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It takes quite a bit to frighten Zee. The 35-year-old father of two not often will get flustered: not when he first set out on the 4,000-mile journey from his household dwelling in Pakistan to the UK greater than a decade in the past; not throughout the years he spent struggling for survival on the fringes of Britain’s formal economic system; not when the Dwelling Workplace threatened to deport him, plunging his younger household into uncertainty. However the chilly, foggy, ultimate hours of 24 January this yr – they felt totally different. “My coronary heart was pounding,” Zee remembers. “My thoughts was scared.”
That was the night time Zee and his colleagues at Amazon’s BHX4 warehouse in Coventry determined to make historical past, abandoning their workstations and launching an unprecedented stoppage to demand greater wages. That they had walked out earlier than, in a spontaneous, advert hoc protest. However this was totally different: a rigorously deliberate and authorized effort, the likes of which Amazon UK had by no means confronted. Standing of their approach on the exit gates was a line of senior managers who had the facility to make or break every employee’s future, staring down anybody who may dare to move. “As midnight struck, I stored catching different folks’s eyes: can we go, or can we keep?” Zee recollects. “We didn’t know what would occur if we crossed that threshold. However we did know that any person, someplace needed to be the primary to attempt.”
Compared with many current industrial actions, with hundreds of nurses, lecturers and civil servants protesting en masse, this was a modest affair: simply Zee and about 300 fellow nightshift workers congregating within the darkness, slapping one another’s backs, sipping espresso and taking turns to huddle round a brazier on the sides of a nondescript industrial park within the metropolis’s suburbs. However by operating that ultimate gauntlet, a precarious and fragmented workforce had finished what no one on this nation had finished earlier than. That they had formally entered battle with one of many greatest, richest and most vehemently anti-union corporations on Earth.
The story of how they obtained there stretches far past Amazon, or Coventry, and divulges a lot concerning the cracks operating by means of British society. But it surely’s a narrative, too, of these on the mistaken facet of the financial establishment discovering methods to combat again, upending previous assumptions concerning the limits of collective organising. Now, in opposition to the backdrop of a value of residing disaster and renewed assaults by the federal government on the appropriate to protest, Zee and his colleagues are scaling up their ambitions: scheduling extra strike motion, spreading their dispute to different Amazon websites. The stakes are monumental. Lose, and all that hope and momentum drains away. Win, they usually show that employees anyplace can unionise, tackle their employers, and triumph.
“We’re a part of one thing greater,” Zee observes. “Wanting across the UK, it feels as if nearly everyone is like us – at boiling level. And ultimately, when a saucepan is left like that, it boils over.”
BHX4, a state-of-the-art logistics hub boasting 9 miles of conveyor belts and 120,000 sq metres of ground house, opened in 2018. Zee – not his actual identify (lots of these interviewed right here requested to stay nameless) – began work there in early 2020. His new position concerned much less strolling than a earlier non permanent job he’d finished at one other Amazon plant close by. “At first, I assumed it was heaven,” he tells me. “Then Covid hit.”
Coronavirus and its lockdowns acted like a progress hormone on Amazon and despatched it on a unprecedented hiring spree. By late 2020 the corporate was recruiting 1,400 new employees a day, pushing the scale of its worldwide workforce as much as 1.2 million. Amid document demand for dwelling supply, that workforce helped Amazon harvest monumental riches. Between 2019 and 2021, annual internet earnings from the corporate’s international operations practically tripled to greater than £25bn, whereas the private wealth of the founder, Jeff Bezos, soared by greater than £57bn throughout the first 12 months of the pandemic alone. With that windfall, Bezos may have given a bonus of £38,000 to each single Amazon employee on the planet and nonetheless remained one of many world’s wealthiest folks. As an alternative, he commissioned a rocket to fly him into house and again. “I wish to thank each Amazon worker and each Amazon buyer,” Bezos declared upon touchdown, “since you guys paid for all this.”
