🧑🔎🛒 Unifor slams Hudson's Bay Company management bonuses as workers face mass terminations

Wednesday, 26 March 2025 02:23.PM

Unifor is denouncing Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) awarding management bonuses while thousands of workers face termination and learn that the company has publicly refused to honour its severance pay obligations.

"It's disgraceful, enraging, and outrageous. This is corporate greed at its worst and shows how fundamentally unfair this process is for the very workers who kept this company going," says Unifor National President Lana Payne. "No manager or executive should see a bonus while severance and other legal obligations to workers remain unpaid. We're going to fight for justice for our members."

Layoffs have already begun and will continue through June. As unsecured creditors under CCAA and bankruptcy rules, HBC employees are last in line to receive compensation. The union will pursue all avenues to hold HBC to its contractual and financial obligations to Unifor members.

"The system doesn't work for workers. Government programs, like the Wage Earner Protection Program, are inadequate and fail to meet the urgent needs of workers facing layoff," continued Payne. "For many long-service members, this amount falls far short of what they are owed with the potential of months-long delays before they receive a penny."

Under Unifor's collective agreements with HBC, some members are entitled to upwards of $35,000 in severance, depending on wages, seniority, and other factors like commissions.

Unifor is urging all levels of government to take legislative action that ensures workers are not treated as afterthoughts in corporate financial dissolutions.

Unifor's understanding is that the pension plan is currently in surplus position, which is positive news for members at this difficult time. Unifor will be advocating for members to receive their fair share of any surplus in the pension plan.

Unifor continues to call for urgent reforms to federal insolvency laws to better protect workers, including raising the WEPP cap, expanding super-priority protections, imposing liability on directors for unpaid compensation, and creating a mechanism to ensure workers are made whole through trust-held funds or federal guarantees

Unifor Locals 40 and 240 represent approximately 595 HBC employees at stores in Windsor, Kitchener, and Toronto's Sherway Gardens, as well as workers at the company's e-commerce warehouse.

Unifor is Canada's largest union in the private sector, representing 320,000 workers in every major area of the economy. The union advocates for all working people and their rights, fights for equality and social justice in Canada and abroad, and strives to create progressive change for a better future.

SOURCE: Unifor

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