This article was originally published on February 28, 2023

This week, Amazon workers from Coventry are walking out once again to fight for better pay. The strike action, taking place on February 28, March 2, and for a week from March 13, follows a history-making strike in January. Despite working all the way through the pandemic, workers received an embarrassing three per cent pay offer of 35p to 50p last summer, when inflation was at 9.9 per cent and energy bills were set to rise even further. They were angry, obviously – and they demanded change. 

Over the course of two weeks in August last year, Amazon workers all across the country – including in Coventry, Essex, Doncaster and Bristol – staged informal wildcat strikes and occupations. The action wasn’t formally organised by a union, nor was it legal, but, thankfully, the GMB Union, which has been attempting to organise in Amazon warehouses for the best part of a decade, was ready to help give workers a voice. “The spontaneous action was led by younger people who were so pissed off by the way their employer treated them, and the fact that they had done all this work through the pandemic,” Kevin Brandstatter, a national organiser for GMB, tells Dazed. “During that two-week period, workers started coming to us and saying they want to get organised at work.”

Coventry is where this organising happened to stick, and the union is entering this next wave of strikes with a total of 350 members. But it is far from the only Amazon warehouse where workers are hungry for change. In fact, it now seems like the appetite for striking is spreading across the country. 

Francis*, 24, an Amazon warehouse associate, has worked at Amazon for four years. While he does find the work fairly rewarding, due to its challenging nature, he says he would also go on strike if given the opportunity. “I’m not in a trade union, but I am for the Coventry strike, and I hope more strikes take action as well,” he tells Dazed. His main issue with his work is the pay. “The pay has stayed stagnant and isn’t competitive anymore,” he says. “People are feeling more and more squeezed with the cost of living crisis, and the wages just aren’t enough to pay the bills anymore.” 

Clara*, 26, agrees. As a packing and process guide, Clara gets paid £13.40 an hour even though she works nights. She says it’s no longer enough. “Everything has become more expensive, and they don’t want to give us more money,” she says. Again, Clara isn’t part of a union, but says she would take part in a strike at her workplace: “we have to fight for more money and for our rights,” she says. 

Pay is the leading issue for the Coventry strikers, who are calling for £15 an hour under the assumption that this would likely have little impact on Amazon’s profit margins – after all, it’s no secret that Amazon is hugely profitable (hello, Jeff Bezos is one of the most famous billionaires in the world). That said, it’s worth pointing out that while Amazon UK made huge profits in 2020 and 2021, it did in fact make a loss in 2022.

‘People constantly break safety codes in the warehouse, there’s always at least one person getting injured... we’re underpaid and underappreciated’ – Josh, 21

However, pay isn’t the only issue faced by Amazon’s young workers, it was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. “Whenever you speak to an Amazon worker, they will give you a catalogue of things that they find incredibly hard and frustrating working for the company,” says Richards. While he says that young workers often find the flexibility of the working hours appealing, many are concerned about the way that Amazon judges performance. “Performance is measured by an algorithm that measures performance across the whole of the site,” he explains. “As an individual, you don’t know what that target is, so you don’t know whether you are performing acceptably in their eyes or not.” 

If workers don’t meet the target and are in the bottom five per cent, he continues, they are brought into a meeting and given a warning. If this happens three times, they’re fired. This, he says, leads to overworking, paving the way to a much more dangerous working environment. “It really drives a lot of people to work much, much harder than they would in normal circumstances,” says Richards. “And you see the rate of injuries and accidents shoot up as a direct result of that.” 

This is one of 21-year-old Josh’s main issues with the job. “People constantly break safety codes in the warehouse,” the warehouse operative tells us. “There’s always at least one person getting injured.” For Josh, the best part of the job is break time, and this ultimately stems from the way he and his colleagues get treated: in his words, they’re “underpaid and underappreciated”. Francis and Clara also feel undervalued. “You’re treated more like a number than a person,” says Clara. Coincidentally, Francis tells us the exact same thing. 

Josh says the Coventry workers who went on strike are “legends”. “I would definitely go on strike if we had the chance,” he says. However, like Francis and Clara, Josh isn’t part of a union, for the sole reason that he hasn’t been offered to join one.

GMB organisers have largely struggled to organise in Amazon warehouses, partly due to high staff turnover but also, say organisers, due to direct and indirect tactics used by Amazon to prevent union officials engaging with workers. The main issue is that, as Brandstatter points out, outsiders aren’t allowed inside the warehouse. “We don’t have any access to the Amazon workplaces at all,” he says. “The only people who can get into an Amazon workplace are invited guests or people that work there.” Of course, union representatives are able to enter the workhouse if they’re representing a member in a disciplinary meeting, for example, but both Richards and Brandstatter say union officials are “escorted” everywhere in the warehouse, something they haven’t seen in any other company. “We’re escorted from the moment we enter the edge of Amazon premises,” says Richards. “We’re escorted to the toilets and we aren’t allowed to meet members at any point on the site.”

This means that the only route any union official has for talking to Amazon workers is effectively on the gate. Often, Brandstatter says, this isn’t practical, especially in winter. However, even in summer – when Coventry organisers made a lot of progress by talking to employees at the gates and in the car parks – Richards says that Amazon took extra steps to keep organisers away from workers. “We’ve seen security on the gates massively ramped up in terms of bringing in additional CCTV and they fenced off bits of warehouses,” he says. Brandstatter seconds this, saying the company had “doubled or tripled” their security measures. 

‘People are feeling more and more squeezed with the cost of living crisis, and the wages just aren’t enough to pay the bills anymore’ – Francis, 24

In Coventry, the wildcat strikes were a big help: union officials were able to speak with members and non-members who were protesting outside of the site and in Coventry city centre, allowing them to recruit activists who could organise within the workplace. But this isn’t always easy, considering that, according to Richards, Amazon briefs workers against having conversations about unions “under the banner of some workers might feel intimidated if you’re asking them about contentious things like workers rights.” This, he says, is a direct attempt to “limit the ability of those workers to organise themselves.”

Plus, some workers are somewhat apprehensive about staging a strike. Francis, for instance, says he’s worried about the prospect of “getting sacked,” as well as losing out on income. His fears aren’t completely unfounded. Over in the US, Amazon hasn’t shied away from firing workers involved with organising efforts in its warehouse. In November last year, a judge even ordered Amazon to stop firing workers for engaging in workplace organising. However, Richards says that, although Amazon doesn’t officially recognise GMB, workers are still “protected against being dismissed as a result of taking strike action,” as long as the union follows the legal process for industrial action, which involves holding a vote and serving two week’s notice. 

When asked for comment, an Amazon spokesperson told Dazed: “A tiny proportion of our workforce is involved [with the strike]. In fact, according to the verified figures, only a fraction of one per cent of our UK employees voted in the ballot – and that includes those who voted against industrial action.

“We appreciate the great work our teams do throughout the year and we’re proud to offer competitive pay which starts at a minimum of between £10.50 and £11.45 per hour, depending on location. This represents a 29 per cent increase in the minimum hourly wage paid to Amazon employees since 2018. Employees are also offered comprehensive benefits that are worth thousands more – including private medical insurance, life assurance, subsidised meals and an employee discount, to name a few.”

Despite that, the appetite to strike is definitely there – though it’s clear there’s more work to be done, whether that’s educating workers about trade unions or finding new ways to reach workers. Either way, it feels like change is afoot – as Brandstatter says: “we’re as strong as we’ve ever been in Amazon, and we’re getting stronger.” 

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