UK Immigrant Workers May Win Europe’s First Amazon Union
Amazon Workers in Coventry, England, May Soon Be Union07.16.2024
JACOBIN
In Coventry, England, 3,000 Amazon workers — most of them immigrants — just voted on whether to unionize. If the workers vote yes, they would be the first Amazon warehouse workers in Europe to win a union.
The GMB trade union holding a rally outside Amazon HQ in support of Amazon workers in Coventry on July 8, 2024. (Kristian Buus / In Pictures via Getty Images)
Three thousand Amazon workers at a warehouse in the United Kingdom are poised to become the first recognized Amazon union in Europe.
Workers at fulfillment center BHX4 in Coventry, central England, cast votes July 8–13 for the GMB union to negotiate over pay, hours, and working conditions with the Amazon bosses. The results are expected July 17.
The watershed vote comes after a long, bruising battle; Amazon tried US-style stalling and union-busting tactics. Meanwhile the workers have taken thirty-seven days of strike action in two years. They’ve grown their union to fourteen hundred members, established a stewards network, and built multiethnic solidarity. In the UK, workers can become dues-paying members before union recognition is attained.
Last year, the GMB withdrew a previous application to the Central Arbitration Committee, the government agency that regulates collective bargaining, over Amazon’s “dirty tricks.” The company had brought in thirteen hundred new workers to dilute the pro-union workforce of seventeen hundred. The GMB estimates this cost Amazon $389,530 (£300,000) per week.
At the state level, the winds may now be blowing in the GMB’s favor after Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won control of the government on a platform of a “new deal for working people,” including making it easier for unions to organize.
But the stakes reach beyond Britain. The UK is Amazon’s largest market in Europe after Germany, where the service-sector union Ver. di has been striking and fighting for a decade to win collective bargaining rights.
A union victory here in Coventry, a city about a hundred miles northwest of London, would reverberate across Amazon’s vast global logistics network and boost international coordination among logistics workers.
“Then the dominoes will start falling,” said Darren Westwood, who has been at Amazon since 2018, after previous union jobs in retail, rail, and auto. “I think there’s a lot of people watching us, hoping that we do it, but also scared to get into the fight at the moment. Once we’ve got this in the bag, I think the rest will start coming.”
To win the recognition election, the union needs a majority of voters and at least 40 percent of all eligible workers to vote yes.
Born in a Sit-Down Strike
The GMB, one of the largest unions in the UK with six hundred thousand members, began organizing at Amazon over a decade ago. Amazon is one of the UK’s top ten private sector employers.
But the organizing only gained momentum after a series of wildcat strikes around the country in August 2022. Workers were angry over a measly pay hike of 50 pence (56 cents). They organized through Facebook and Telegram chats. Workers in the port town of Tilbury kicked off the strike wave, saying Amazon was treating them “like slaves.”
At BHX4, workers staged a sit-down strike and walkout.
“We had been waiting for a pay raise,” said Ceferina Floresca, a sixty-eight-year-old worker of Filipino and Spanish descent. During the worst two years of the pandemic, she had to show the police paperwork exempting her from lockdowns so she could report to the fulfillment center to pack orders.
Amazon had also stopped giving workers shares of the company stock after 2019. “We’ve all seen the shares go up,” said Westwood. “Managers were telling us during the start-up meetings how much money the company had made that day. They were so proud that they’ve got shares. And I said, ‘Now you tell us we’re going to get 50 pence; it’s a smack in the face.’”
“That’s why we decided to sit down and have a talk with the general manager,” said Floresca.
Three hundred workers sat down in the cafeteria, refusing to work. The general manager tried to negotiate to get them back to work. Floresca said he told them in a “snobbish” tone to write down ten questions for him to answer, and choose among their coworkers someone to represent them. “And I stood up and said, “What are you doing? You have to answer for the pay raise.”
The workers tapped Westwood and four others to speak with management. But Westwood insisted, “No one’s coming upstairs.”
“He looked at me and said, ‘What do you mean?’” Westwood remembered. “I said, ‘Look, for us to decide on five people, we all have to agree and elect people to come upstairs and talk with management. That’s the union, and Amazon doesn’t recognize unions.”
He told his coworkers, “As soon as you put a foot on that staircase, we lose.” Workers erupted in cheers, and the manager went upstairs with the tail between his legs. The sit-down continued.
At 2 p.m., workers saw on their phone apps that Amazon management had started clocking them out. Some people went back to work, but most stayed in the cafeteria to wait for the night shift. By late afternoon, they realized that other Amazon workers across the UK had also engaged in wildcat strikes and protests. Videos began to circulate. The news that they weren’t alone steeled their resolve, and they agreed to walk out again the following day.
The next morning, as workers gathered to protest outside the fulfillment center, a GMB organizer approached and asked if the union could talk to workers. “I was like, ‘Please, I don’t know what I’m doing!” Westwood said.
Formal Strike Votes
Britain has seen a larger strike wave in the past two years, in which hundreds of thousands of nurses, ambulance drivers, railway workers, teachers, and postal workers in the public sector participated.
While some of the Amazon organizing eventually dissipated, in Coventry it kept intensifying. Garfield Hylton, a worker of Jamaican descent, said the strikes and protest drove the union’s growth.
In the UK, if workers walk off the job, employers can simply fire them. To strike with legal protection, a union has to mail ballots to workers’ homes and persuade a majority to vote for a strike. Stuart Richards, senior organizer of the GMB Midlands, said the union wanted to provide that protection, so Amazon couldn’t fire the key leaders.
Hylton said the workers used their strikes to talk at the gates with coworkers, who were generally bolted down to their workstations in order to meet their productivity rates. But to reach a majority of the workforce, the workers also had to persuade the GMB to hold consecutive days of strikes.
“The view that we put to the GMB was that, if we can’t have more than the stated strike days, we weren’t going to come out and strike, because most strikers in the UK, they did one or two days a week, and we felt that with the size of Amazon that would be of no impact whatsoever,” said Hylton.
