At the Fulfilment Centre

‘In 2020,’ according to the Washington Post, ‘for every 200,000 hours worked at an Amazon warehouse in the United States – the equivalent of a hundred employees working full time for a year – there were 5.9 serious incidents, according to OSHA data’: nearly double the rate of non-Amazon warehouses. Research by the trade union GMB found that there were about a thousand serious injuries reported at Amazon warehouses in the UK during 2020, and 294 ambulance callouts.

In Amazon’s corporate-speak, a warehouse is known as a ‘fulfilment centre’ or FC. Workers are known as ‘associates’ and are subject to a system called ‘ADAPT’ (‘associate development and performance tracker’). If a worker doesn’t pack and ship enough boxes – the targets are set by an opaque algorithm – their manager taps them on the shoulder and tells them to do better. The next time they get a formal verbal warning, then a written warning, then they’re fired. Even meeting your targets may not be enough because Amazon’s algorithm doesn’t only set targets, it also creates performance tables that rank workers against each other. Fall into the bottom 10 to 25 per cent of the table and you get an ADAPT warning. The rankings are not adjusted for such factors as age, gender, disability or injuries sustained at work.

It’s a vicious cycle. You work as fast as you can to meet targets that get faster and faster. There’s no time even to go to the toilet. You push your body beyond what it can take or work faster than is safe. Then you get hurt, or your body starts to break down. Now you’re slower – and you still can’t meet your targets. The three thousand workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Coventry (BHX4) know this all too well. Coventry has been at the coalface of the movement to unionise warehouses – holding the first legal strike at an Amazon facility in the UK last year, and voting earlier this month on whether to formally recognise GMB.

It's an uphill battle. Amazon’s antipathy to unions is infamous. The US National Labor Relations Board has repeatedly accused the company of breaking the law to intimidate staff trying to unionise. At Coventry, Chloe (not her real name) was approached three times by management trying to intimidate her into voting no. They told her that if the union is recognised she and her colleagues will lose their ‘Amazon benefits’. They said if the union is recognised, Amazon may close BHX4 down. Such old-school methods are interspersed with thoroughly new ones. The company flooded the warehouse with QR codes – in every corridor, on every table in the canteen, even in all the toilet stalls. Scan the code on your phone and it generated an email that cancelled your union membership.

To get a union recognised in law you need more than half the workforce (or ‘bargaining unit’) onside. By December 2022, despite Amazon’s anti-union campaign, GMB thought they had the numbers. Amazon responded by hiring a thousand new workers. The writer and film-maker Oobah Butler was one of them. Co-workers told him: ‘You were only hired because of the union vote.’

But Chloe and her colleagues refused to give up. Union membership continued to grow – including the recruitment of many of the workers brought in to sabotage GMB’s first attempt at getting legal recognition. In April, the union regulator, the Central Arbitration Committee, accepted GMB’s application:

on the basis of the evidence before it, the panel has decided that, on the balance of probabilities, a majority of the workers in the proposed bargaining unit would be likely to favour recognition of the union.

Jeff Bezos has been open about his company’s business strategy: ‘Amazon exploits its power in one sector to take over neighbouring markets. Each new conquest adds more momentum. The flywheel accelerates.’ Amazon is currently valued at more than $2 trillion. Last year, its main UK division posted a profit of £222 million and paid no corporation tax for the second year running. In the same period, workers in Coventry received a real-terms pay cut of 8 per cent. An estimated 75 per cent of BHX4 associates cannot afford to pay their household bills, and many are trapped in high-interest debt. In 2020, Bezos’s personal wealth soared by more than £57 billion, enough to give every Amazon worker on the planet a bonus of £38,000.

The union lost the recent Coventry ballot by 28 votes. The QR codes were scanned by 71 workers, leading to 36 giving up their union membership by the time of the ballot. Fifteen more votes and the union would have won recognition. The QR codes are being challenged in the employment courts: workers argue they are unlawful inducement, along with the harassment, intimidation and bullying so many have faced during the election process.

The fight is not theirs alone. Amazon’s employment practices are extending to the companies that partner and compete with them. Ever increasing numbers of retailers and logistics companies are copying Amazon’s tactics. The struggle to recognise GMB at Coventry is part of a broader front of resistance that it’s in all our interests to support.