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. “What do we want? £15! When do we want it? Now!” they chanted. 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.

Five years ago, Amazon set up shop in Coventry, erecting a humongous site the size of eight soccer fields. 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.

Browns 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. There are twenty fulfillment centers across the UK, and fifty-four more in Europe. 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. In 2021, turnover in the UK alone topped £6 billion with pretax profits at over £200 million. Amazon UK Services Ltd employs over fifty-one thousand managers and administrative employees and an army of self-employed subcontractors. It’s owned by Amazon EU, which is incorporated in Luxembourg, a fellow monarchy and tax haven in Europe.