Amazon’s recent announcement that it will make around 14,000 people redundant globally needs to be recognised as part of a wider phenomenon of the company’s undervaluation of its employees. Past experience shows that this has the potential to spark resistance from workers, and that when such resistance occurs, trade unions can play a crucial role in supporting workers to maintain momentum and win.
The reality of working at Amazon
While Amazon has cited the growing capabilities of AI as part of its justification for the redundancies, the company has also made clear that this is not simply about reducing the size of its workforce – the company is, at the same time, continuing to hire new staff – but is rather about ‘shifting resources’ within the company. This is consistent with a wider pattern in which AI and other new technologies change the kind of work employers require rather than making human labour obsolete.
We also need to take into account that high turnover of staff is a prominent feature of Amazon’s business model, with previously reported turnover rates of 150 per cent annually and its own statement released in July 2024 that up to 49 per cent of its UK workforce were at that point on temporary contracts.
Workers report back-breaking targets, lack of rest breaks and penalties for absences due to poor health. Combined with injury rates well above sector averages, this paints a picture of a company that treats its employees as disposable.
Lessons from past warehouse struggles
While it is not yet clear how many of the 14,000 global redundancies will encompass warehouse staff, or ‘associates’ in Amazon’s parlance, we can learn important lessons from previous struggles that have taken place in the company’s warehouses.
In August 2022, a wave of organising began, following the first pay rise at Amazon UK warehouses in several years. Workers reported that managers built up that pay rise to be something significant, and this provoked intense anger when it was announced to be only an additional 50 pence per hour.
This was felt particularly acutely due to the hardships Amazon workers had experienced during the pandemic, when they were classified as essential workers, the reliance of many workers’ families on money they sent back home, and soaring costs of living from 2022 onwards.
The response from workers was immediate and dramatic. At warehouses across the UK, Amazon workers staged wildcat protests and walkouts calling for decent pay. At Amazon’s BHX4 warehouse in Coventry, there was already a small base of GMB Union members, who immediately contacted union staff. The GMB’s Midlands Organising Department mobilised to meet with the workers and plan to sustain the action.
In the following two years, GMB membership at Coventry grew from around 60 to more than 1,400. Workers took 37 days of strike action, and eventually won pay rises totalling 28.5 per cent. Although the GMB narrowly lost a ballot of the workforce in July 2024, which would have forced Amazon to enter a collective bargaining negotiation, the union was able to use this as a case study to introduce important legislative changes to the process for statutory recognition as part of the Employment Rights Bill.
Strategies for effective worker organisation: Next steps for action
As further details of this wave of redundancies emerge, it is possible it will spark further mobilisations by workers. If that happens, they will be able to benefit from the principles that helped to make the Coventry campaign successful:
- Capitalise on spontaneous ruptures in the employer’s control. For workers, this might mean finding ways to maintain momentum by keeping workers in touch with each other, reaching out to unions for support and refusing any attempt by managers to separate off a small group of workers to negotiate on behalf of everybody else. For union organisers, this means responding immediately to workers who are taking action by mobilising officers to meet with workers and listen seriously to their concerns.
- Create democratic spaces and times outside the employer’s control. At Coventry, where workers wanted to have their voices heard without risking their jobs, this meant balloting for formal strike action, supporting workers’ participation in strikes with substantial payments to cover lost income, and using the protected time and space of the strike to organise strike schools and other activities that enabled workers to speak freely to each other and to union organisers.
- Cultivate worker leadership through deep support and education. This requires unions to be responsive to the natural leaders among the workers, establishing genuine dialogue and respect to integrate these leaders into the union. At Coventry this was further advanced by weekly leaders’ meetings, supported by union payments for lost earnings and expenses, which combined training in trade union representation with strategic discussions about how to respond to the latest issues in the campaign.
- Connect with workers’ lives beyond the workplace. This principle calls for a recognition that while the immediate trigger for unionisation might be a specific workplace issue such as redundancies or pay, every other issue that affects workers’ lives is therefore a trade union issue. Openly addressing the whole worker can be vital to identifying potential allies among workers’ communities and may also help to address any barriers limiting workers’ involvement with the union.
- Challenge the employer’s freedom to operate. Any employer must interact with an array of outside forces in the course of its activities, from customers to state regulators to investors. Redundancies raise a host of social issues about job security that are currently the subject of scrutiny in the Employment Rights Bill, and offer the potential to build public support through media engagement.
- Contest the employer’s control of the workplace. Increased levels of worker organisation provoked by redundancies have the potential to increase motivation to challenge everyday issues at work, and could fuel further increases in union membership among Amazon workers and enable further applications for statutory recognition.
Fundamentally, the experience of the Coventry campaign shows that Amazon workers have tremendous ability to fight for their rights, and that when a union throws its support behind them, they can become a force to be reckoned with.
Tom Vickers is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the GMB-NTU Work Futures Research Observatory at Nottingham Trent University. He has been engaged with movements resisting capitalism exploitation and oppression for more than two decades.
Organizing Amazon by Tom Vickers is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £14.99.
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