Sunday Times 9th July
Amazon warehouse operatives and delivery drivers up and down the country are this week gearing up for Amazon Prime Day, the discount bonanza that marks one of the busiest days in the online giant’s calendar.
As their colleagues prepare for action, however, hundreds of workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Coventry are downing tools.
The GMB trade union claims that from Tuesday up to 880 workers will strike for three days in protest at what they deem to be inadequate pay rises. That would mark the biggest walkout yet in almost a year of disruption at the warehouse. The unrest can be traced back to last August, when Amazon doled out a non-negotiable 50p an hour pay rise — announced to little fanfare on giant screens hung in the warehouses. The below-inflation increase came after a pandemic-era boom in sales that catapulted net profit to a record $33.4 billion (£26 billion).
The workers who helped deliver that were expecting much more — especially since they swiftly found themselves at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis.
“It was like, ‘Great news, everyone! Here is a 50p pay rise!’ It just sparked everyone off,” said Nick Henderson, 46, who has worked at the Coventry facility for more than four years and will be on the picket line this week. “Amazon were making record profits — they could easily have paid us more.”
The GMB is demanding that Amazon pay workers £15 an hour — up from the current starting rate of between £11 and £12 an hour. Henderson, who works most days loading boxes on to the back of a truck, where temperatures can soar above 30C in the summer, said that the underwhelming pay rises fuelled long-standing disgruntlement over physically arduous work and demanding productivity targets.
In Coventry, Amazon has installed robotic arms which move crates around at a speed that humans can’t match. One insider said the only reason they had not been installed on both floors of the warehouse was because it would require Amazon to reinforce the upper floor.
“The robots have increased productivity four, five or six-fold – probably more. They don’t need breaks or go to the toilet. As a human being, there is no way you can compete with that,” said one warehouse worker.
At Coventry, workers scan items for ten hours a day with two 30-minute breaks, one of which is unpaid. Supervisors constantly monitor productivity and are alerted when a worker hasn’t scanned an item for five minutes. The least productive workers are marked up for an “adapt”, in effect a soft warning. Workers themselves have no way of seeing how productively they are working relative to colleagues. These adapts can be handed out simply for returning a minute or two late from a break, according to workers.
After recruiting 700 members at Coventry, the GMB bid for formal recognition at the facility in May, believing that it had passed the 51 per cent mandatory threshold. However, the union claims Amazon thwarted its efforts by flooding the Coventry warehouse with new workers, in effect diluting their voting power.
Insiders at the warehouse say that in the weeks after GMB’s bid for recognition, there was a steady stream of new recruits shown around each day — a ritual known as “day zero”. These were predominantly international students studying at nearby Nottingham, Warwick and Coventry universities.
“We regularly recruit new team members, across the country and across the year . . . this year is no different,” said a spokesman. Amazon has increased minimum rates of pay by 10 per cent within the past year.
Still, Amazon’s actions in America, where workers at its warehouse on Staten Island, New York, organised successfully last year, underline the company’s determination to keep unions out of its business. Amazon unsuccessfully sought to overturn the unionisation and spent $14 million last year on anti-union consultants.
Last summer, it was contending with an unprecedented wave of impromptu walkouts at warehouses in Coventry, Bristol, Swindon and Tilbury Docks. While the GMB has had significant success at Coventry, it has made little headway elsewhere. The union is currently balloting 100 workers for strike action at Amazon’s distribution centre in Rugeley in the West Midlands. The results will be known on Friday.
If Amazon can see off unions during the worst squeeze on living standards for a generation, collective bargaining may never catch on, especially with the looming threat of automation hanging over workers.
The economic slowdown and changing shopping habits pose other threats to job security, too. Amazon’s UK sales fell 5.6 per cent to $30.1 billion last year. The online giant announced in January that three of its 30-plus UK warehouses would close, although two new ones will be opened in the coming years.
Despite these challenges, Amazon’s Prime membership scheme has been a huge success. Subscribers pay £8.99 per month for free next-day delivery, as well as access to Amazon’s TV and music streaming services.
Analysts from Mintel estimate that Amazon has 20 million Prime subscribers in the UK. GlobalData, another research firm, reckons that 68 per cent of all UK consumers have access to a Prime account, even if it is not held in their name.
On Prime Day, which runs over Tuesday and Wednesday this week, subscribers are showered with discounts on everything from ear buds to power tools and air fryers.
While Amazon anticipates this week’s strikes will not have any impact on Prime Day deliveries — because the Coventry warehouse only receives goods from suppliers and distributes them to other Amazon facilities — it will certainly disrupt work at Coventry. Amazon has called the police to previous strikes, claiming that non-striking workers were prevented from clocking in on time, and individuals were behaving in an intimidating fashion.
The GMB insists that the strikes are peaceful — and entirely justified. “People are doing 60 hours a week to make sure they can feed their family,” said Henderson.
“The guy I was working with today logs on to the Uber Eats app to do deliveries in the evening just so that he can put food on the table. It’s not right. We will keep doing this for as long as it takes.”
