Amazon Workers Seeking to Organize in Coventry, UK

Richard Partington, reporting in The Guardian brings us news that 3000 workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Coventry held a vote in early July on forming a union.  If successful, it will be the first Amazon union in the UK.  Conflicts between workers and management have been simmering for some time.  There were strikes in 2022 and 2023, with workers demanding pay of £15 an hour.  Workers currently start at somewhere between £12.30 and 13 an hour.

The new Labour government has pledged to improve work conditions, so it may be interesting to see if government action can move the parties to the bargaining table and forestall a strike. 

Nimo Omer, in conversation with Heather Stewart, provides more details in The Guardian’s Tuesday briefing from July 9th.  In addition to seeking higher pay, workers would also prefer not to work in a panopticon environment (left) with a high injury rate.  Their reporting highlights the huge boost in Amazon’s profits since the COVID pandemic, as well as the shocking net worth of Amazon’s CEO.  According to Forbes, his net worth has increased by $44 billion so far this year.  Just to put things in perspective, by my calculations, Mr. Bezos could personally afford to give each Amazon worker worldwide a 15,000 bonus, and he’d still be up over $20 billion for the year.  And then the company might not have to spend $14 million on union-busting consultants.

It occurs to me that Elon Musk payed $44 billion for Twitter. Presumably, with his $44 billion increase in wealth, Jeff Bezos could take Twitter off Musk’s hands. The company is now valued at less than $10 billion. The acquisition would be a good synergy with Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, and then he could make it so that nobody could endorse a Presidential candidate either in the press or on social media. Also, we could just go back to calling the site Twitter.

Eshe Nelson, writing in The New York Times reported back on July 17th that the organization efforts in Coventry failed. Only 49.5% of the workers voted to unionize.