Three thousand Amazon workers at a warehouse in the United Kingdom are on the brink of forming the first recognized Amazon union in Europe.
From July 8 to 13, workers at the BHX4 fulfillment center in Coventry, central England, cast their votes on whether the GMB union should negotiate over pay, hours, and working conditions with Amazon management. The results are expected on July 17.
This pivotal vote follows a prolonged struggle marked by Amazon’s use of union-busting tactics akin to those seen in the U.S. Over the past two years, workers have engaged in 37 days of strike action, grown their union to 1,400 members, established a stewards network, and built a multiethnic solidarity movement. In the UK, workers can become dues-paying members even before a union is officially recognized.
Last year, the GMB withdrew a previous application to the Central Arbitration Committee (the government body regulating collective bargaining) due to Amazon’s “dirty tricks.” The company had hired 1,300 new workers to dilute the pro-union workforce of 1,700. The GMB estimates this maneuver cost Amazon £300,000 ($389,530) per week.
Political winds may now favor the GMB, with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party winning control of the government on a platform promising a “new deal for working people,” which includes making union organization easier.
The significance of this potential victory extends beyond the UK. The UK is Amazon’s largest market in Europe after Germany, where the service-sector union Ver.di has been striving for a decade to secure collective bargaining rights. A union win in Coventry, located about 100 miles northwest of London, would send ripples across Amazon’s global logistics network and bolster international coordination among logistics workers.
“Then the dominoes will start falling,” said Darren Westwood, an Amazon worker since 2018. “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 UK’s largest unions with 600,000 members, began organizing at Amazon over a decade ago. Amazon is among the UK’s top 10 private sector employers.
However, significant momentum only built after a series of wildcat strikes across the country in August 2022. Workers were outraged by a paltry pay raise of 50 pence (56 cents) and organized strikes through Facebook and Telegram chats. Workers in Tilbury, a port town, ignited the strike wave, complaining that Amazon was treating them “like slaves.”
At BHX4, workers initiated a sit-down strike and walkout.
“We had been waiting for a pay raise,” said Ceferina Floresca, a 68-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 10 questions for him to answer and choose among their co-workers someone to represent them. “And I stood up and said, ‘What are you doing? You have to answer for the pay raise.’”
The workers selected 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 co-workers, “As soon as you put a foot on that staircase, we lose.” Workers erupted in cheers, and the manager went upstairs with his 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 strengthened 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, involving hundreds of thousands of nurses, ambulance drivers, railway workers, teachers, and postal workers in the public sector.
While some of the Amazon organizing eventually dissipated, in Coventry it kept intensifying. Garfield Hylton, a worker of Jamaican descent, said the strikes and protests fueled 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 co-workers, who were generally tied to their workstations to meet 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 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 during 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 15 stewards trained to accompany their co-workers into meetings with management. Another 30 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 their 10-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 30-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 [70 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 80 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 10-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 20.”
The unionizing workers come from all over the world. At one meeting, Hylton counted people from 20 different nationalities, speaking at least 12 languages, ranging from Tagalog to Romanian.
The union formed WhatsApp and Telegram groups for each department and language group. Workers also used the Telegram groups to put Amazon’s productivity app on blast: members would alert one another whenever they were dragged into the manager’s office to receive a productivity warning, a tactic that revealed to everyone how many other people were being disciplined.
Coventry’s growing confidence inspired Amazon workers in nearby Rugeley to stage their own sit-down strike in December 2022.
The pay raise that ignited the wildcats had been set at 35 pence. After months of strikes, Amazon raised the rate to 50 pence—still far below the 2 pounds the GMB was demanding. Workers are now pushing for £15 (just under $20) per hour.
TREAT US WITH RESPECT
Amazon has responded to the organizing in Coventry by spending big on union-busting tactics. At BHX4, Hylton said workers have been disciplined for using language that Amazon considers “inappropriate,” such as by shouting, “No! No! No!” in the break room to encourage workers not to join an anti-union meeting.
Management circulated a memo in February insisting that Amazon was willing to listen to employee concerns without a union. Westwood said, “There’s a few people who believe what’s written, and there’s a lot of people that don’t. I tell people, if Amazon’s saying it’s good for us, it’s not good for us. I mean, why would you take our word for it? You don’t trust us any other day of the week, so why trust us now?”
The union’s solidarity efforts extend beyond BHX4. Coventry is a city of immigrants, and many Amazon workers are first-generation immigrants from the Philippines, India, Romania, Poland, Sudan, and elsewhere. Solidarity networks within their communities were vital.
During the strikes, members of the Filipino Workers Organization of Coventry, Sikh activists, and climate activists supported the GMB.
As news of the Coventry strikes spread, logistics workers in the UK and beyond started to get organized. In late 2022, the GMB’s cooperation with the public-sector union Unite resulted in the first Amazon strikes in Scotland.
Around the same time, DHL couriers on a major Amazon delivery contract began to organize with the IWGB, a progressive union for low-wage workers. Management noticed the talk of collective bargaining and pulled drivers into “stand-ups” before their shifts to decry the union.
In early 2023, Amazon workers organized in the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) held their first-ever strike in the U.S., at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York.
ALU Vice President Derrick Palmer traveled to Coventry in February to express solidarity with the BHX4 workers and told a large rally, “Amazon is trying to convince people that the union can’t win, that Amazon is going to always have their way. But they’re wrong.”
Westwood echoed, “I want Amazon to treat us with respect. I think that’s the bottom line for everyone that’s working there.”
After more than a year of disputes, the Coventry workers’ resilience will soon face its biggest test yet: the recognition election. If they prevail, Europe’s first Amazon union will be established, setting a powerful precedent for workers across the continent and beyond.
WHAT’S NEXT
Recognition Vote Outcome: The results of the recognition vote, expected on July 17, will determine if the GMB union will be officially recognized to negotiate on behalf of Amazon workers in Coventry. This outcome will significantly impact the unionization efforts and could serve as a catalyst for similar movements in other Amazon facilities across Europe.
Impact on Amazon’s Practices: A successful recognition vote may compel Amazon to alter its labor practices and engage in collective bargaining, potentially leading to improved wages, working conditions, and benefits for workers.
Broader Implications for Labor Movements: A victory for the Coventry workers could inspire other Amazon employees globally to pursue unionization, potentially reshaping labor relations within the company and beyond, especially in logistics and e-commerce sectors.
Government and Public Support: The involvement of political figures and public support will play a crucial role in sustaining the momentum of the unionization efforts. The political climate, particularly with the Labour Party’s pro-union stance, may further influence the outcome and support for the workers’ cause.
International Coordination: Successful unionization in Coventry might strengthen international coordination among Amazon workers, fostering solidarity and collective action across borders. This could lead to a more unified and powerful labor movement within the company.
Continued Struggles and Tactics: Regardless of the vote outcome, the workers will likely continue their struggle for better conditions. The tactics used by both the workers and Amazon management, including union-busting efforts and strikes, will evolve based on the ongoing developments.
The coming weeks will be critical for the Amazon workers in Coventry, as their fight for union recognition not only aims to transform their working conditions but also has the potential to influence labor movements and corporate practices on a global scale.