Throughout the largely windowless partitions of BHX4, life beneath Covid was turning out to be a wild trip. Shifts had by no means been extra plentiful, or punishing, and although many workers appreciated the additional time – and an preliminary pay rise of £2 an hour, granted in recognition of the elevated workload – frustrations have been mounting. Workers have been topic to mysterious every day targets and distinctive surveillance, with any time spent “off process” measured to the second by their work gadgets and reported again to bosses. Alterations to work patterns – because of sickness, household emergency, or any of the messy issues that include actual life – have been assessed by inflexible, unsympathetic laptop packages, overseen by seemingly inflexible, unsympathetic managers.
One employee says they have been threatened with disciplinary motion upon returning to work after weeks of chemotherapy; one other says the identical factor occurred after they have been caught in hospital with their sick new child daughter, regardless of informing Amazon of the state of affairs (Amazon insists no formal disciplinary motion was carried out in both case). Every day, the proprietary productivity-monitoring software program would robotically generate league tables rating workers by how shut they got here to assembly ever-changing every day targets, the small print of which have been by no means shared with employees. Anybody close to the underside may count on to be flagged for consideration by administration, step one down a highway that would result in the sack. Sudden dismissals have been frequent. “To them, we’re like robots relatively than folks,” one worker says. “The little issues that make us human, you may really feel them being floor out of you.”
Discontent was effervescent at BHX4, and Zee was capable of command a greater of view of it than most. By 2021 he was a “downside solver” – roaming the warehouse with a cellular computing unit, fixing any points with inventory or provide traces alongside the best way – which gave him the chance to talk informally to colleagues in a number of departments. He had additionally been elected to Amazon’s “affiliate discussion board”, an inside worker group ostensibly arrange by the corporate to offer a hyperlink between employees and administration – although critics accuse it of being little greater than a toothless physique designed to insulate Amazon from calls for for real union illustration. “I’ve at all times been outspoken; if I see one thing’s mistaken, then I’ve to do one thing about it,” Zee says. “Individuals have been coming to us with the identical type of issues, repeatedly, however once I introduced these up with administration, nothing modified.”
One downside, Zee realised, loomed giant over all the remaining. A number of months into the pandemic, whilst Amazon employees have been being feted as “key employees”, their £2 an hour bonus pay was quietly withdrawn. With most workers contained in the warehouse now again incomes about £10 an hour earlier than tax, a daily full-time shift sample – 4 10-hour stints every week – was turning into more and more exhausting to stay off. Employees have been compelled to compete for one or two further shifts, though the influence of a 60-hour working week on household life was extreme.
“My youngsters don’t know me like they need to know me,” one longstanding employee says. “On the at some point of the week I’ve off, they wish to trip their bikes with me however I’m too drained to do something however fear about cash and sleep.” One other asks why they need to have to decide on between monetary safety and the essential constructing blocks of a good life. “I don’t have hobbies,” they are saying. “I’ve misplaced mates, social connections – all so I can stand right here six days every week, scanning parcels, to pay my lease.” An estimated 75% of the employees at BHX4, in response to a GMB union survey, say they will’t afford to pay their payments; some have change into trapped in cycles of high-interest debt. Final yr, Amazon’s core UK division posted a revenue of £222m and paid no company tax for the second yr operating. In that point, Zee and his colleagues obtained a real-terms pay minimize of 8%.
By the summer time of 2022, it wasn’t simply employees in Coventry reaching breaking level, however Amazon workers throughout the nation. For months, managers had been attempting to placate a stressed workforce by saying a big pay rise was on the best way, however when the small print have been lastly introduced in early August – a rise of solely 35p-50p an hour – it provoked uproar. In Tilbury, Essex, a whole lot of livid employees spontaneously left their posts to rally within the employees canteen. The next day, copycat protests erupted in Dartford, Chesterfield, Avonmouth, Hemel Hempstead – and Coventry.