Institutionalizing the spontaneous momentum of the wildcats was a learning experience. Westwood said the GMB failed to meet the threshold for its first attempt at a formal strike because workers received white envelopes in the mail and ignored them, assuming they were from bill collectors at the height of the cost-of-living crisis. After that they made the envelopes orange, the union’s color.
Another lesson was to translate materials better. At first a sloppy translation into Romanian, “sindicat,” made the union sound as if it was part of an organized crime ring.
Alone No More
The GMB supported workers in establishing a shop stewards network. Hylton is one of fifteen stewards trained up to accompany their coworkers into meetings with management. Another thirty activists form a communication network across the warehouse.
The need for stewards is acute because the conditions are punishing. Amazon uses its Associate Development and Performance Tracker (ADAPT) to monitor the pace and activity of employees over the course of their ten-hour shifts.
Workers were initially allowed six minutes of idle time; then it was reduced to three. So if you’re idle for longer than three minutes — say, to go to the bathroom — you receive a productivity warning. Workers get two thirty-minute breaks, one of which is unpaid.
Sometimes packages tumbling down the conveyor belt get caught or jammed, forcing workers to strain to dislodge them. Two years ago, Floresca suffered a heart attack while trying to move a heavy box off the conveyor.
“We have boxes that weigh [seventy pounds],” she said. “So I was trying to pull the boxes, and they were compressed tightly, and I just had that pain in my chest.”
She was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, and the doctor told her to rest for four weeks. But when she got back she faced disciplinary action for the time she had taken off.
The notice was called a “letter of concern,” a term Floresca hadn’t heard before. “Oh, I was even touched,” she said. “They’re concerned about me because I just had a heart attack here.”
But managers told her that she had “triggered” a disciplinary meeting by being absent for more than eighty hours. As a result, she couldn’t change her shift or department, lower her hours, or apply for a higher position.
Floresca was shocked. “I asked him, ‘Why are you penalizing me for being sick? And how can you say that for the next six months I cannot be sick because you will give me a warning letter?’” She refused to sign the letter. It took another ambulance rush to the hospital for Amazon to agree to provide her accommodations.
Today she’s a steward, and no longer alone; workers take collective action when problems arise. During a recent heat wave, when managers were refusing ten-minute breaks to workers laboring in sweltering trailers, Hylton said the workers checked with GMB reps to confirm their right to safety breaks, “and then they were confronting the managers in the building. Instead of having one person go to a manager, you have twenty people complaining.”
The new union has become a real force in the warehouse. Workers won two pay raises last year, and Amazon even offered union members an incentive of $2,500 (£2,000) to transfer to other facilities in central England. This backfired: the organizing actually spread to new facilities, including Amazon’s flagship site in Birmingham, UK, where hundreds of workers struck in March.
After the first formal strike, the union had 750 members. Then Amazon flooded the warehouse with workers on five-year student visas. The union has responded by bringing these workers into the organizing campaign.
Many Languages
Most workers in the warehouse are immigrants. The GMB has recruited leaders who speak Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, Romanian, Tigrinya, Punjabi, French, Amharic, Hindi, and Polish.
Before the influx of workers on student visas, around 70 percent of the workers were African, mostly from East Africa; 20 percent were Eastern European, and the remaining 10 percent were a mix of South Asian, English, Anglophone Caribbean, and Brazilian workers.
The new workers are mostly South Asian; many aren’t familiar with unions. “Amazon brought a lot of Indian managers to walk around and talk to the Indians [and Pakistanis] in their native languages of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi,” said Muhammad Nur, a worker from Ethiopia.
After workers complained that Amazon had never hired any managers from an African country, it brought Eritrean managers from London to lead captive-audience meetings.
Many African workers come to the UK with advanced degrees from their home countries. But they say Amazon passes them over for promotions, in a mix of favoritism and racism.
Nur holds a degree in accounting in Ethiopia and is studying for an MBA in the UK, where he has resided for fifteen years. He originally applied for a job in Amazon’s finance department in 2019. Amazon brought him on for a trial period, but after a year and a half, it restructured the department and demoted him to an associate in the warehouse with no explanation; a white worker with no accounting experience kept his job.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” Nur said.
Hollow Threat of Closure
Louveza Iqbal works at BHX4 as a universal receiver, lifting boxes off the conveyor belt and scanning them in. She grew up in the UK; her parents hail from Pakistan.
“I have a slight doubt in my mind where we might lose because of the misinformation that’s gone around,” she said. “It might tilt the results in Amazon’s favor.”
She said immigrant workers live hand to mouth; after covering their basic needs, they send the rest of their earnings back home to support their families. Amazon finds ways to exploit this desperation.
“They work for ten hours on an empty stomach because they can’t afford to buy food from the canteen,” she said. “On strike days, when we walked out, Amazon would incentivize workers with food vouchers, so that they come into work.”
In the preelection period, rumors about visas were swirling. And of all the threats, none has had more impact than that Amazon might close down the facility.
Amazon operates forty-two fulfillment centers in the UK, plus ninety-one smaller warehouses including sort centers and delivery stations, according to MWPVL International. It closed three fulfillment centers in the UK last year.
But Amazon has shifted globally to a regional fulfillment center model to increase delivery speeds and cut down on costs — so if it is to remain in central England, it can’t close all its facilities down in the Midlands.
BHX4 is an inbound cross-dock facility that’s clustered around other warehouses of similar type and has strategic value. Cross-dock facilities receive products from vendors and quickly send them across to an outbound dock to be shipped to other surrounding fulfillment centers, where workers sort boxes of stuff to put into trailers to send to yet other fulfillment centers.
“The UK is an island with only a handful of major ports,” said Katy Fox-Hodess, senior lecturer in employment relations at the University of Sheffield. “The country isn’t big enough to locate new facilities at large distances from where they are already located, so the possibility of Amazon closing facilities to avoid unionization is less of a risk.”
