Nearly ninety years ago, Ford kept its own private security force on the payroll for whenever they needed to beat up union supporters. Having traded in the brass knuckles and baseball bats of the early twentieth century for the empathetic listening and fine-grained surveillance of the early twenty-first, Amazon today employs an entirely different set of tactics to ward off union drives — tactics that may well be more effective precisely because they are so systematic.

Amazon is, of course, a notoriously anti-union employer. Though workers at the JFK8 Fulfillment Center in Staten Island voted to form a union in 2022, Amazon has refused to bargain with them, even after the National Labor Relations Board ordered it to do so this past April. When workers at Cornucopia Logistics, a delivery service provider at its DBK4 Delivery Station in Queens, New York, sought to unionize, Amazon cut the provider’s contract. When workers at what used to be the DXT4 warehouse in Laval, Quebec, just outside Montreal, did the same, Amazon not only shuttered the facility but closed up shop in the entire province.

Thanks to the disclosure of documents related to its anti-union activity in the province of British Columbia, made available through the filing of an unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint by Unifor, which represents workers at YVR2 in Delta, BC, and is seeking to represent workers at facilities throughout the area, we now have a peek under the hood of Amazon’s anti-unionism. Included in these documents (which were produced in public hearings and not subject to a seal order, and which were provided to me by Unifor) were trainings given to managers about how to stave off organizing drives at their facilities, as well as Amazon’s own list of its facilities where there were active union threats.