Inside a couple of days, order appeared to have been restored: employees have been again on regular shifts, and no concessions on pay had been granted. In Coventry, administration’s solely response was to quickly improve a couple of affiliate discussion board members – Zee included – to “employees representatives”, within the hope that this may mollify workers’ considerations about not being listened to. However under the floor, one thing elementary had shifted. It wasn’t simply that many employees had brazenly defied their bosses for the primary time and, within the phrases of 1 participant, “rediscovered our price within the course of”. What had additionally modified was that, within the midst of this haphazard revolt, one other group of individuals had turned as much as discuss with Amazon employees about how they may do it once more – extra powerfully, durably and legally.
Due to these conversations, when Zee encountered colleagues outdoors the warehouse, they usually inevitably started complaining about Amazon’s low wages, unresponsive bosses and unfair working circumstances, he lastly felt as if he had an actual resolution to supply. “Bro,” he would reply, with a large smile, “be a part of the union!”
Amanda Gearing was driving when she obtained the decision. “Somebody from the staff mentioned, ‘They’re strolling out at Amazon’ and I simply turned the automobile round there after which. We have been blindsided. However we obtained ourselves on the scene and from there, the whole lot constructed.”
Gearing, who’s now a senior GMB organiser within the Midlands, started her first job for the union in 2007 – simply as the worldwide monetary crash hit, unleashing an period of austerity, rising inequality and electoral turmoil that continues to convulse our politics at present. “To be trustworthy, it’s felt fixed,” she says of the union’s makes an attempt to firefight the implications. “We’ve at all times confronted cuts or disaster someplace.” The previous decade and a half has seen the worth of personal property – disproportionately held by the wealthiest in society – develop by 70%, whereas British employees have endured the longest squeeze on wages for greater than 200 years. Till not too long ago, this mass switch of assets away from odd folks had not been met by an increase in labour militancy: by the early 2020s, the variety of UK commerce union members had fallen to about 6 million – half of the late Nineteen Seventies peak. Up to now few years, nevertheless, that development has slowly began reversing. “You’re seeing progress as a result of we’ve hit the underside,” Gearing says. “There’s nothing left to lose.”
The Jaguar Membership in Allesley, the place Gearing and I sit down to talk, exemplifies this financial story. As soon as a part of a sprawling manufacturing complicated on the coronary heart of the area’s motor trade, its wood-panelled bar and framed prints of basic vehicles at the moment are relics of an age during which many within the native working-class group may depend on a safe, expert profession path when leaving college, and a social life – dancehalls, soccer matches, self-improvement societies – to go along with it. A way of collective id helped gasoline sturdy commerce unions, too, however by the early 80s – when Coventry ska revival band the Specials launched Ghost City, a biting commentary on deindustrialisation and concrete decay – the tide was turning. Manufacturing of recent autos on the location step by step declined earlier than ceasing in 2005. Inside a couple of years the factories had been changed with a generic out-of-town enterprise park. Amazon’s BHX4 warehouse now stands the place E-Sort sports activities vehicles as soon as rolled off the meeting line, and the close by Jaguar Membership has change into the unofficial HQ of employees searching for to unionise it.
Inside a brand new world of precarious labour, Amazon’s workforce – fragmented by intermediary recruitment companies, shift patterns and a number of languages – has lengthy been seen by conventional commerce unions as the toughest to penetrate. Not solely is Amazon fiercely against them (the corporate spends hundreds of thousands on “union-busting” consultants, and the US Nationwide Labor Relations Board has repeatedly accused it of illegally coercing and intimidating employees over unionisation efforts, a declare Amazon denies), however establishing a stable base of union members in any single facility is rendered nearly not possible by the extremely excessive employees turnover: at some centres, the employee substitute fee is estimated to be 150% a yr. This degree of churn isn’t a flaw in Amazon’s enterprise mannequin, however a central characteristic: in response to one former vice-president, Bezos believes giant, entrenched workforces characterize “a march to mediocrity” and if workers – significantly lower-paid ones – keep round for too lengthy, they’ll change into a risk to the company.