“Sent to Coventry”
As it happens, this warehouse in Coventry was once an auto manufacturing powerhouse dubbed “Motor City.” It was home to Daimler, the UK’s first carmaker, and later made the iconic Jaguar. In the postwar period Coventry became the world’s second-largest car producer (after Detroit) and leading car exporter.
The level of labor militancy was high. “A story that goes around from [Trade Union Council] Trade Union Council people is that when they had a management dispute on the floor in the paint shop, it only took eleven individuals to bring the whole company to its knees on that site, because the paint shop was crucial,” Hylton said.
In 2004 the Jaguar plant closed, hemorrhaging two thousand jobs, part of the era of deindustrialization. Amazon took over the site in 2008, replacing assembly lines with conveyor belts spread across a space as big as twenty-four (American) football fields.
“It’s also historically significant because “sent to Coventry” meant you were sent here to die and suffer,” Hylton said. “In the 13th century, if you didn’t get inside the city walls, you were left to virtually suffer on the outside. So historically, there’s this air of militancy in this city — the whole raft of engineering, from aircraft manufacturing to auto. It always had workers that got together to stand up to management to campaign for better treatment and wages.
“I don’t think Amazon realized, when they picked the site, the historical significance. They just picked it for the motorway network for the lorries [semitrucks] to come in and out.”
In Coventry, England, 3,000 Amazon workers — most of them immigrants — just voted on whether to unionize. If the workers vote yes, they would be the first Amazon warehouse workers in Europe to win a union.
The GMB trade union holding a rally outside Amazon HQ in support of Amazon workers in Coventry on July 8, 2024. (Kristian Buus / In Pictures via Getty Images)
Three thousand Amazon workers at a warehouse in the United Kingdom are poised to become the first recognized Amazon union in Europe.
Workers at fulfillment center BHX4 in Coventry, central England, cast votes July 8–13 for the GMB union to negotiate over pay, hours, and working conditions with the Amazon bosses. The results are expected July 17.
The watershed vote comes after a long, bruising battle; Amazon tried US-style stalling and union-busting tactics. Meanwhile the workers have taken thirty-seven days of strike action in two years. They’ve grown their union to fourteen hundred members, established a stewards network, and built multiethnic solidarity. In the UK, workers can become dues-paying members before union recognition is attained.
Last year, the GMB withdrew a previous application to the Central Arbitration Committee, the government agency that regulates collective bargaining, over Amazon’s “dirty tricks.” The company had brought in thirteen hundred new workers to dilute the pro-union workforce of seventeen hundred. The GMB estimates this cost Amazon $389,530 (£300,000) per week.
At the state level, the winds may now be blowing in the GMB’s favor after Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won control of the government on a platform of a “new deal for working people,” including making it easier for unions to organize.
But the stakes reach beyond Britain. The UK is Amazon’s largest market in Europe after Germany, where the service-sector union Ver. di has been striking and fighting for a decade to win collective bargaining rights.
A union victory here in Coventry, a city about a hundred miles northwest of London, would reverberate across Amazon’s vast global logistics network and boost international coordination among logistics workers.
“Then the dominoes will start falling,” said Darren Westwood, who has been at Amazon since 2018, after previous union jobs in retail, rail, and auto. “I think there’s a lot of people watching us, hoping that we do it, but also scared to get into the fight at the moment. Once we’ve got this in the bag, I think the rest will start coming.”
To win the recognition election, the union needs a majority of voters and at least 40 percent of all eligible workers to vote yes.
Born in a Sit-Down Strike
The GMB, one of the largest unions in the UK with six hundred thousand members, began organizing at Amazon over a decade ago. Amazon is one of the UK’s top ten private sector employers.
But the organizing only gained momentum after a series of wildcat strikes around the country in August 2022. Workers were angry over a measly pay hike of 50 pence (56 cents). They organized through Facebook and Telegram chats. Workers in the port town of Tilbury kicked off the strike wave, saying Amazon was treating them “like slaves.”
At BHX4, workers staged a sit-down strike and walkout.
“We had been waiting for a pay raise,” said Ceferina Floresca, a sixty-eight-year-old worker of Filipino and Spanish descent. During the worst two years of the pandemic, she had to show the police paperwork exempting her from lockdowns so she could report to the fulfillment center to pack orders.
Amazon had also stopped giving workers shares of the company stock after 2019. “We’ve all seen the shares go up,” said Westwood. “Managers were telling us during the start-up meetings how much money the company had made that day. They were so proud that they’ve got shares. And I said, ‘Now you tell us we’re going to get 50 pence; it’s a smack in the face.’”
“That’s why we decided to sit down and have a talk with the general manager,” said Floresca.
Three hundred workers sat down in the cafeteria, refusing to work. The general manager tried to negotiate to get them back to work. Floresca said he told them in a “snobbish” tone to write down ten questions for him to answer, and choose among their coworkers someone to represent them. “And I stood up and said, “What are you doing? You have to answer for the pay raise.”
The workers tapped Westwood and four others to speak with management. But Westwood insisted, “No one’s coming upstairs.”
“He looked at me and said, ‘What do you mean?’” Westwood remembered. “I said, ‘Look, for us to decide on five people, we all have to agree and elect people to come upstairs and talk with management. That’s the union, and Amazon doesn’t recognize unions.”
He told his coworkers, “As soon as you put a foot on that staircase, we lose.” Workers erupted in cheers, and the manager went upstairs with the tail between his legs. The sit-down continued.
At 2 p.m., workers saw on their phone apps that Amazon management had started clocking them out. Some people went back to work, but most stayed in the cafeteria to wait for the night shift. By late afternoon, they realized that other Amazon workers across the UK had also engaged in wildcat strikes and protests. Videos began to circulate. The news that they weren’t alone steeled their resolve, and they agreed to walk out again the following day.
The next morning, as workers gathered to protest outside the fulfillment center, a GMB organizer approached and asked if the union could talk to workers. “I was like, ‘Please, I don’t know what I’m doing!” Westwood said.
