We Just Won the First Union Contract at a Walmart in North America

I felt I had a good job for my first 18 years at the Mississauga, Ontario distribution center where I’ve worked since 1996. 

We had a good benefits program, a vacation policy that let us use our time-off anytime during the year, and a healthy social work environment.

That all changed soon after Walmart acquired our center in 2014.

Over the next decade the conditions on the job slowly got worse — we were moved onto a cheaper health plan, it became difficult to take vacation, and holiday parties were pulled off the calendar. We were briefly given a $2 an hour pay bump when the COVID pandemic hit, but Walmart took it away months later.

At that point we knew something had to change. And in 2023 a fellow worker got in touch with Unifor about forming a union. Within a year of that first contact, after an intense organizing campaign, a majority of the roughly 800 workers at our Walmart Regional Distribution Center had voted to unionize.

Although there’s no active union other than ours at Walmarts in either the United States or Canada, we were not the first location to vote for a union. In fact, there had been two before in Canada and one in the US. However, none of those managed to secure a contract.

A store in Windsor, Ontario only had its union with the United Steelworkers certified in 1997 after Walmart engaged in unfair labor practices. The union never won a contract and eventually was decertified. A store in Jonquière, Quebec unionized with the United Food and Commercial Workers in 2005 but Walmart closed it before a contract was negotiated. And after meat cutters organized at a Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas in 2000, Walmart discontinued meat-cutting operations at 180 locations.

Knowing that history and Walmart’s overwhelming resource advantage, we predicted that winning our first contract with North America’s largest private employer would be challenging. 

The day after we won our election, Walmart announced wage increases for every single logistics worker in Canada — except for us.

Once Walmart came to the bargaining table the company dragged its feet at every opportunity. We had a secret weapon to combat them running out the clock and hoping we’d eventually lose support of the workforce: Canadian labor law.

Unifor was able to request a mediated settlement because negotiations had stalled, resulting in an agreement on May 7, 2026.

The contract, which me and 93 percent of my colleagues voted to approve, gives us wage parity with other facilities as well as back pay in a lump sum for illegally withholding the raise Walmart gave everyone else, planned wage hikes, and a grievance procedure.

It’s not everything we were hoping to win, but it puts us in a strong position for the next time we bargain. And it shows other Walmart employees across North America that a union is winnable even at a notoriously anti-labor company.

There are over 400 Walmart stores in Canada and a whopping 4,615 more in the US. This is a company that can afford to give the workers that power it way more. Not only did Walmart make nearly $170 billion in profits last fiscal year, but former CEO Doug McMillon raked in a $29.2 million salary.

At the same time, many of our colleagues in the United States have to rely on Medicaid and SNAP because their salaries are so low. My message to all of those workers is: you can win a union contract that will protect your rights and dignity.