Workers Can Win

Efforts to unionize Amazon are not futile. When trade unions see the struggle at Amazon as a strategic priority and commit serious resources, they have shown that with support workers can overcome the barriers they face and become a force to be reckoned with.

Wildcat protests erupted at Amazon warehouses across the UK in August 2022, sparked by a lower-than-expected pay offer amid soaring inflation. At the Coventry BHX4 warehouse, workers sat down in the cafeteria and refused to return to work without a direct explanation from management about their paltry pay raise. They resisted Amazon’s attempt to divide and conquer, rejecting a management proposal to meet privately with a small delegation of workers instead of everyone.

The GMB, a union representing six hundred thousand workers across many UK industries, had already been doing years of slow and steady organizing work at BHX4 and other Amazon sites, and had built a modest membership of around sixty workers at Coventry. When hundreds of workers walked out over the pay dispute, GMB members contacted union staff, who immediately met with workers and helped build the fight.

Union membership at BHX4 surged to over fourteen hundred out of a total workforce of about three thousand. Workers staged a series of strike actions totaling thirty-seven days, and within two years the workers had won pay increases totaling 28.5 percent, a sea change after years of static pay that failed to keep up with inflation.

In the summer of 2024, the Coventry workers nearly won bargaining rights, falling short in a union representation election by a 0.5 percent margin after an intensive anti-union blitz by management. The tactics Amazon used in the period leading to the ballot should prepare workers and organizers to expect the same in other battles with Amazon: Management leaned on workers’ insecurities to threaten that union recognition could lead to delayed pay increases or even the warehouse closing. They invited all workers to multiple “voluntary information sessions” (a rare opportunity to take a rest from work!) where they bombarded workers with anti-union propaganda. And they drenched the warehouse in anti-union propaganda — posters, display screens, leaflets, pop-up stands — including QR codes that activated workers’ personal emails to send a message canceling their GMB membership.

Notably, because the recognition ballot was only running at a single site, Amazon was able to focus all its union-busting attention there. They also brought in more than thirty managers from other warehouses in both the UK and the United States, including managers who focused specifically on speaking to workers from their own nationality in their own language, and who spent many weeks speaking to workers one-on-one during work time, trying to persuade them against the union. Cynically, they also diluted union membership below the 50 percent that would have triggered automatic recognition under UK rules by suddenly hiring more than a thousand new workers, who had no union contact or experience.

Learning From Coventry

Surely Amazon management hoped that defeating the union ballot would be the end of their union troubles in Coventry. That has not been the case. The union activists at BHX4 picked themselves up after the narrow loss and have continued organizing with full GMB support, advocating for safety and better pay, and recruiting new members despite continued retaliation.

Many people have asked what made the GMB’s strategy at BHX4 so successful in building a strong in-plant organization, and in coming so close to prevailing in a hotly contested election. To answer this question, worker-leaders and organizers worked with Tom Vickers to produce a book just published this month, titled Organizing Amazon: Building Worker Power Under Conditions of Fragmentation, Precarity and Regimentation.

The book presents the “Six Cs,” or core principles, of the Coventry Model: capitalize on spontaneous ruptures in the employer’s control; create democratic spaces and times outside the employer’s control; cultivate worker leadership through deep support and education; connect with workers’ lives beyond the workplace; challenge the employer’s freedom to operate; and contest employer control of the workplace.

At BHX4, workers and organizers applied the Six Cs in many ways, including: using the opportunity presented by the wildcat protests to get GMB organizers to meet workers in the streets; using the protected time and space of official strikes, enabled by a substantial strike fund, to create democratic forums where workers could associate more freely and speak with organizers; systematically identifying natural leaders among the workers and inviting them to weekly all-day training and strategy sessions, for which they were reimbursed for lost work time; opening conversations about workers’ wider lives and responding to issues raised, for example by providing accredited immigration advice; working with community organizations, charities, politicians, the media, lawyers, and even company investors to increase pressure on Amazon from outside; and fostering a culture of worker-leaders challenging the employer’s arguments within company social media platforms and at meetings, while also engaging in legal processes to force the company to formally recognize the union.