Formal Strike Votes
Britain has seen a larger strike wave in the past two years, in which hundreds of thousands of nurses, ambulance drivers, railway workers, teachers, and postal workers in the public sector participated.
While some of the Amazon organizing eventually dissipated, in Coventry it kept intensifying. Garfield Hylton, a worker of Jamaican descent, said the strikes and protest drove the union’s growth.
In the UK, if workers walk off the job, employers can simply fire them. To strike with legal protection, a union has to mail ballots to workers’ homes and persuade a majority to vote for a strike. Stuart Richards, senior organizer of the GMB Midlands, said the union wanted to provide that protection, so Amazon couldn’t fire the key leaders.
Hylton said the workers used their strikes to talk at the gates with coworkers, who were generally bolted down to their workstations in order to meet their productivity rates. But to reach a majority of the workforce, the workers also had to persuade the GMB to hold consecutive days of strikes.
“The view that we put to the GMB was that, if we can’t have more than the stated strike days, we weren’t going to come out and strike, because most strikers in the UK, they did one or two days a week, and we felt that with the size of Amazon that would be of no impact whatsoever,” said Hylton.
Institutionalizing the spontaneous momentum of the wildcats was a learning experience. Westwood said the GMB failed to meet the threshold for its first attempt at a formal strike because workers received white envelopes in the mail and ignored them, assuming they were from bill collectors at the height of the cost-of-living crisis. After that they made the envelopes orange, the union’s color.
Another lesson was to translate materials better. At first a sloppy translation into Romanian, “sindicat,” made the union sound as if it was part of an organized crime ring.
Alone No More
The GMB supported workers in establishing a shop stewards network. Hylton is one of fifteen stewards trained up to accompany their coworkers into meetings with management. Another thirty activists form a communication network across the warehouse.
The need for stewards is acute because the conditions are punishing. Amazon uses its Associate Development and Performance Tracker (ADAPT) to monitor the pace and activity of employees over the course of their ten-hour shifts.
Workers were initially allowed six minutes of idle time; then it was reduced to three. So if you’re idle for longer than three minutes — say, to go to the bathroom — you receive a productivity warning. Workers get two thirty-minute breaks, one of which is unpaid.
Sometimes packages tumbling down the conveyor belt get caught or jammed, forcing workers to strain to dislodge them. Two years ago, Floresca suffered a heart attack while trying to move a heavy box off the conveyor.
“We have boxes that weigh [seventy pounds],” she said. “So I was trying to pull the boxes, and they were compressed tightly, and I just had that pain in my chest.”
She was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, and the doctor told her to rest for four weeks. But when she got back she faced disciplinary action for the time she had taken off.
The notice was called a “letter of concern,” a term Floresca hadn’t heard before. “Oh, I was even touched,” she said. “They’re concerned about me because I just had a heart attack here.”
But managers told her that she had “triggered” a disciplinary meeting by being absent for more than eighty hours. As a result, she couldn’t change her shift or department, lower her hours, or apply for a higher position.
Floresca was shocked. “I asked him, ‘Why are you penalizing me for being sick? And how can you say that for the next six months I cannot be sick because you will give me a warning letter?’” She refused to sign the letter. It took another ambulance rush to the hospital for Amazon to agree to provide her accommodations.
Today she’s a steward, and no longer alone; workers take collective action when problems arise. During a recent heat wave, when managers were refusing ten-minute breaks to workers laboring in sweltering trailers, Hylton said the workers checked with GMB reps to confirm their right to safety breaks, “and then they were confronting the managers in the building. Instead of having one person go to a manager, you have twenty people complaining.”
The new union has become a real force in the warehouse. Workers won two pay raises last year, and Amazon even offered union members an incentive of $2,500 (£2,000) to transfer to other facilities in central England. This backfired: the organizing actually spread to new facilities, including Amazon’s flagship site in Birmingham, UK, where hundreds of workers struck in March.
After the first formal strike, the union had 750 members. Then Amazon flooded the warehouse with workers on five-year student visas. The union has responded by bringing these workers into the organizing campaign.
Many Languages
Most workers in the warehouse are immigrants. The GMB has recruited leaders who speak Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, Romanian, Tigrinya, Punjabi, French, Amharic, Hindi, and Polish.
Before the influx of workers on student visas, around 70 percent of the workers were African, mostly from East Africa; 20 percent were Eastern European, and the remaining 10 percent were a mix of South Asian, English, Anglophone Caribbean, and Brazilian workers.
The new workers are mostly South Asian; many aren’t familiar with unions. “Amazon brought a lot of Indian managers to walk around and talk to the Indians [and Pakistanis] in their native languages of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi,” said Muhammad Nur, a worker from Ethiopia.
After workers complained that Amazon had never hired any managers from an African country, it brought Eritrean managers from London to lead captive-audience meetings.
Many African workers come to the UK with advanced degrees from their home countries. But they say Amazon passes them over for promotions, in a mix of favoritism and racism.
Nur holds a degree in accounting in Ethiopia and is studying for an MBA in the UK, where he has resided for fifteen years. He originally applied for a job in Amazon’s finance department in 2019. Amazon brought him on for a trial period, but after a year and a half, it restructured the department and demoted him to an associate in the warehouse with no explanation; a white worker with no accounting experience kept his job.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” Nur said.
Hollow Threat of Closure
Louveza Iqbal works at BHX4 as a universal receiver, lifting boxes off the conveyor belt and scanning them in. She grew up in the UK; her parents hail from Pakistan.
“I have a slight doubt in my mind where we might lose because of the misinformation that’s gone around,” she said. “It might tilt the results in Amazon’s favor.”
She said immigrant workers live hand to mouth; after covering their basic needs, they send the rest of their earnings back home to support their families. Amazon finds ways to exploit this desperation.
“They work for ten hours on an empty stomach because they can’t afford to buy food from the canteen,” she said. “On strike days, when we walked out, Amazon would incentivize workers with food vouchers, so that they come into work.”