Bezos is now not CEO – he turned govt chairman in 2021 – however labour insecurity continues to have an effect on employees inside the corporate and past, as a result of Amazon’s gargantuan measurement means its approach of doing issues has a heavy affect on sector norms. As a retailer Amazon has at all times sought to change into the “the whole lot retailer”, however now – not least due to its cosy relationship with the British authorities (which has signed a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of kilos’ price of contracts with the corporate, together with the availability of information providers for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ) – the priority is that many industries will bear “Amazonification” of the labour market, with employers partaking in a race to the underside on employees’ wages and rights.
“It’s simply mistaken,” Gearing says. “You’ve obtained a giant American firm price billions of kilos that has imported itself into this nation, pays its employees a pittance and treats them like robots, all whereas getting state help for its infrastructure and profitable public sector contracts. We’ve obtained to vary this tradition.”
That, nevertheless, is simpler mentioned than finished. Over the previous decade, precarious employees the labour motion as soon as struggled to achieve have racked up some notable victories, such because the Uber drivers’ bid to be reclassified as workers relatively than self-employed. Many of those battles have been led by radical commerce unions such because the Unbiased Employees’ Union of Nice Britain (IWGB) or United Voices of the World (UVW), which are likely to characterize lower-paid, usually migrant employees and argue that labour disputes are greatest led by employees themselves (UVW represents a gaggle of outsourced cleaners at an Amazon warehouse in Dartford). The connection between these smaller actions and bigger, legacy unions such because the GMB has typically been fractious; after the GMB signed a cope with Deliveroo final yr, for instance, giving its couriers collective bargaining rights however no assure of incomes the minimal wage throughout the entire working day, IWGB dismissed the settlement as an “endorsement of exploitative practices”.
Regardless of these tensions, it’s clear conventional unions have been studying classes from their youthful, anti-establishment siblings. By the point employees at BHX4 walked out final August, GMB organisers had been circling the warehouse for years: patiently partaking employees in dialog on park benches, driving the buses that ferried folks to work and loading up trestle tables with drinks and snacks simply outdoors the gates. “We tried to come back each week, and at first nobody took any discover of us,” Gearing remembers. “Then a couple of folks would nod and smile in recognition. Then a couple of stopped to take a packet of crisps. Then a couple of extra started to talk. It was about slowly, steadily increase belief.”
Gearing and her staff realised that amongst such a various workforce (about 80% of Amazon’s Coventry employees have been born outdoors the UK), a one-size-fits-all method was doomed to fail. In Romania, for instance, many commerce unions have a better relationship with authorities than they do within the UK, so to allay any suspicions amongst Romanian employees, myth-busting supplies have been ready, stressing the GMB’s autonomy. “It was about listening to employees, relatively than telling them we all know what they want,” Gearing says.
On the floor, the quick good points have been restricted: a handful of sign-ups and the occasional alternative to get contained in the Amazon facility when representing members at disciplinary hearings (giving organisers the possibility to surreptitiously go away leaflets within the canteen). However when the wildcat motion erupted, all of the GMB’s exhausting work lastly paid dividends. “It kicked off and somebody mentioned, ‘Let’s telephone a union,’” Gearing says with a smile. “We had at all times been there, so it was us they referred to as.”
Within the months that adopted, GMB recruitment on the fulfilment centre grew quickly. By December – largely due to the efforts of Zee and different new members like him – a proper strike poll delivered a thumping majority in favour of business motion: 98%, on a 63% turnout. At that stage, about 300 employees had signed as much as the union, however membership has greater than tripled since. “Individuals was scared. Amazon advised us the GMB didn’t have our greatest pursuits at coronary heart,” one employee says. “However after our pay shrank with inflation, and the corporate ignored our cries, we began to understand the union wasn’t this distant physique, it was us: I’m the union, we’re the union. Amazon didn’t change, so we did.”
