Early last month, DHL locked out its workers across Canada, even as the workers were trying to negotiate a new collective agreement.
Their most recent collective agreement expired at the end of 2024, and the workers started bargaining last October, nearly 3 months before the expiry date.
Unifor represents over 2,000 workers across Canada, including 228 workers in Alberta. About a third of these workers are owner-operators, another third work in clerical positions, and the remaining workers are employed in warehouse and driving roles.
According to Lana Payne, Unifor’s national president, the workers were focused on “improving working conditions and securing fair wages” in their new collective agreement.
After 2.5 months of bargaining, minimal progress had been made towards creating a collective agreement that is fair for workers.
By this past January, very little had changed. Unifor had claimed that they “were able to address a few small items”; however, there were “still a substantive amount of issues“ that needed resolving.
In March, Unifor published a letter to its members indicating that DHL representatives had been meeting with workers individually “across the country to discuss bargaining”, instead of negotiating with the bargaining team that the workers had elected.
During these meetings, according to Unifor, the company shared information about specific proposals and editorializing the bargaining committee’s initial response to those proposals, “intentionally misinforming the union membership to paint your bargaining committee in a negative light, and in turn, stoke fear and sow division amongst” the workers.
These sorts of actions undermine solidarity among fellow workers, as well as the bargaining process itself, which may motivate workers to settle for a worse contract.
By the end of March, after more than 25 days of bargaining, DHL refused “to take negotiations seriously” and it had become clear that they didn’t “adequately prepare to bargain a new contract”. More than half of the demands workers had brought to the table still hadn’t been adequately addressed, and that’s despite a mediator even getting involved!
Rather than making concessions on the worker’s proposals, the employer wanted to force the following conditions on workers:
- Changing the driver pay system in a way that would result in less money for drivers
- Forcing drivers to travel up to 100 km just to reach their routes or pick up freight—with no compensation
- Proposing language that would allow the company to refuse WSIB and general workplace accommodation requests
- Refusing to acknowledge and provide wage adjustments to customer service and other classifications—some of which are just barely ahead of minimum wage
- Seeking the ability to lay off employees more easily
- No recognition for job loss that may occur through the use of AI
- Attempting to reduce the daily minimum guarantee for drivers
- Rerouting pickups across the country while cutting pay for owner-operators
On top of that, they told the bargaining team that they were no longer going to bargain prior to the deadline in June. They also indicated to the team that they had applied for conciliation, which meant that they would be in a legal position to lockout workers on 8 June 2025.
In response, Unifor organized a strike vote, and in May, nearly two months after DHL indicated that they weren’t going to bargain anymore, thus triggering a lockout process, 97% of workers who voted said that they supported strike action.
Sure enough, last month, on 4 June, DHL explicitly told Unifor that they planned to lock out the workers, despite the fact that they were negotiating that week with the workers’ bargaining team, which called the actions “disgraceful, incomprehensible, without a trace of common sense, and devoid of empathy”.
The union retaliated, serving the company with a 72-hour strike notice the next day. Daniel Cloutier, Unifor’s Québec director, said that Unifor “members are united and will not be intimidated by this multinational giant”.
In Alberta, strike locations were at the Calgary International Airport and the Edmonton International Airport.
To further erode class solidarity among workers, DHL sent a letter on 14 June 2025 to the Canadian prime minister, the minister of finance, the minister of transport, the minister of industry, and the minister of international trade, requesting an exemption to the new federal anti-scab legislation, which was scheduled to come into effect less than a week later.
Unifor was not happy with this development. Payne said that the union would “not stand by while DHL locks out our members across the country and threatens to use scabs in an attempt to pressure our members to take concessions. Our members deserve respect and a fair contract”.
She further stated that they expected “DHL to abide by the law on the books, passed unanimously by Parliament, which will come fully into force later this month. A law that bans the use of replacement works in a legal dispute. It is reprehensible that this company thinks they can bust our members’ right to fair and free collective bargaining by using scab labour.”
The union claimed that prior to the federal legislation coming into effect, DHL had been hiring scabs during the lockout. In fact, they allege that the company had scab workers in their facilities 3 days before the deadline, clearly indicating that they “never intended to reach a fair deal at the table”.
So, they locked out their workers, then hired scabs to do the work that these workers were no longer allowed to do, and they wanted an exemption from the federal legislation so they could continue hiring scabs.
Scab labour undermines the strength workers have when withholding their labour. If a company can continue their operations during a work stoppage, they have less incentive to come to the bargaining table.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Unifor published a media release on its website indicating that they had “documented numerous violations” by DHL regarding the new anti-scab legislation, including “bussing in replacement workers and continuing to use third-party contractors for deliveries”. They used this evidence to file a formal complaint with the Canada Industrial Relations Board.
If found guilty of violating the anti-scab legislation, DHL could face penalties of up to $100,000 per day.
Finally, after weeks of pushback from the union and being denied an exemption from the federal government to continue using scab labour, the employer came back to the bargaining table and eked out a tentative agreement with the workers’ negotiating team.
This past Saturday, Unifor published on their website that the 72% of the workers who participated in the ratification vote chose to support the new collective agreement.
The new contract includes a 15.75% increase in wages over the 4-year contract, which averages out to 3.94% per year.
Workers can expect to see improvements in several other areas, including the following:
- Pension increases for hourly workers
- Increases to short and long-term disability payments
- New mental health benefit
- Increases to severance
- Wage adjustments
- Language around AI, robotics, and automatic
- Improved work-from-home language