In the preelection period, rumors about visas were swirling. And of all the threats, none has had more impact than that Amazon might close down the facility.
Amazon operates forty-two fulfillment centers in the UK, plus ninety-one smaller warehouses including sort centers and delivery stations, according to MWPVL International. It closed three fulfillment centers in the UK last year.
But Amazon has shifted globally to a regional fulfillment center model to increase delivery speeds and cut down on costs — so if it is to remain in central England, it can’t close all its facilities down in the Midlands.
BHX4 is an inbound cross-dock facility that’s clustered around other warehouses of similar type and has strategic value. Cross-dock facilities receive products from vendors and quickly send them across to an outbound dock to be shipped to other surrounding fulfillment centers, where workers sort boxes of stuff to put into trailers to send to yet other fulfillment centers.
“The UK is an island with only a handful of major ports,” said Katy Fox-Hodess, senior lecturer in employment relations at the University of Sheffield. “The country isn’t big enough to locate new facilities at large distances from where they are already located, so the possibility of Amazon closing facilities to avoid unionization is less of a risk.”
“Sent to Coventry”
As it happens, this warehouse in Coventry was once an auto manufacturing powerhouse dubbed “Motor City.” It was home to Daimler, the UK’s first carmaker, and later made the iconic Jaguar. In the postwar period Coventry became the world’s second-largest car producer (after Detroit) and leading car exporter.
The level of labor militancy was high. “A story that goes around from [Trade Union Council] Trade Union Council people is that when they had a management dispute on the floor in the paint shop, it only took eleven individuals to bring the whole company to its knees on that site, because the paint shop was crucial,” Hylton said.
In 2004 the Jaguar plant closed, hemorrhaging two thousand jobs, part of the era of deindustrialization. Amazon took over the site in 2008, replacing assembly lines with conveyor belts spread across a space as big as twenty-four (American) football fields.
“It’s also historically significant because “sent to Coventry” meant you were sent here to die and suffer,” Hylton said. “In the 13th century, if you didn’t get inside the city walls, you were left to virtually suffer on the outside. So historically, there’s this air of militancy in this city — the whole raft of engineering, from aircraft manufacturing to auto. It always had workers that got together to stand up to management to campaign for better treatment and wages.
“I don’t think Amazon realized, when they picked the site, the historical significance. They just picked it for the motorway network for the lorries [semitrucks] to come in and out.”
Republished from Labor Notes.
CONTRIBUTORS
Luis Feliz Leon is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes.
Luis Feliz Leon is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes.
British Workers Are on the Cusp of Winning a Union at Amazon
Thousands of workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Coventry, England, are on the verge of winning union recognition. After facing 18 months of harsh resistance, they are taking the first steps toward holding the $2 trillion company to account in the UK.
Amazon workers hold a picket line during a strike over pay at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry, UK, on Tuesday, February 28, 2023.
CONTRIBUTOR
Matthew Cole is a lecturer in technology, work, and employment at the University of Sussex. He is currently writing a study of wage theft and technological change for Verso Books.
Thousands of workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Coventry, England, are on the verge of winning union recognition. After facing 18 months of harsh resistance, they are taking the first steps toward holding the $2 trillion company to account in the UK.
Amazon workers hold a picket line during a strike over pay at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry, UK, on Tuesday, February 28, 2023.
(Darren Staples / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
BYMATTHEW COLE
07.15.2024
JACOBIN
Over the weekend, workers at Britain’s GMB union, which has 560,000 members working everywhere from the retail sector to social care and logistics, began voting for union recognition at Amazon’s site in Coventry, the West Midlands city where it employs over three thousand people. Results for the ballot are likely to arrive in the coming days, but for eighteen months, the company, valued at $2 trillion, has bitterly resisted attempts at unionization, plastering the walls of its Coventry warehouse with QR codes that produce emails addressed to GMB cancelling union membership.
Amazon’s sprawling behemoth warehouse, BHX4, located at the former Jaguar motor facility of Browns Lane in Coventry, is ground zero for the union movement in logistics. The company has expended huge resources and used aggressive anti-union tactics to fight over 1,400 GMB-unionized “warehouse associates” who want formal recognition at the company. By refusing voluntary recognition, Amazon has forced the struggle for democratic representation to be decided by the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) — the government body responsible for regulating collective bargaining. The vote, which closed on Saturday, will decide the fate of every worker at the warehouse.
An Amazon spokesperson claims they “take on feedback, make continuous improvements, and invest heavily to offer great pay, benefits and skills development,” yet such rhetoric is not reflected in the grueling sixty-hour weeks and below-inflation pay raises commonplace amongst the companies’ employees. The implementation of artificial intelligence, which under a more democratic management structure might have eased the load of workers, has only served to increase the intensity and amount of work required of the companies’ employees. The Associate Development and Performance Tracker, or ADAPT, and the Supply Chain Optimization Technology, or SCOT, have become a widely used tools in Amazon’s workplaces. The former meticulously tracks the pace and activity of employees over sometimes ten-hour shifts and the latter is partially responsible for making decisions about what the warehouse should buy, where items ought to be stored, and what the best means are for delivering goods to customers.
It is possible to imagine a world in which these technologies, combined with job security and adequate paid training, are used to make work more efficient and to transfer workers to positions where they can be most effective. In reality, these systems are a block box for workers, who are provided with no transparency about how their work is organized, what data is being collected about them, or what to expect from future machine decisions. Their effect is to create a culture of constant anxiety and uncertainty in an already precarious industry.
For trade unionists, the tactics Amazon deploys to undermine efforts at collective action are well-known. The company has hired private investigators to spy on labor organizers and organized anti-union captive audience meetings, at which trade union officials are targeted by management. In Coventry, the company launched a charm offensive ahead of the vote for union recognition. While in the past Amazon had made little effort to translate contracts for its staff, many of whom are foreign born, the company has in the lead up to the vote printed out anti-union messaging in multiple languages and hired management of the same ethnicity as some of the staff to undermine solidarity.