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The sky is just beginning to lighten as I turn into Sayer Drive, the long, straight approach road to BHX4, and the moon hangs low over the warehouses. It’s the early hours of a wet, windy morning in mid-March and through the gloom I can just make out figures in orange hi-vis jackets banging stakes into the grass verges up ahead. The first lorries of the day are beginning to rumble in from the tangle of A-roads and motorways that crisscross this corner of the Midlands, but before they can reach the Amazon gates they find themselves brought to a halt by a thicket of people clutching coffee cups, megaphones and placards. “Official picket” the signs read.
With three separate 24-hour strikes already under their belts, Zee and his colleagues are upping the ante with a week-long stoppage, one that will cumulatively cost the company £2m, according to GMB estimates. Despite the apocalyptic weather, the mood is exuberant. Small groups of strikers buzz up and down the long line of traffic, pleading with hauliers to turn their trucks around and letting out joyful shouts of recognition when they encounter a fellow employee heading into work. “Come on, man, we’ve got them shitting themselves – it’s time to join us!” one worker says, fist-bumping two friends through a car window. “We need a Polish speaker over here!” someone yells. Soon vehicles line both sides of the road, bumper to bumper. Their occupants crowd under a flapping gazebo where Gearing and other GMB organisers sit with laptops, signing up new members.
Overlooking them are new CCTV units, installed by Amazon around the entranceway in the run-up to the strikes, ostensibly to improve safety in the car park. On one of the strike days I attend, a senior manager walks out with a camera and appears to be photographing workers on the picket line (he claims he was recording the lines of traffic), only to be chased away by the GMB organiser Tom Rigby – a large, lively Salford native with a self-described “asbestos ego” – accompanied by jeering strikers. On other days, police cars are summoned to the site, seemingly at Amazon’s request, though there was no suggestion of any illegal behaviour by anyone on the picket line; Amazon says it always calls the police if there are “traffic issues” on the site.
There are parts of the drama playing out in Coventry that are specific to Amazon and its hostility to organised labour – and parts that raise wider questions about the disconnect between the frictionless consumer nirvana tech giants such as Amazon are selling us and the gritty, physical and (to most of us) invisible world of warehouses, conveyor belts, pallet trucks and real humans it all depends on. “I think this is unimaginable to customers,” one worker tells me on the picket line. “They don’t see or think about the work inside those walls. To them it probably feels as if their parcels arrive by magic.”
In truth, the battle at BHX4 is bigger than all of that, as I realise when I visit Zee at his home in West Bromwich – a 25-mile drive from the Amazon facility, on the other side of Birmingham. It’s his birthday, Zee reveals, as he sits me down on the sofa next to a giant panda and opposite a sagging helium balloon. He apologises for the cold: with energy prices soaring, he and his wife have turned the radiators off and now rely on a single electric heater to warm whichever room everyone is cramming into.
Zee’s normal working day starts at 5.30pm, when he sets off for Coventry on a journey that can take anything from 45 minutes to over an hour. After his 10-hour night shift at Amazon, he gets home at about 6am – and almost immediately heads out again to take his wife to her day shift at the HelloFresh warehouse in Nuneaton (the couple can’t afford two cars). He’s home around 8am, assembling lunchboxes and finding exercise books before driving the children to school. By 9am he can finally try to get some sleep, but because parents need to be contactable in an emergency and his wife can’t use her mobile at work, he leaves his phone on and is regularly woken by messages and calls. On a good day, Zee squeezes in about four and a half hours’ rest, but by 1.45pm he must be back on the road to collect his wife at 2.30pm. An hour later, having picked up the children from school, everyone is finally back in the house. They have two precious hours in which to eat, play and socialise, then 5.30pm comes around and, for Zee, the whole energy-sapping cycle starts again.
