Organizing Amazon in the UK
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Even the most anti-union American companies often have to acquiesce to unions in nations where the law and culture are more friendly to them. Much to its disgust, for example, Walmart has unionized stores in Chile. So we will see what Amazon does as warehouse workers in the UK seek to unionize.
On a traffic island on the outskirts of Coventry, armed with handmade signs and a stack of orange bucket hats, a small but noisy team of organisers from the GMB union are taking on Amazon.
More than 3,000 staff here – “associates,” as Amazon calls them – were given the opportunity to vote in a historic ballot last week that could force the company to recognise a union for the first time in the UK. It is one of several tussles over union recognition globally at the retail-to-cloud-services group founded by Jeff Bezos in his garage in 1994 and now worth more than $2 trillion.
If the GMB wins, it would give workers the right to sit around the table with Amazon bosses and negotiate over pay, hours and holidays – anathema to the Seattle-based company, which is notoriously hostile to unions. The GMB believes recognition would also strengthen its hand in tackling the health and safety issues its representatives identify inside the vast Coventry warehouse, which is known as BHX4. Workers there have told of doing physically demanding work under close surveillance from managers, who can issue them with an “adapt” – in effect a disciplinary black mark – for any of a series of minor infractions.
With the new Labour government promising to strengthen the power of unions, the story of the GMB’s lengthy campaign at BHX4 underlines the barriers they currently face.
The ballot closed on Saturday, following a month-long process, and the result is expected on Monday. The workers have the backing of local Labour MP Taiwo Owateme, who says: “I’m so proud of all the workers at Amazon BHX4 for the campaign they’ve run and how far they’ve come in their fight.”
I don’t pretend to have any knowledge of British politics, but at the very least, I don’t expect the UK have quite the same anti-union levers as in the US, especially with Labour coming into power and Amazon basically being a 19th century railroad in terms of running roughshod of everyone and so causing a lot of hate toward it, even as everyone relies on it.