delivery. Under this segment they have mini-FC’s in a handful of locations across the country, five of which are in the GTA and total 653k square feet. If Walmart ever decides to use their FC’s, Cartage could play a similar role as some smaller third-party logistics companies like Drexel Industries that assist Walmart’s e-commerce business. Under CCLS they also offer their fleet for home delivery services to companies like Canadian Tire, Home Depot, Hudson’s Bay and Sleep Country. It will be interesting to see if Walmart chooses to use them to deliver online orders directly to customers. Their website lists delivery locations in nine cities across Ontario and 18 across the country, which could be beneficial to Walmart by expanding their last-mile delivery capacity as they try to compete with Amazon in e-commerce. However, they will have to consider that Canada Cartage drivers are directly employed by one company and therefore more vulnerable to union campaigns than the third-party gig platform workers discussed above. This is especially evident because Unifor has organized Canada Cartage drivers in the past and will be bargaining with them soon for a contract for the recently unionized fleet drivers.
Mubadala Capital and the UAE
An additional thing that stands out about Canada Cartage was purchased by Mubadala Capital in 2022. This is a subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Company, a $284 Billion USD state-led investment company owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Mubadala has made other recent investments into Canada such as their purchase of Canada’s largest independent asset manager, CI Financial Group. In 2018 they invested $60 million into a California logistics software company called Turbo, which they claimed could help its businesses in the semiconductor, mining and energy sectors.
They are also known for being a large investor in various Israeli businesses in their gas and tech sectors. When Mubadala invested in broadband services in Scotland, there were privacy concerns from citizens because of their investments in the NSO Group, an Israeli company that sells hacking software to government agencies that can be installed into devices remotely. It is not entirely clear why Mubadala chose to purchase Canada Cartage specifically, but it may be that the centrality of logistics infrastructure and supply chains to the UAE’s regional economic success has led them to prioritize logistics investments overseas.
Considerations for organizing
After the fleet sale Unifor expressed deep concern about the delay in their contract negotiations and called on Walmart to bargain the first contract as soon as possible. They also spoke about the need for labour laws that protect workers constitutional rights to organize and assured that they would explore all legal avenues to determine their next actions. They said Walmart informed them that the 96 unionized drivers in Surrey (this was before 280 additional drivers unionized in Alberta) will continue to work interrupted with no immediate changes in employment. It is ambiguous how this will change their drivers’ work conditions or how long bargaining will be delayed. In February, Unifor demanded that the contract be bargained before the sale is closed to ensure their demands are solidified while avoiding bargaining with a new company. Since there has been no further public announcements by the union or either company since then, it appears likely that Walmart did not give into this demand.
Unifor’s response expresses a commitment to a legal based strategy that is consistent with their past actions in their organizing campaigns. They recently have been filing an application with the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) in response to drivers receiving less hourly wages due to contractors doing work usually done by Unifor members. In their successful organizing drive last year for Walmart workers at the RDC in Mississauga, they chose to protect their organizing committee by informing Walmart about the committee’s existence, naming many of its members and stating they would file unfair labour practice charges if the rights of these workers to organize were violated. Unifor’s emphasis on them in their response implies they will respond to continual bargaining delays with similar methods. While it is possible that these legal tactics have played some role in challenging union-busting, tactics like filing unfair labour practice charges and waiting for them to be resolved seem unlikely to quickly pressure Walmart to come to the table before sale completion. Actions to speedup the bargaining process that require more worker participation and militancy, such as walkouts or slowdowns, do not appear to be a part of this approach so far.
Even if hypothetically Walmart did come to the table before the sales completion, Unifor still has to rethink how they want to approach their driver organizing campaign at a new company. They currently have organized 376 out of the Walmart fleet’s roughly 900 drivers (so far all in the west coast). It remains to be seen whether their primary grievances around wage freezes, scheduling and security will continue to be the primary conditions to organize around, or altered demands will be developed in response to new management policies. One key question is whether Unifor will prioritize the goal of unionizing remaining drivers under Canada Cartage’s new Walmart fleet division, or see that as part of a broader push to organize all Canada Cartage drivers? They have already unionized Canada Cartage drivers in Oshawa (who deliver for the LCBO) and Winnipeg, which could indicate a willingness to take on such an organizing campaign. Additionally in 2016, the Teamsters unionized Canada Cartage drivers and warehouse workers in Vancouver and the Yukon territory. Canada Cartage’s growing size and influence in Canadian logistic supply-chains could make it a valuable target towards building power for logistics workers, but Unifor may feel it diverts them from their existing goals to organize Walmart and Amazon warehouse workers. As I mentioned above, if this partnership leads Walmart to start using Canada Cartage’s last-mile delivery services for a meaningful amount of their e-commerce business, these drivers’ more traditional employment status (compared to the third-party driver apps Walmart currently is relying on) could create a new opportunity for building worker power in the last-mile of Walmart’s supply chain.
Regardless of what changes occur and what new strategic considerations or areas of focus emerge, it is important to acknowledge limits in Unifor’s current strategy. While their successful contract certifications are an unprecedented step forward in the struggle to unionize Walmart workers in North America, they so far appear to have limited their focus to signing enough cards for certification and waiting for collective bargaining to occur. We will have to see if Unifor’s site-by-site organizing approach, with traditional card collection and bargaining tactics, will see more success than similar approaches at Amazon have. However, even if they do achieve successful elections for a meaningful amount of warehouse and driver locations (whether they be Walmart or Canada Cartage), an entirely legalistic approach will still face limits to what it can achieve. A contract that pushes Walmart to grant some concessions would be a step in the right direction, but it will not stop Walmart (or Canada Cartage) from continually finding new ways to exert pressure on their workers for productivity gains. Only an approach that extends beyond formal contract negotiation, and encourages workers before and in between contracts to take disruptive action at multiple strategic locations (and likely companies) in Walmart Canada’s supply chain, will meaningfully allow them to alter their conditions of work.
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