As he is telling me all this, his phone rings several times: on the line are letting agents, and once someone from the local council’s housing department. With each conversation, Zee’s brow furrows deeper. The family have lived here for nearly two years, but are about to be evicted; the landlord claims he wants to sell the property but Zee believes he simply wants to hike the rent and knows the family will not be able to afford it. With tenants’ rights in the UK among the weakest in Europe, there is little Zee can do once the mandatory two-month notice period expires, but he is struggling to find an affordable alternative within a manageable drive of his children’s school. He has informed his local authority and officials have promised to try to help, but they’re not optimistic. As in many regions around the country, the social housing waiting list has tripled in recent years; it stands at more than 7,000 people.
The prospect of imminent homelessness would be more manageable if they had any savings to fall back on, but those have long been wiped out by the Home Office fees – about £10,000 last year – they have had to pay for residency visas, renewable every two and a half years. At times over the past decade, Zee has had to rely on credit cards and sometimes missed repayments, which means his credit score has been shredded and it’s almost impossible for him now to access emergency loans.
“Every minute of the day and every penny of our pay is accounted for,” he says. “Every day, we’re juggling to get through. And every day it feels like it could all come crashing down.” So many of the Coventry workers tell similar tales, each inflected with different failure points of 2020s Britain: partners and parents at home who depend on them for care; illnesses requiring regular medical appointments that are ever harder to come by; stifling student debts. The low wages Amazon pay are part of the problem but so, too, are Britain’s broken housing system, woeful childcare provision, crisis-ridden NHS and a Home Office that appears geared more towards revenue generation than human decency.
It’s that pernicious cocktail of private exploitation and public decay that forces Zee, whenever he can, to do two 10-hour overtime shifts each week at Amazon – a six-day schedule he kept up for five months nonstop at the end of last year. It’s why, when an old friend recently encouraged Zee to join a regular weekend cricket club, he had to turn them down – even though he grew up perfecting his medium-fast bowling and the prospect of being back out on the field made his tired eyes shine. “I think everyone needs some time to themselves, to do their thing and mentally recharge,” Zee says. “But life for me now is just work, work, work.” It’s why, on strike days, despite all the other stresses crowding in on his time and headspace, Zee still makes the long drive all the way from West Bromwich to Coventry: simply to stand with his colleagues on the picket line and feel for once that he is taking the shape of his life into his own hands, rather than being forced to watch it pass on by.
In an upstairs room at the Jaguar Club, a strike strategy meeting is taking place. Sheets of paper have been taped to the wall, with headings such as, “What have we learned?”, “What is our message?”, “What have we achieved so far?” On this page, below references to membership growth, confidence and news coverage, someone has written: “A family”.
The asymmetry of power between Amazon and its workers relies on the latter’s isolation. Managers are fed real-time data on every aspect of the logistics chain: packing rates, the number of items moving through the facility, the optimum destination for each. Employees, by contrast, are given only one piece of information: how fast they are performing in comparison with their colleagues, a metric sometimes expressed graphically in the form of racing cars. When employees are ordered by their work devices to pick objects from the shelves, they are told to follow a route designed to minimise contact between them that might impede their progress. Individually, each worker is a single cog with little insight into Amazon’s vulnerabilities. Collectively, they are capable of mapping and disrupting the entire system.
BHX4 is one of only two “cross-dock” facilities: warehouses where raw product is received and sorted before being distributed to the 20 or so other fulfilment centres that will prepare customer orders for delivery. Disturbances at this location have an outsized impact on the rest of Amazon’s operations – something the striking workers are keenly aware of. “We need to think about where the pressure points are,” one says, prompting nods around the table. “The run-up to Prime Week is going to be really busy here.” Someone else jumps in to point out that the warehouse often struggles for staff around religious holidays such as Eid. “If strikes hit both the cross-dock facilities in that period, it would pretty much bring Amazon UK to a standstill,” they say.