This success in building unity and a democratic process involving hundreds of workers across nationalities and cultures was all the more impressive because Amazon works hard to divide workers. Not only were the workers in BHX4 tightly controlled and monitored at work, leaving little opportunity to speak to each other, but many workers spoke of widespread favoritism by managers, who exploited racial and national differences by elevating some groups for special favors and promotion, while punishing others.

GMB organizers took seriously the diversity of cultures, nationalities, and languages among workers, routinely translating their materials into thirteen languages and timing strike days to coincide with Eid and Orthodox Easter, to give workers time with their communities on two of the workers’ main religious holidays. And they built a workers’ leadership in which all nationalities were represented.

Proof of Concept

The Coventry workers are notable but not unique in their accomplishments. Earlier this year, members of CAUSE, the independent union of workers at the RDU1 warehouse in Garner, North Carolina, badly lost their union representation election. But like their Coventry siblings, they regrouped and are moving forward, expanding their outreach to Amazon workers throughout their region and conducting trainings and building new alliances with groups like the Union of Southern Service Workers.

Workers at the massive JFK8 facility in Staten Island, New York, won their historic union election three and a half years ago, but Amazon has refused to bargain and now, with the Trump administration in charge of labor law, has little to fear from government accountability. That hasn’t stopped the JFK8 workers, who belong to Amazon Labor Union Local 1, now affiliated with the Teamsters union. They’ve built a new core of leaders through intensive organizing and training, and have launched an ambitious demand for a Safety Bill of Rights.

In India, Amazon warehouse and delivery workers in the Amazon India Workers Union have organized direct actions and used social media to expose horrific working conditions, with workplace temperatures reaching a staggering 122 degrees Fahrenheit or even higher. Staging rallies and garnering media publicity, workers at the huge DEL4 warehouse outside Delhi forced the company to agree to stop work during extreme heat, increase access to water, set up a new cafeteria for workers, and hire a female nurse for women workers.

These are just a few of the many examples of Amazon workers standing up and fighting back, even when the odds are stacked heavily against them. They are proving that workers can organize and force concessions from the behemoth — an important rejoinder to anyone who believes the Amazon juggernaut is too powerful to stop. And increasingly, Amazon workers are linking up across borders, through networks like Amazon Workers International and Uni Global Union, coordinating actions and learning from one another.

In many countries, workers have been organizing independently, outside of traditional unions, especially where unions are unprepared to commit the resources needed to take on Amazon. Even when unions commit, those efforts typically have been tentative and small-scale. The Coventry experience demonstrates what’s possible when a union commits a dedicated team of organizers and resources to help low-paid, precarious workers develop a well-trained and organic leadership, strike the company repeatedly, wrest pay concessions, and — even with laws that strongly favor the employer — come extremely close to prevailing in an election. 

Coventry workers did those things with the resources of just one of the GMB’s seven regions. Now imagine if unions came together to launch Coventry-like campaigns at all Amazon warehouses in the UK; imagine if instead of focusing on a couple dozen of Amazon’s 1,445 US worksites, the Teamsters and other unions launched campaigns at hundreds.

Given Amazon’s heavy reliance in many countries on immigrant workers, unions also need to include defense of migrant rights as a basic part of their organizing. The Midlands GMB already made a step in this direction, by arranging for members and their families to have access to free, accredited immigration advice. But at a time when immigrants in the United States, the UK, and many other countries are coming under vicious attack and are having their rights systematically stripped away, unions need to do much more to demonstrate that when it comes to the rights of immigrant workers, “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Investing in hundreds of Coventry-like campaigns would of course represent an unprecedented commitment in the modern labor movement. But the alternative — failing to step up to the Amazon challenge — bodes poorly not just for Amazon workers but for workers everywhere.

The Coventry workers and their compatriots in warehouses around the world have shown that it’s possible to take on Goliath. They’ve shown that with creativity, worker democracy and leadership, and a fighting spirit, it’s possible to wrest concessions from the company. The question is, will union leaders worldwide step up, pay attention to these workplace organizing lessons, and commit the resources for mass organizing on the scale that’s urgently needed?