Over the weekend, workers at Britain’s GMB union, which has 560,000 members working everywhere from the retail sector to social care and logistics, began voting for union recognition at Amazon’s site in Coventry, the West Midlands city where it employs over three thousand people. Results for the ballot are likely to arrive in the coming days, but for eighteen months, the company, valued at $2 trillion, has bitterly resisted attempts at unionization, plastering the walls of its Coventry warehouse with QR codes that produce emails addressed to GMB cancelling union membership.

Amazon’s sprawling behemoth warehouse, BHX4, located at the former Jaguar motor facility of Browns Lane in Coventry, is ground zero for the union movement in logistics. The company has expended huge resources and used aggressive anti-union tactics to fight over 1,400 GMB-unionized “warehouse associates” who want formal recognition at the company. By refusing voluntary recognition, Amazon has forced the struggle for democratic representation to be decided by the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) — the government body responsible for regulating collective bargaining. The vote, which closed on Saturday, will decide the fate of every worker at the warehouse.

An Amazon spokesperson claims they “take on feedback, make continuous improvements, and invest heavily to offer great pay, benefits and skills development,” yet such rhetoric is not reflected in the grueling sixty-hour weeks and below-inflation pay raises commonplace amongst the companies’ employees. The implementation of artificial intelligence, which under a more democratic management structure might have eased the load of workers, has only served to increase the intensity and amount of work required of the companies’ employees. The Associate Development and Performance Tracker, or ADAPT, and the Supply Chain Optimization Technology, or SCOT, have become a widely used tools in Amazon’s workplaces. The former meticulously tracks the pace and activity of employees over sometimes ten-hour shifts and the latter is partially responsible for making decisions about what the warehouse should buy, where items ought to be stored, and what the best means are for delivering goods to customers.

It is possible to imagine a world in which these technologies, combined with job security and adequate paid training, are used to make work more efficient and to transfer workers to positions where they can be most effective. In reality, these systems are a block box for workers, who are provided with no transparency about how their work is organized, what data is being collected about them, or what to expect from future machine decisions. Their effect is to create a culture of constant anxiety and uncertainty in an already precarious industry.

For trade unionists, the tactics Amazon deploys to undermine efforts at collective action are well-known. The company has hired private investigators to spy on labor organizers and organized anti-union captive audience meetings, at which trade union officials are targeted by management. In Coventry, the company launched a charm offensive ahead of the vote for union recognition. While in the past Amazon had made little effort to translate contracts for its staff, many of whom are foreign born, the company has in the lead up to the vote printed out anti-union messaging in multiple languages and hired management of the same ethnicity as some of the staff to undermine solidarity.

Ferdousara, a GMB organizer who has been on the picket line from 5:00 a.m. every day for the duration of the organizing drive, told Jacobin that Amazon has attempted to present the union “as an external organization, saying GMB will make all the decisions, which is a complete lie.” The company has also posted anti-union propaganda throughout the warehouse, including “QR codes that when scanned, automatically create an email to GMB cancelling membership.”

She added that the company has also been holding mandatory meetings with anti-union propaganda. These “voluntary” sessions, which every worker is obliged to attend, last the better part of two hours. Amazon’s tactics extend further than what Ferdousara described as “brainwashing.” The company has also sought to undermine the process of gaining legal recognition for the union in other ways:

They [Amazon] have also flooded the warehouse with new hires on temporary contracts to subvert the democratic process. The first time we put in an application for recognition was around this time last year, when there were about 1,800 workers. Now, we estimate there are over three thousand people. We’ve been told Amazon have been hiring ten to fifteen workers a week.

These tactics have meant that longtime employees at the warehouse have been unable to find enough work or have had to take on other jobs for which they have not been trained, which can be dangerous. Staff are often moved to jobs that require lifting heavy weights or traveling long distances when their regular work is unavailable.  

There are currently forty workers leading the unionization fight with GMB who have become organic leaders of the unionization drive, but their efforts have helped to get the union to where it is now, on the cusp of recognition.

While being far from socialist, the new Labour government led by Keir Starmer will create a political climate that will be much more union-friendly than one led by the Conservatives. Starmer has in fact pledged support the GMB workers and implied that he might repeal anti-union legislation, including mandates of minimum service levels at schools and on railways during strikes. However, Starmer’s recruitment of former Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke, an ardent supporter of minimum service laws, to the party in May in the lead-up to the general election is a worrying sign that a U-turn on this policy may be a possibility. But if Starmer is serious about bolstering workers’ rights in the wake of a fourteen-year assault on living standards by the Tories, he will have to keep his promises.

Labour has also committed to repeal regressive anti-strike laws that prevent electronic balloting, and will lower the current threshold for statutory recognition from the current mandate of 40 percent of the total bargaining unit and over 50 percent turnout. Furthermore, Starmer has pledged to scrap the two-year qualifying period to receive full employment rights, a move that organizers like Ferdousara believe will help their efforts.

The labor of warehousing and logistics is part of the cloud empire that amazon has built. The UK’s digital infrastructure essentially runs on Amazon Web Services, which has had no competition or public accountability despite the critical importance of this infrastructure. Victory in this sector could be the start of a wider trend for democratic accountability over these crucial features of the architecture of modern life.