Chris Smalls – the former Amazon worker who was fired from his Staten Island warehouse job in 2020 and went on to lead a successful Amazon unionisation effort in New York City – has observed that, when facing staff acting in concert, the corporate behemoth is weaker than one might think. “Amazon prepared me for this,” he says, arguing that workers can repurpose its internal mantras – such as “see it, own it, fix it” – as weapons in their labour struggles. “I’m using a lot of the principles I learned at Amazon, against them.” BHX4 staff say they have discovered ways of exploiting the fundamental contradiction between their productivity targets and Amazon’s health and safety instructions, for example by strictly following the injunction to carefully check every side of a box before picking it up; the result is that the conveyor belt slows to a crawl and managers become infuriated. Earlier this year, Smalls came to Britain and met some of the Coventry strike leaders; they are now hitting the road to visit other Amazon warehouses and spread their own newfound self-belief. “Everything you have done, we would have done differently,” Stuart Richards, a GMB organiser, tells union members at the strike strategy meeting. “And that’s what’s brilliant.”
In recent weeks, the battle lines between Amazon and its workers have hardened. Having signed up more than 800 members in Coventry from what GMB believes is a workforce of 1,400 – more than the 50% needed to force the company into formally acknowledging and negotiating with it – the union submitted an application for statutory recognition, only to withdraw it again after Amazon claimed there were actually 2,700 employees at BHX4. (Union membership has since risen to over 1,000.) Workers say hundreds of new recruits have suddenly appeared in the warehouse, part of what GMB calls a concerted campaign of union-busting – a charge Amazon denies. Meanwhile, the Coventry workers have just voted to renew their strike mandate for another six months and their radicalism is proving infectious: new strike ballots are being planned by Amazon workers in two other sites in the Midlands: Mansfield and Rugeley. “Amazon have been ramping up the anti-union rhetoric, and trying to buy out the contracts of workers they know are GMB members,” Gearing says. “I think they’ve massively misjudged the mood internally, and they’re only just realising what they’re up against.”
Amazon says its wages and employee benefits are competitive and points to two recent national pay rises, each worth between 20p and 50p an hour to its lowest paid staff – and both awarded since worker unrest at Coventry began. In a statement, the company strongly denies its workers are subject to excessive surveillance or employment insecurity, or that it is hostile to trade unions. “Our people are supported by managers with daily face-to-face briefings and access to onsite HR teams, employee forums and site leadership teams,” it says. “We assess performance based on safe, achievable expectations and take into account time and tenure, peer performance, and adherence to safe work practices. If we think someone needs support, we offer coaching.
“Amazon respects our employees’ rights to join, or not to join, a union … We are enormously proud of our employees and the great work they do every day,” the company adds. “We place enormous value and emphasis on engaging with our employees directly and empowering them to pursue the career they want.”
On my final full day in Coventry, a public rally is staged by GMB outside the gates of BHX4 at which the organisation’s general secretary, Gary Smith, delivers a rousing address. “A thousand fires are being lit across this country by ordinary working people, people who have never been organised in their workplace before,” he booms, to wild applause. Afterwards, he approaches Zee, who has been watching quietly from the sidelines, shakes him by the hand and asks him to record an inspirational message for other Amazon colleagues and global supporters of the strike, which will be put out on Twitter. Zee looks simultaneously embarrassed and proud, but after a couple of false starts makes an impassioned plea. “Wherever you are,” he says, “start by just talking with your colleagues, because you will realise you’re stronger together. That’s what we did.”
Later, I joke with Zee that he is becoming a celebrity. He shakes his head and laughs, then falls silent, gazing out at the bright lights of the Amazon warehouse ahead and the night sky beyond. “It’s not like I wanted any of this,” he says. “And I don’t know what the consequences will be.” He turns back to me with a weary smile. “All we ever wanted was some security and decency at work. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.”
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