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.