AMAZON workers walked out in Coventry today in the delivery giant’s first ever strike on British soil.
Their strike has a special significance.
The government has, naturally enough, proved most vocally intransigent when it comes to strikes in public services where it is the decision-maker on pay.
But private-sector strikes are not less important. Here, unions like GMB — which has fought doggedly to organise Amazon workers in the teeth of employer hostility for years — and Unite have repeatedly won above-inflation pay awards across hundreds of disputes, putting hundreds of millions of pounds into workers’ pockets.
It is these successes rather than the possibility of economic disruption that give ministers sleepless nights: Tory attacks on the right to strike are motivated by pay victories in the private sector as well as the large national disputes.
The private sector — making up around three-quarters of the British workforce — is poorly unionised, and Amazon is quick to point out that most of its workers are not engaged in industrial action.
But that is exactly why efforts to organise in the sector are so important and why pay victories when they happen can help unionise new swathes of the workforce.
The name recognition of a market leader like Amazon — as was the case in recent years with BFAWU strikes at fast-food giant McDonald’s — helps popularise industrial action and can inspire people in similar lines of work to join unions.
Rishi Sunak’s determination to hold down pay in the public sector is not about balancing books — after all, the Treasury altered its own debt calculation models to create the “black hole” in public finances which it now says it needs to fill.
It is part of a strategy to drive down pay across the economy to raise profit margins.
The Amazon strike — taking place at one of Britain’s highest-profile businesses — is a reminder that the pay fight is one which unites public and private-sector workers, foiling Tory attempts to divide and rule.
And, though an insulting 50p an hour pay rise offer has prompted the action, it’s a dispute which also highlights the inhuman conditions imposed on Amazon workers by this gig economy behemoth.
Union reps tell horror stories of workers penalised for toilet breaks, driven relentlessly to hit unreasonable targets set by algorithm, collapsing on the job and requiring ambulance call-outs.
It is a model utterly indifferent to the welfare of its workforce — one intended to “wear them out, get rid of them, replace them,” as GMB senior organiser Amanda Gearing says.
If workers do not stand up and be counted, this is the future for many other industries — not least Royal Mail, where the CWU is currently reballoting to extend its strike mandate against bosses seeking to turn it into a gig-economy courier not unlike Amazon.
At Royal Mail — as indeed on the railway — workers are told they must put up with worsening terms and conditions in a changing world.
Demand has shrunk and their industries are no longer profitable, say companies that have siphoned off billions and handed it to shareholders. So the service must be downgraded, the workforce must be downsized, and “productivity” (by which they mean the rate of exploitation) must increase.
Amazon gives the lie to all that. Here we have a company that has almost doubled in value since the pandemic: one which saw its annual revenues rise by 38 per cent in 2020, by 22 per cent in 2021 and by another 10 per cent in 2022.
Internet shopping and behavioural changes since the lockdowns have seen demand soar, yet it is still waging war on its workers.
Amazon’s behaviour shows that workers are not under attack because business is poor or the economic outlook difficult. They are under attack when business is booming: they are under attack to maximise employer profit.
