Will Immigrant Workers Win Britain’s First Amazon Union?

July 18, 2024 Update: The union lost but came heartbreakingly close: 49.5 percent yes votes, just 28 votes short of winning recognition.

Three thousand warehouse workers are poised to become the first recognized Amazon union in Britain.

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 U.S.-style stalling and union-busting tactics. Meanwhile the workers have taken 37 days of strike action in two years. They’ve grown their union to 1,400 members, established a stewards network, and built multiethnic solidarity. In the U.K., 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 1,300 new workers to dilute the pro-union workforce of 1,700. The GMB estimates this cost Amazon $389,530 (300,000 pounds) 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 U.K. 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 100 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 U.K. with 600,000 members, began organizing at Amazon over a decade ago. Amazon is one of the U.K.’s top 10 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 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 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 co-workers, “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 U.K. 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 U.K., 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 bolted down to their work stations 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 U.K., 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 15 stewards trained up 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 the course of their 10-hour shifts.

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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 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 pounds) to transfer to other facilities in central England. This backfired: the organizing actually spread to new facilities, including Amazon’s flagship site in Birmingham, 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 U.K. 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 and is studying for an MBA in the U.K., where he has resided for 15 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 U.K.; 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 10 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 pre-election 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 42 fulfillment centers in the U.K., plus 91 smaller warehouses including sort centers and delivery stations, according to MWPVL International.It closed three fulfillment centers in the U.K. 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 U.K. 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 U.K.’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 people is that when they had a management dispute on the floor in the paint shop, it only took 11 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 2,000 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 24 (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 [trucks] to come in and out.”