“As an individual, you don’t know what that target is, so you don’t know whether you are performing acceptably in their eyes or not.” “Performance is measured by an algorithm that measures performance across the whole of the site,” he explains. While he says that young workers often find the flexibility of the working hours appealing, many are concerned about the way that Amazon judges performance. “Whenever you speak to an Amazon worker, they will give you a catalogue of things that they find incredibly hard and frustrating working for the company,” says Richards. However, pay isn’t the only issue faced by Amazon’s young workers, it was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. That said, it’s worth pointing out that while Amazon UK made huge profits in 20, it did in fact make a loss in 2022. Pay is the leading issue for the Coventry strikers, who are calling for £15 an hour under the assumption that this would likely have little impact on Amazon’s profit margins – after all, it’s no secret that Amazon is hugely profitable (hello, Jeff Bezos is one of the most famous billionaires in the world). Again, Clara isn’t part of a union, but says she would take part in a strike at her workplace: “we have to fight for more money and for our rights,” she says. “Everything has become more expensive, and they don’t want to give us more money,” she says. As a packing and process guide, Clara gets paid £13.40 an hour even though she works nights. “People are feeling more and more squeezed with the cost of living crisis, and the wages just aren’t enough to pay the bills anymore.”Ĭlara*, 26, agrees. “The pay has stayed stagnant and isn’t competitive anymore,” he says. “I’m not in a trade union, but I am for the Coventry strike, and I hope more strikes take action as well,” he tells Dazed. While he does find the work fairly rewarding, due to its challenging nature, he says he would also go on strike if given the opportunity. In fact, it now seems like the appetite for striking is spreading across the country.įrancis*, 24, an Amazon warehouse associate, has worked at Amazon for four years. But it is far from the only Amazon warehouse where workers are hungry for change. “During that two-week period, workers started coming to us and saying they want to get organised at work.”Ĭoventry is where this organising happened to stick, and the union is entering this next wave of strikes with a total of 350 members. “The spontaneous action was led by younger people who were so pissed off by the way their employer treated them, and the fact that they had done all this work through the pandemic,” Kevin Brandstatter, a national organiser for GMB, tells Dazed. The action wasn’t formally organised by a union, nor was it legal, but, thankfully, the GMB Union, which has been attempting to organise in Amazon warehouses for the best part of a decade, was ready to help give workers a voice. Over the course of two weeks in August last year, Amazon workers all across the country – including in Coventry, Essex, Doncaster and Bristol – staged informal wildcat strikes and occupations. They were angry, obviously – and they demanded change. Despite working all the way through the pandemic, workers received an embarrassing three per cent pay offer of 35p to 50p last summer, when inflation was at 9.9 per cent and energy bills were set to rise even further. The strike action, taking place on February 28, March 2, and for a week from March 13, follows a history-making strike in January. This week, Amazon workers from Coventry are walking out once again to fight for better pay. This article was originally published on February 28, 2023
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