It was 6am and raining hard when I arrived at the picket line outside Amazon’s Coventry warehouse. Despite the weather, hundreds of workers were gathering on either side of the road in an industrial estate on the city’s outskirts. When I chatted to them, they told hopeful stories of how a pay rise and union recognition could improve their lives. Now, one year and 37 days of strike action later, their campaign for union recognition has suffered a serious setback. Last week, they found out that they have lost an election that would have seen the union GMB recognised by Amazon for collective bargaining for the first time in the UK.
The margin of defeat was razor-thin: only 0.5%. Amazon’s anti-union stance in the UK has been maintained by a handful of votes. The company had to use every trick in its extensive union-busting playbook to secure the result.
Its anti-union efforts followed a carrot-and-stick approach. The carrot side of the equation saw Amazon hire a significant number of extra staff, swamping the electorate with unorganised workers. Union members suggest that management used this extra labour to reduce the pace of work dramatically, abandoning their usual target-led performance management regime. The duration of the election campaign was one of the very rare periods that Amazon took its foot off the gas. When I put these allegations to Amazon, a spokesperson responded: “We regularly hire new team members across the country and throughout the year to meet customer demand.”
The stick side of the equation saw allegations from the GMB of a sustained campaign of union busting, from targeting key organisers by cutting their hours to holding anti-union meetings and distributing leaflets with QR codes that auto-generated resignation emails from the union. Referring to the QR codes, the Amazon spokesperson said: “Employees were telling us they wanted to cancel their membership but could not find a way to do so, so we provided information to help.”
The genesis of the organising drive in Coventry – the closest any union has come to winning collective bargaining at Amazon’s notorious warehouses – was an outburst of unprecedented wildcat action that spread across the company’s UK facilities during the strike wave of 2022. Thousands of workers decided to stop picking and packing items in protest against a below-inflation pay rise, and gathered in their warehouses’ canteens to demand more from management. Although the company’s profits soared as much as 220% during the pandemic, they were only being offered a few pence more an hour. Coventry was one of the first warehouses where workers downed tools, with operations disrupted for three days before the strike abated.
The conditions that generated that outburst still persist across Amazon warehouses. As part of a research project with Fairwork, a project based at the University of Oxford, my colleagues and I have spoken to workers across the country who have reported struggling with the harshness of the Amazon regime. We found that the combination of using surveillance, artificial intelligence and robotics to ratchet up the pace of work in warehouses leads to workers being exposed to serious harms such as the risk of muscular-skeletal injuries, depression and anxiety. The company responded to our report by saying: “Amazon aims to create the safest and most technologically advanced workplace on Earth.” So long as Amazon’s warehouses are characterised by relatively low wages and a pace of work so severe that it endangers workers’ mental and physical health, there will always be a segment of the workforce who will be open to organising efforts.
Workers in Coventry aren’t the first to lose an election in the face of Amazon’s anti-union playbook. In New York, workers at the LDJ5 warehouse lost their vote by a margin of 12%. But they continued organising, viewing it as a “structure test” that allows them to understand their level of support in the warehouse, rather than a final defeat. They have written petitions and made demands of management over conditions, and are making steady progress. Their example should serve as an inspiration to GMB members in Coventry.
Amazon spends a huge amount of resources trying to prevent unionisation, just as US industrial giants such as the Ford Motor Company did before. It runs global monitoring projects and hires expert consultants with the aim of preventing workers from creating independent organisations to represent themselves. But those efforts are increasingly difficult in the face of a rising global tide. The workers in Coventry didn’t win this time, but they may get another chance before long.
Their struggle for representation isn’t only important for workers at Amazon and their immediate goals of better wages and conditions. The percentage of workers across the entire economy who are members of trade unions has been falling for almost 50 years now, since the high point of 1979. If the trade union movement is to turn that decline around, it must do it in workplaces such as that warehouse that stands on the edge of Coventry.
The people leading the charge in new industries are likely to be the young generation who began to find their feet in the workplace during the 2022 strike wave. These workers are discovering that in post-crisis Britain, you have to stand up for yourself if you want things to get better. The Labour party is planning an employment rights bill that may lower the statutory recognition threshold in a way that would have allowed workers in Coventry to gain collective representation. But the transfer of responsibility for the bill from the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, to the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, is widely understood to signal a slimming down of the already mild ambitions set out in Labour’s “new deal for working people”. The new government will pursue nothing like the seismic transformation of industrial relations that would be necessary to produce a more just and democratic economy. These young workers will have to fight for that themselves.
Rebuilding the workers’ movement isn’t an easy task. As the vote at Amazon shows, employers will fight the spread of organisation tooth and nail. But in the face of a world increasingly characterised by exogenous economic shocks and downward pressure on living standards, workers may find that they have no other choice but to get organised.
Callum Cant is a sociologist of work and author of Feeding the Machine
