That's why he never works a shift without taking detailed notes. Workers who receive three of these warnings in a six-week period must have a formal one-to-one with managers. ![]() He says his productivity is assessed relative to his colleagues, and if he ranks among the bottom 25 percent, he will receive a verbal warning from management. He doesn't know how the system works, but he claims it doesn't care whether he's sick or whether the supermarket-style hand scanner he uses malfunctions. Usually he gets a 60 or 70 percent productivity rate. Garfield Hylton, also a GMB union member, describes his working day at Amazon as haunted by a number what he calls his “rate.” Every morning, and again in the afternoon, a manager walks up to him to tell him how productive he has been according to the company’s algorithms. When he objected-“This isn’t the army!”-he says he was told by his manager that the conversation had been “logged,” immortalized on his record.įor others, that management style is epitomized by the surveillance software workers say Amazon uses to track their performance. “How the management treats people is shocking.” He says he was recently told off for leaning against a wall and catching his breath. But the 57-year-old is also concerned about the management culture inside Amazon. He says his shoulder aches at night, after more than three years moving pallets inside the Coventry warehouse. Yet many staff here worked through the pandemic-a period during which Amazon saw quarterly profits triple-and argue they have earned that pay rise.Įven on the other side of the pandemic, long days are still taking their toll on Westwood. Amazon’s local regional director, Neil Travis, describes the company’s pay as competitive-either in line with or higher than similar jobs locally. But the union representing them, GMB, is calling for that figure to rise to £15 per hour, which would make UK workers’ wages equivalent to the $18 hourly rate their US colleagues receive. Amazon workers in central Germany have been striking on and off for a decade, while a Staten Island warehouse became the first US site to unionize in April 2022.Įmployees in the Coventry warehouse right now receive around £10.50 ($13) an hour. But compared to other countries, the UK organizing efforts have had a slow start. In August 2022, employees at warehouses across the country held unofficial protests in warehouse canteens. The Coventry strike is not the first time that UK Amazon workers have publicly complained about pay and working conditions. Thaddeus, who has worked at Amazon for three years, agrees. “We are trying to fight for a pay rise,” he says. Among them is Mal (who declines to give his surname for reasons of privacy). These are the first Amazon workers to officially go on strike in the UK. A few minutes after midnight, four figures emerge from the mist and the crowd waiting for them erupts into cheers and applause. Westwood is among a group of Amazon day shift employees, union representatives, and TV cameras waiting in nervous silence to see whether workers on the night shift will be bold enough to walk away from their workstations. And I’m still struggling to pay my bills.” We’re doing 40 hours a week, stood up for 10 hours a day. Now we’re at 10.5 percent and people can't cope,” he says. “When we started this protest, I think inflation was at 6 percent. Westwood, a member of the UK’s GMB Union, is here to campaign for higher pay. ![]() In the early hours of January 25, he’s on the picket line again outside Amazon’s giant Coventry warehouse, where he gets paid £10.46 ($12.90) per hour to work alongside a fleet of robots. He was working as a train guard and it was the 1980s-the only other time in recent British history when inflation surged past 9 percent. The last time Amazon employee Darren Westwood was on strike, Amazon didn’t exist.
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