Ferdousara, a GMB organizer who has been on the picket line from 5:00 a.m. every day for the duration of the organizing drive, told Jacobin that Amazon has attempted to present the union “as an external organization, saying GMB will make all the decisions, which is a complete lie.” The company has also posted anti-union propaganda throughout the warehouse, including “QR codes that when scanned, automatically create an email to GMB cancelling membership.”
She added that the company has also been holding mandatory meetings with anti-union propaganda. These “voluntary” sessions, which every worker is obliged to attend, last the better part of two hours. Amazon’s tactics extend further than what Ferdousara described as “brainwashing.” The company has also sought to undermine the process of gaining legal recognition for the union in other ways:
They [Amazon] have also flooded the warehouse with new hires on temporary contracts to subvert the democratic process. The first time we put in an application for recognition was around this time last year, when there were about 1,800 workers. Now, we estimate there are over three thousand people. We’ve been told Amazon have been hiring ten to fifteen workers a week.
These tactics have meant that longtime employees at the warehouse have been unable to find enough work or have had to take on other jobs for which they have not been trained, which can be dangerous. Staff are often moved to jobs that require lifting heavy weights or traveling long distances when their regular work is unavailable.
There are currently forty workers leading the unionization fight with GMB who have become organic leaders of the unionization drive, but their efforts have helped to get the union to where it is now, on the cusp of recognition.
While being far from socialist, the new Labour government led by Keir Starmer will create a political climate that will be much more union-friendly than one led by the Conservatives. Starmer has in fact pledged support the GMB workers and implied that he might repeal anti-union legislation, including mandates of minimum service levels at schools and on railways during strikes. However, Starmer’s recruitment of former Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke, an ardent supporter of minimum service laws, to the party in May in the lead-up to the general election is a worrying sign that a U-turn on this policy may be a possibility. But if Starmer is serious about bolstering workers’ rights in the wake of a fourteen-year assault on living standards by the Tories, he will have to keep his promises.
Labour has also committed to repeal regressive anti-strike laws that prevent electronic balloting, and will lower the current threshold for statutory recognition from the current mandate of 40 percent of the total bargaining unit and over 50 percent turnout. Furthermore, Starmer has pledged to scrap the two-year qualifying period to receive full employment rights, a move that organizers like Ferdousara believe will help their efforts.
The labor of warehousing and logistics is part of the cloud empire that amazon has built. The UK’s digital infrastructure essentially runs on Amazon Web Services, which has had no competition or public accountability despite the critical importance of this infrastructure. Victory in this sector could be the start of a wider trend for democratic accountability over these crucial features of the architecture of modern life.
BYMATTHEW COLE
07.15.2024
JACOBIN
Over the weekend, workers at Britain’s GMB union, which has 560,000 members working everywhere from the retail sector to social care and logistics, began voting for union recognition at Amazon’s site in Coventry, the West Midlands city where it employs over three thousand people. Results for the ballot are likely to arrive in the coming days, but for eighteen months, the company, valued at $2 trillion, has bitterly resisted attempts at unionization, plastering the walls of its Coventry warehouse with QR codes that produce emails addressed to GMB cancelling union membership.
Amazon’s sprawling behemoth warehouse, BHX4, located at the former Jaguar motor facility of Browns Lane in Coventry, is ground zero for the union movement in logistics. The company has expended huge resources and used aggressive anti-union tactics to fight over 1,400 GMB-unionized “warehouse associates” who want formal recognition at the company. By refusing voluntary recognition, Amazon has forced the struggle for democratic representation to be decided by the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) — the government body responsible for regulating collective bargaining. The vote, which closed on Saturday, will decide the fate of every worker at the warehouse.
An Amazon spokesperson claims they “take on feedback, make continuous improvements, and invest heavily to offer great pay, benefits and skills development,” yet such rhetoric is not reflected in the grueling sixty-hour weeks and below-inflation pay raises commonplace amongst the companies’ employees. The implementation of artificial intelligence, which under a more democratic management structure might have eased the load of workers, has only served to increase the intensity and amount of work required of the companies’ employees. The Associate Development and Performance Tracker, or ADAPT, and the Supply Chain Optimization Technology, or SCOT, have become a widely used tools in Amazon’s workplaces. The former meticulously tracks the pace and activity of employees over sometimes ten-hour shifts and the latter is partially responsible for making decisions about what the warehouse should buy, where items ought to be stored, and what the best means are for delivering goods to customers.
It is possible to imagine a world in which these technologies, combined with job security and adequate paid training, are used to make work more efficient and to transfer workers to positions where they can be most effective. In reality, these systems are a block box for workers, who are provided with no transparency about how their work is organized, what data is being collected about them, or what to expect from future machine decisions. Their effect is to create a culture of constant anxiety and uncertainty in an already precarious industry.
For trade unionists, the tactics Amazon deploys to undermine efforts at collective action are well-known. The company has hired private investigators to spy on labor organizers and organized anti-union captive audience meetings, at which trade union officials are targeted by management. In Coventry, the company launched a charm offensive ahead of the vote for union recognition. While in the past Amazon had made little effort to translate contracts for its staff, many of whom are foreign born, the company has in the lead up to the vote printed out anti-union messaging in multiple languages and hired management of the same ethnicity as some of the staff to undermine solidarity.
Ferdousara, a GMB organizer who has been on the picket line from 5:00 a.m. every day for the duration of the organizing drive, told Jacobin that Amazon has attempted to present the union “as an external organization, saying GMB will make all the decisions, which is a complete lie.” The company has also posted anti-union propaganda throughout the warehouse, including “QR codes that when scanned, automatically create an email to GMB cancelling membership.”
