Canadian warehouse workers in Mississauga signed the first-ever collective agreement with Walmart in May, ending a two-year push that began when they voted to unionize in 2024. The deal gives the distribution centre workers a pay bump, guarantees over working conditions and a lump-sum payout to settle allegations of unfair labour practices.
The warehouse sits in one of Walmart’s biggest Canadian markets and feeds a high-volume distribution network that supplies more than 100 brick-and-mortar stores while handling online orders. That makes the agreement more than a local labour story: it lands in the middle of a supply chain that helps move goods across Canada, and it comes as workers at a high-profile Scotiabank and Tesla Model 3 market elsewhere in the country watch corporate bargaining battles of their own.
Lana Payne, Unifor’s national president, cast the contract as a milestone won by persistence rather than luck. She said the members were determined to secure workplace democracy and stuck with it, and that their courage in sitting across from one of the world’s largest corporations is why the deal made labour history. For Unifor, the contract also proves that warehouse workers, not just retail staff, can force a major employer to bargain.
But the union is treating the Walmart settlement as a starting point, not a finish line. Payne said Unifor has had to put serious effort into targeting the whole supply chain because major employers and the labour laws around them still frustrate unionization. Retail locations have organized before, but distribution centres have been harder to crack, and the union now wants the result in Mississauga to spill over into other warehouses.
That is why the fight is already moving west. Unifor has opened a second front at an Amazon facility in British Columbia, where the provincial labour board recently found Amazon unlawfully withheld scheduled wage increases from workers. Those employees will now receive updated compensation as soon as possible, a reminder that the legal and bargaining terrain can still shift in labour’s favour even as employers resist. For Payne, the Mississauga deal looks less like an endpoint than the first real proof that the warehouse sector can be organized one contract at a time.
