Thirty workers at a downtown Windsor call centre will be laid off Wednesday. By the end of March the remaining 100 employees will also be gone.

Shaw Communications announced this week it's shutting down the Freedom Mobile operation and moving the work to Victoria, B.C.

​Lee Riggs is the national president of the Telecommunications Workers Union and USW National Local 1944. He said some of the employees have been at the call centre for 10 years.

"Many of these people that work in this call centre are single moms. There's one gentleman there that's planning a wedding here next week, so people were very, very upset," he explained. "There was a lot of people crying in the call centre."

Riggs added the employer did not offer his members a chance to relocate to the west coast.

Move not linked to minimum wage increase

"We will be consolidating our Canadian customer care operations into a single location in Victoria, B.C. in the coming months," Chethan Lakshman, Shaw's vice president of external affairs wrote to CBC News in a statement. "This transition will improve operational efficiency while ensuring consistent, high-quality, responsive customer service."

Lakshman said the move was an "operational decision" and "not connected to any labour matters in Windsor or Ontario's minimum wage."

Riggs said the union and Service Canada will work with the employees to help them find other jobs.

The union has not yet reached out to other call centres in the area to find out if they would take on these workers.