She added that the company has also been holding mandatory meetings with anti-union propaganda. These “voluntary” sessions, which every worker is obliged to attend, last the better part of two hours. Amazon’s tactics extend further than what Ferdousara described as “brainwashing.” The company has also sought to undermine the process of gaining legal recognition for the union in other ways:
They [Amazon] have also flooded the warehouse with new hires on temporary contracts to subvert the democratic process. The first time we put in an application for recognition was around this time last year, when there were about 1,800 workers. Now, we estimate there are over three thousand people. We’ve been told Amazon have been hiring ten to fifteen workers a week.
These tactics have meant that longtime employees at the warehouse have been unable to find enough work or have had to take on other jobs for which they have not been trained, which can be dangerous. Staff are often moved to jobs that require lifting heavy weights or traveling long distances when their regular work is unavailable.
There are currently forty workers leading the unionization fight with GMB who have become organic leaders of the unionization drive, but their efforts have helped to get the union to where it is now, on the cusp of recognition.
While being far from socialist, the new Labour government led by Keir Starmer will create a political climate that will be much more union-friendly than one led by the Conservatives. Starmer has in fact pledged support the GMB workers and implied that he might repeal anti-union legislation, including mandates of minimum service levels at schools and on railways during strikes. However, Starmer’s recruitment of former Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke, an ardent supporter of minimum service laws, to the party in May in the lead-up to the general election is a worrying sign that a U-turn on this policy may be a possibility. But if Starmer is serious about bolstering workers’ rights in the wake of a fourteen-year assault on living standards by the Tories, he will have to keep his promises.
Labour has also committed to repeal regressive anti-strike laws that prevent electronic balloting, and will lower the current threshold for statutory recognition from the current mandate of 40 percent of the total bargaining unit and over 50 percent turnout. Furthermore, Starmer has pledged to scrap the two-year qualifying period to receive full employment rights, a move that organizers like Ferdousara believe will help their efforts.
The labor of warehousing and logistics is part of the cloud empire that amazon has built. The UK’s digital infrastructure essentially runs on Amazon Web Services, which has had no competition or public accountability despite the critical importance of this infrastructure. Victory in this sector could be the start of a wider trend for democratic accountability over these crucial features of the architecture of modern life.
CONTRIBUTOR
Matthew Cole is a lecturer in technology, work, and employment at the University of Sussex. He is currently writing a study of wage theft and technological change for Verso Books.
A year and a half ago, workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry, England, launched the first-ever formal strike against the retail giant in British history. Today the workers finish voting on whether to unionize.
July 14, 2024
Source: Jacobin
It has been a year and a half since workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry shook the retail giant with the company’s first-ever formal strike in British history. From that time, they have become used to seeing the company’s anti-union material displayed in the workplace.
But all of this only foreshadowed the scale of the union busting brought in by management as workers prepared to vote in a ballot for statutory union recognition.
Union recognition would mean Amazon would be forced to sit down with the GMB Union to negotiate on matters relating to pay, worker safety, and terms and conditions. A victory here would empower Amazon workers everywhere.
From the moment workers enter the workplace, they are faced with huge posters telling them why they shouldn’t vote for union recognition. As they go through the walkway into the main building, they walk past four display screens pumping out anti-union messaging. Once they enter the main building, they find even more pop-up displays, posters, display screens, and notices on the back of toilet doors.
All of the workers have been told to attend up to six management meetings to be regaled with tales of how Amazon really does listen and how managers will be making changes for the better. Managers have been brought in from other sites to help spread the company’s anti-union propaganda through one-on-one conversations with workers. The messaging is constant and unrelenting.
Amazon is throwing huge amounts of time, money, and resources into trying to stop workers from voting for union recognition. This is a company that is panicking.
Amazon’s management is heavily investing in discouraging unionization. It is evident that they fear transparency and the prospect of revealing their financial records through legal processes stemming from union recognition. This could expose practices they would rather keep hidden, hence their extensive efforts to influence voting against union recognition.
Ceferina Floresca is one of the instigators of Amazon’s agitation. She is one of the forty workplace leaders who have led workers through thirty-seven days of strike action and built a union of around 1,400 members inside the warehouse.
She is clever, articulate, and a force of nature. One of the many mistakes Amazon bosses have made is underestimating her and her union colleagues.
They are the reason for the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) — the government body responsible for regulating collective bargaining — determining that it is likely that the majority of workers are in favor of union recognition. They are the reason for a ballot for union recognition at Coventry being forced on Amazon.
In a sea of union busting, Ceferina’s face is one of those appearing on the three display screens given over to the union during the ballot period. The one union notice board echoes her words and those of her colleagues.
It was Ceferina and her colleagues who led the union meetings held inside the warehouse, with around 2,500 workers being able to listen to the reasons for union recognition and ask questions about the wild rumors being spread by management.
“Being a GMB member enables me to represent my colleagues and be their advocate for fair treatment and better working conditions. After spending five years at BHX4 [Coventry warehouse], we have forged bonds. We spent nearly ten hours together each day navigating the same challenges, fostering a sense of camaraderie and understanding.”
Ceferina and the other workplace leaders have the same lived experience as the other Amazon workers. They have experienced the grueling ten-hour shifts and had to work up to sixty hours a week just to make ends meet. They have seen colleagues taken to the hospital taxis after bosses told first-aiders not to call ambulances. They know what it’s like to work at Amazon. They are trusted.
When Ceferina tells workers the rumors of the site closing as a result of union recognition are nonsense, they believe her. When she says union recognition doesn’t mean losing benefits — it means fighting for better and saying no to losing even more benefits — they believe her.
“I believe I can be a voice for the countless individuals who work alongside me at BHX4. It is about standing shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues, amplifying their voices, and fighting for a future where every worker is paid a decent wage and treated with dignity and respect.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Amazon’s union busting hasn’t had an impact. When speaking to Amazon workers, you can see that many are frightened by the company’s threats and rumors. Managers have told workers there will be no pay award this year if workers vote for union recognition. They have told workers there will be no pay award this year and they will lose benefits if there is union recognition. For workers who are already struggling with the cost of living and who have already had years of benefits taken from them, this is no small threat.
