With little notice outside their province, about 400 newly unionized Voilà workers in Quebec have ratified collective bargaining agreements, setting a precedent many of their counterparts in Ontario hope to follow.

Workers at a Montreal fulfillment centre of Voilà, Sobeys’s online grocery delivery service, joined the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in February 2022, while those at a “spoke” location in Quebec City followed suit in October. The provincial labour relations commission certified the bargaining units after majorities of workers at each location signed membership cards. In Quebec, no vote is required if more than 50 per cent of staff sign cards.

Workers who gather and prepare orders at the Montreal warehouse constitute one bargaining unit, while another comprises employees who do deliveries, said Nil Ataogul, the UFCW’s organizing coordinator in Quebec. A third unit is made up of delivery drivers who work out of the Quebec City site.

In January, the Montreal location’s 307 unionized workers signed new three-year collective bargaining agreements. In April, the Quebec City location, where the union estimates there are as many as 75 staff, did the same.

The certifications come amid renewed efforts to organize hundreds more Voilà workers in Ontario, where labour laws pose greater hurdles, but where employees of the service have contacted the UFCW in the past about pay and working conditions. More recently, the workers have raised concerns about what an upcoming merger of Voilà with Grocery Gateway means for them.

Sobeys launched Voilà in Toronto in June 2020, a few years after partnering with U.K.-based Ocado. Using Ocado’s technology, the grocer planned to build automated warehouses where robots do much of the picking and humans deliver the orders to customers. Sobeys opened its second fulfillment centre in Montreal in March 2022, with plans for others in Calgary and Vancouver. It has also opened three spoke locations—Etobicoke, Ont., Ottawa and Quebec City—to expand its delivery areas in those provinces. Sobeys did not respond to a request for comment. 

Drivers have previously expressed concerns around their working conditions. In Ontario, UFCW has been working to unionize the ones at the Vaughan warehouse—Sobeys’s first—and the Etobicoke spoke location. Workers first reached out to UFCW at the end of 2021, expressing concerns about low pay as well as health, safety and workload.

The newly unionized Quebec staffers shared those complaints. They sought standardized pay on a scale that rises over time, said Ataogul, and had complaints about job stability and security. 

Their new collective agreements address these issues. In Montreal, warehouse workers will be hired at $18.20 an hour, while new delivery drivers will receive $19.20—both increases over previous rates. Union members will see their wages rise 60 cents for every 1,000 hours they work, meaning those working full time can receive two pay bumps annually. The contracts also include shift premiums and a new dental plan. 

The Quebec City agreement is very similar, said Ataogul. “They have a salary scale. They have a guaranteed evolution,” she said.

As for working conditions, the agreements call for the creation of a committee to address disputes rather than setting down specific requirements such as limits on the number of deliveries drivers can make in a day. “The whole point of having a collective agreement is to keep it as general as possible in order to basically have the right to intervene [for] whatever issues arise,” said Ataogul, noting these are fairly new operations and it’s not yet clear what all the problems are. 

Meanwhile, Voilà workers in Ontario have renewed their interest in joining UFCW, said Debora De Angelis, the union’s regional director for the province, amid concern that their future colleagues from Grocery Gateway are paid more than they are. “The workers have asked us to come back,” De Angelis said. “They’re quite angry, very angry.” 

Sobeys parent company Empire acquired the Grocery Gateway e-commerce service as part of its May 2021 acquisition of Ontario grocery store chain Longo’s. In Empire’s most recent earnings call, CEO Michael Medline announced Sobeys would combine Grocery Gateway in July with Voilà. In addition to their concerns about wage fairness, Voilà workers want clarity on how the merger will affect their seniority and flexibility when it comes to scheduling, De Angelis said.

“Loyal drivers like myself, for the first time with this company, are furious,” said an Ontario employee, whose identity The Logic is not revealing because the worker feared that speaking out could hurt their job prospects. It feels different than when the union first arrived, the person said, adding workers are “100 per cent” more likely to sign cards over fears around the upcoming Grocery Gateway merger.

The staffer who spoke to The Logic said most Voilà drivers make $21 an hour or less—a wage that, for this driver, leaves much of the food they deliver out of financial reach. The employee also cited health and safety concerns: at a time when demand for e-commerce is booming, Voilà has no per-order weight limit, and deliveries can involve lugging food up multiple flights of stairs. “For the drivers, in particular, it’s a struggle right now and we don’t have anyone to fight for us,” the source said.

UFCW believes there are more than 200 workers at the Vaughan warehouse and about 100 in Etobicoke, and went back to both locations in April to canvas staff. It would need more than 40 per cent of workers at each location to sign cards to hold a unionization vote—a threshold De Angelis said is hard to hit as new drivers join and current staff quit. Unlike Quebec, Ontario requires a vote even if more than half the workers sign cards.

“We have the second hurdle that we need to jump in Ontario,” she said. “It makes unionization a lot harder, even if it’s the will of the workers.”