Amazon workers narrowly reject unions in historic vote

GMB has narrowly lost its landmark merger recognition bid at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry.

About 49.5% of the polled workers voted in favor, while 50.5% voted against. The union needed a majority to vote yes.

If GMB had won, it would have been the first time Amazon had recognized a merger in the UK.

The online giant would have been forced to negotiate with workers over issues such as pay and conditions.

In a statement, Amazon said it placed “high value on direct engagement” with staff.

“We look forward to continuing on that path with our team in Coventry,” he added.

GMB told the BBC that it is considering trying to get recognition on the Coventry site again and that discussions are taking place about its strategy.

The process would involve convincing the Central Arbitration Committee, which is responsible for overseeing applications for recognition, that the pool of eligible workers had changed.

The GMB, which lost by 28 votes, said its recognition efforts had failed “very badly” and accused Amazon of “union busting”.

He said there were “anti-union messages from company bosses, including numerous anti-union seminars” at the warehouse.

He added that “the fire lit by workers in Coventry and across the UK is still burning” and that the union will “continue to fight” for low paid workers.

The union’s fight for recognition had been described as a David vs Goliath battle, with workers facing stiff resistance from the online giant.

It began with a show of defiance in the summer of 2022, after Amazon offered workers a pay rise of between 35p and 50p an hour.

Toiling in warehouses during the Covid pandemic, workers said it felt like an insult and in Coventry a small group of angry workers spontaneously walked out and protested outside the fulfillment centre.

Then the GMB got involved and asked the workforce to unionise.

In January 2023, with a GMB membership of just 50, Coventry workers held the first Amazon strike in the UK.

It went on to organize a further 37 days of industrial action over the past year and by recruiting on the box line, it steadily raised its membership to more than 1,400 members out of around 3,000 centre-workers.

In April, the union launched a legal challenge against Amazon, alleging it used underhanded tactics to encourage members to cancel their union memberships.

He said on Wednesday that the legal challenge will continue.

As part of the challenge, the GMB says Amazon placed posters in fulfillment centers with QR codes that generated an email to the union’s membership department asking for their membership to be cancelled.

Amazon responded by saying that “employees were telling us they wanted to cancel their membership but couldn’t find a way to do so, so we provided information to help.

“We have always been clear that union membership is an employee’s personal choice.”

Amazon, which is one of the UK’s largest private sector employers with 75,000 workers, has made it clear throughout that it does not want to recognize a union and that it wants to maintain direct communication with its staff.

After Wednesday’s vote, she further reiterated that “having daily conversations” with staff was “an essential part of our work culture”.

“We value that direct relationship and so do our employees. That’s why we’ve always worked hard to listen to them, act on their feedback and invest heavily in great pay, benefits and skills development,” the firm added.

The GMB says it is surprised by what it sees as the fearlessness of an overwhelmingly immigrant workforce, many of whom have recently arrived from South Asia.

Union organizers estimate that only 5% of Coventry’s workers are British-born and its campaign leaflets have been translated into 12 different languages.

They say at first many were afraid to get involved, but as the strikes continued, and people saw that workers who joined the picket lines were not facing disciplinary action, their confidence grew.

The union hopes the government will strengthen their power to organize.

Labor has promised legislation in today’s King’s Speech to make it easier for unions to win recognition votes by lowering the threshold required to win and to make it easier for union officials to recruit for jobs.

Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Nowak said despite facing one of the “world’s biggest corporate giants”, Coventry union members “just narrowly missed out” on securing recognition.

“With Labor set to usher in a new era of stronger workers’ rights, companies like Amazon are on the wrong side of history,” he added.

But Gregor Gall, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Glasgow, questioned whether GMB had the resources to take the fight to Amazon’s other hubs.

“The cost of organizing unions is very high. The GMB had officers working full-time in it. We won’t necessarily see organizing races elsewhere,” he said.

Professor Gall’s caution is understandable given what has happened in the United States.

In 2022, Amazon was operating out of its Staten Island warehouse in New York became the first in the US to gain union recognition. Two years later, the company still hasn’t sat down to negotiate with the union and continues to fight legal challenges to the vote.