But Ceferina remains confident. “Looking ahead to the ballot, I’m optimistic. Recent political shifts and a growing sentiment for improved labor conditions suggest a positive outcome is achievable. Many are eager for change both nationally and within Amazon. Our goal as a union is to advocate for fair treatment and better conditions, echoing the broader desire for improvement.”
Going forward, Ceferina has a clear message for bosses: “To Amazon management, I urge you to embrace transparency and fairness. Instead of resisting unionization, view it as an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your workforce. Workers are not just resources. They’re essential partners in the company’s success.”
The ballot for recognition closes inside the warehouse today, and the outcome will be released when the final votes are counted on Monday, July 15.
Whatever the result, Amazon in the UK faces huge changes as workers continue to organize in warehouses throughout the country.
“Joining the union is my response to a convergence of deeply felt concerns and unmet expectations. It represents my commitment to demand better compensation in the face of the escalating cost of living crisis.”
Ceferina’s reasons for joining GMB and organizing her workplace are shared by many Amazon workers. It is clear that the fire lit by Ceferina and her colleagues in Coventry has sent sparks right across Amazon UK warehouses.
Stuart Richards is a senior organizer for the GMB Union.
It has been a year and a half since workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry shook the retail giant with the company’s first-ever formal strike in British history. From that time, they have become used to seeing the company’s anti-union material displayed in the workplace.
But all of this only foreshadowed the scale of the union busting brought in by management as workers prepared to vote in a ballot for statutory union recognition.
Union recognition would mean Amazon would be forced to sit down with the GMB Union to negotiate on matters relating to pay, worker safety, and terms and conditions. A victory here would empower Amazon workers everywhere.
From the moment workers enter the workplace, they are faced with huge posters telling them why they shouldn’t vote for union recognition. As they go through the walkway into the main building, they walk past four display screens pumping out anti-union messaging. Once they enter the main building, they find even more pop-up displays, posters, display screens, and notices on the back of toilet doors.
All of the workers have been told to attend up to six management meetings to be regaled with tales of how Amazon really does listen and how managers will be making changes for the better. Managers have been brought in from other sites to help spread the company’s anti-union propaganda through one-on-one conversations with workers. The messaging is constant and unrelenting.
Amazon is throwing huge amounts of time, money, and resources into trying to stop workers from voting for union recognition. This is a company that is panicking.
Amazon’s management is heavily investing in discouraging unionization. It is evident that they fear transparency and the prospect of revealing their financial records through legal processes stemming from union recognition. This could expose practices they would rather keep hidden, hence their extensive efforts to influence voting against union recognition.
Ceferina Floresca is one of the instigators of Amazon’s agitation. She is one of the forty workplace leaders who have led workers through thirty-seven days of strike action and built a union of around 1,400 members inside the warehouse.
She is clever, articulate, and a force of nature. One of the many mistakes Amazon bosses have made is underestimating her and her union colleagues.
They are the reason for the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) — the government body responsible for regulating collective bargaining — determining that it is likely that the majority of workers are in favor of union recognition. They are the reason for a ballot for union recognition at Coventry being forced on Amazon.
In a sea of union busting, Ceferina’s face is one of those appearing on the three display screens given over to the union during the ballot period. The one union notice board echoes her words and those of her colleagues.
It was Ceferina and her colleagues who led the union meetings held inside the warehouse, with around 2,500 workers being able to listen to the reasons for union recognition and ask questions about the wild rumors being spread by management.
“Being a GMB member enables me to represent my colleagues and be their advocate for fair treatment and better working conditions. After spending five years at BHX4 [Coventry warehouse], we have forged bonds. We spent nearly ten hours together each day navigating the same challenges, fostering a sense of camaraderie and understanding.”
Ceferina and the other workplace leaders have the same lived experience as the other Amazon workers. They have experienced the grueling ten-hour shifts and had to work up to sixty hours a week just to make ends meet. They have seen colleagues taken to the hospital taxis after bosses told first-aiders not to call ambulances. They know what it’s like to work at Amazon. They are trusted.
When Ceferina tells workers the rumors of the site closing as a result of union recognition are nonsense, they believe her. When she says union recognition doesn’t mean losing benefits — it means fighting for better and saying no to losing even more benefits — they believe her.
“I believe I can be a voice for the countless individuals who work alongside me at BHX4. It is about standing shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues, amplifying their voices, and fighting for a future where every worker is paid a decent wage and treated with dignity and respect.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Amazon’s union busting hasn’t had an impact. When speaking to Amazon workers, you can see that many are frightened by the company’s threats and rumors. Managers have told workers there will be no pay award this year if workers vote for union recognition. They have told workers there will be no pay award this year and they will lose benefits if there is union recognition. For workers who are already struggling with the cost of living and who have already had years of benefits taken from them, this is no small threat.
But Ceferina remains confident. “Looking ahead to the ballot, I’m optimistic. Recent political shifts and a growing sentiment for improved labor conditions suggest a positive outcome is achievable. Many are eager for change both nationally and within Amazon. Our goal as a union is to advocate for fair treatment and better conditions, echoing the broader desire for improvement.”
Going forward, Ceferina has a clear message for bosses: “To Amazon management, I urge you to embrace transparency and fairness. Instead of resisting unionization, view it as an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your workforce. Workers are not just resources. They’re essential partners in the company’s success.”
The ballot for recognition closes inside the warehouse today, and the outcome will be released when the final votes are counted on Monday, July 15.
Whatever the result, Amazon in the UK faces huge changes as workers continue to organize in warehouses throughout the country.
“Joining the union is my response to a convergence of deeply felt concerns and unmet expectations. It represents my commitment to demand better compensation in the face of the escalating cost of living crisis.”
Ceferina’s reasons for joining GMB and organizing her workplace are shared by many Amazon workers. It is clear that the fire lit by Ceferina and her colleagues in Coventry has sent sparks right across Amazon UK warehouses.
Stuart Richards is a senior organizer for the GMB Union.
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