Amazon strike union12/9/2023 Like many industrial powerhouses of the postwar era, Coventry’s “golden age” was bound up with automobile production, which boomed throughout the 1950s and ’60s. The Browns Lane site is a case study in the deindustrialization and recomposition of the UK economy. After decades of defensive struggles, the trade union movement is back on the offensive, with the GMB union in Coventry likely just one of many new collective bargaining agreements to come. Amazon is notorious for its use of anti-union consultants and other intelligence operatives to counter labor “organizing threats.” Despite these efforts on the part of the company, the ground that workers have gained at Browns Lane might mean that the warehouse is set to be the first unionized Amazon facility in the nation. Pay rates for Amazon warehouse workers vary by location but the minimum hourly wage is between £10.50 and £11.45 ($13.24 and $14.44). It’s owned by Amazon EU, which is incorporated in Luxembourg, a fellow monarchy and tax haven in Europe. Amazon UK Services Ltd employs over fifty-one thousand managers and administrative employees and an army of self-employed subcontractors. In 2021, turnover in the UK alone topped £6 billion with pretax profits at over £200 million. Through a network of logistics subcontractors and “flex” workers (a gig-work platform for self-employed drivers), they process and deliver a huge volume of goods. ![]() There are twenty fulfillment centers across the UK, and fifty-four more in Europe. Housing nine miles of conveyor belts and anywhere between twelve hundred and eighteen hundred workers, depending on the time of the year, it is comparable in scale to the Jaguar motor factory that previously occupied the site.īrowns Lane is one of two “cross-dock facilities,” or fulfillment centers for fulfillment centers, in the UK, a fact which underscores the strategic importance of unionization drives at the site. The scene, reminiscent of the heyday of industrial conflict in the 1970s, marked a sea change in attempts to organize at the world’s second most valuable company.įive years ago, Amazon set up shop in Coventry, erecting a humongous site the size of eight soccer fields. ![]() “What do we want? £15! When do we want it? Now!” they chanted. ![]() On a mid-April morning, hundreds of workers from Amazon’s Browns Lane fulfillment center in Coventry, England, formed a picket outside of the warehouse before marching to the front gate.
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