It takes a lot to frighten Zee. The 35-year-old father of two rarely gets flustered: not when he first set out on the 4,000-mile journey from his family home in Pakistan to the UK more than a decade ago; not during the years he spent struggling for survival on the fringes of Britain’s formal economy; not when the Home Office threatened to deport him, plunging his young family into uncertainty. But the cold, foggy, final hours of 24 January this year – they felt different.
“My heart was pounding,” Zee remembers. “My mind was scared.”
That was the night Zee and his colleagues at Amazon’s BHX4 warehouse in Coventry decided to make history, abandoning their workstations and launching an unprecedented stoppage to demand higher wages. They had walked out before, in a spontaneous, ad hoc protest. But this was different: a carefully planned and legal effort, the likes of which Amazon UK had never faced. Standing in their way at the exit gates was a line of senior managers who had the power to make or break each worker’s future, staring down anyone who might dare to pass.
“As midnight struck, I kept catching other people’s eyes: do we go, or do we stay?” Zee recalls. “We didn’t know what would happen if we crossed that threshold. But we did know that somebody, somewhere had to be the first to try.”
In comparison with many recent industrial actions, with thousands of nurses, teachers and civil servants protesting en masse, this was a modest affair: just Zee and about 300 fellow nightshift employees congregating in the darkness, slapping each other’s backs, sipping coffee and taking turns to huddle around a brazier on the edges of a nondescript industrial park in the city’s suburbs. But by running that final gauntlet, a precarious and fragmented workforce had done what nobody in this country had done before. They had formally entered battle with one of the biggest, richest and most vehemently anti-union companies on Earth.
The tale of how they got there stretches far beyond Amazon, or Coventry, and reveals much about the cracks running through British society. But it’s a story, too, of those on the wrong side of the economic status quo finding ways to fight back, upending old assumptions about the limits of collective organising. Now, against the backdrop of a cost of living crisis and renewed attacks by the government on the right to protest, Zee and his colleagues are scaling up their ambitions: scheduling more strike action, spreading their dispute to other Amazon sites. The stakes are enormous. Lose, and all that hope and momentum drains away. Win, and they demonstrate that workers anywhere can unionise, take on their employers, and triumph.
“We’re part of something bigger,” Zee observes. “Looking around the UK, it feels as if almost everybody is like us – at boiling point. And eventually, when a saucepan is left like that, it boils over.”
BHX4, a state-of-the-art logistics hub boasting nine miles of conveyor belts and 120,000 sq metres of floor space, opened in 2018. Zee – not his real name (many of those interviewed here asked to remain anonymous) – started work there in early 2020. His new role involved less walking than a previous temporary job he’d done at another Amazon plant nearby. “At first, I thought it was heaven,” he tells me. “Then Covid hit.”
Coronavirus and its lockdowns acted like a growth hormone on Amazon and sent it on an extraordinary hiring spree. By late 2020 the company was recruiting 1,400 new staff a day, pushing the size of its international workforce up to 1.2 million. Amid record demand for home delivery, that workforce helped Amazon harvest enormous riches. Between 2019 and 2021, annual net profits from the company’s global operations nearly tripled to more than £25bn, while the personal wealth of the founder, Jeff Bezos, soared by more than £57bn during the first 12 months of the pandemic alone. With that windfall, Bezos could have given a bonus of £38,000 to every single Amazon worker on the planet and still remained one of the world’s wealthiest people. Instead, he commissioned a rocket to fly him into space and back. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” Bezos declared upon landing, “because you guys paid for all this.”
Within the largely windowless walls of BHX4, life under Covid was turning out to be a wild ride. Shifts had never been more plentiful, or punishing, and though many employees appreciated the overtime – and an initial pay rise of £2 an hour, granted in recognition of the increased workload – frustrations were mounting. Staff were subject to mysterious daily targets and exceptional surveillance, with any time spent “off task” measured to the second by their work devices and reported back to bosses. Alterations to work patterns – as a result of illness, family emergency, or any of the messy complications that come with real life – were assessed by rigid, unsympathetic computer programs, overseen by seemingly rigid, unsympathetic managers.
One worker says they were threatened with disciplinary action upon returning to work after weeks of chemotherapy; another says the same thing happened after they were stuck in hospital with their sick newborn daughter, despite informing Amazon of the situation (Amazon insists no formal disciplinary action was carried out in either case). Each day, the proprietary productivity-monitoring software would automatically generate league tables ranking employees by how close they came to meeting ever-changing daily targets, the details of which were never shared with workers. Anyone near the bottom could expect to be flagged for attention by management, the first step down a road that could lead to the sack. Sudden dismissals were common. “To them, we are like robots rather than people,” one employee says. “The little things that make us human, you can feel them being ground out of you.”
Discontent was bubbling at BHX4, and Zee was able to command a better of view of it than most. By 2021 he was a “problem solver” – roaming the warehouse with a mobile computing unit, fixing any issues with stock or supply lines along the way – which gave him the opportunity to chat informally to colleagues in multiple departments. He had also been elected to Amazon’s “associate forum”, an internal employee group ostensibly set up by the company to provide a link between staff and management – though critics accuse it of being little more than a toothless body designed to insulate Amazon from demands for genuine union representation. “I’ve always been outspoken; if I see something’s wrong, then I have to do something about it,” Zee says. “People were coming to us with the same kind of problems, again and again, but when I brought these up with management, nothing changed.”
One problem, Zee realised, loomed large over all the rest. A few months into the pandemic, even as Amazon staff were being feted as “key workers”, their £2 an hour bonus pay was quietly withdrawn. With most employees inside the warehouse now back earning about £10 an hour before tax, a regular full-time shift pattern – four 10-hour stints a week – was becoming increasingly hard to live off. Workers were forced to compete for one or two extra shifts, even though the impact of a 60-hour working week on family life was severe.
“My kids don’t know me like they should know me,” one longstanding worker says. “On the one day of the week I have off, they want to ride their bikes with me but I’m too tired to do anything but worry about money and sleep.” Another asks why they should have to choose between financial security and the basic building blocks of a decent life. “I don’t have hobbies,” they say. “I’ve lost friends, social connections – all so I can stand here six days a week, scanning parcels, to pay my rent.” An estimated 75% of the workers at BHX4, according to a GMB union survey, say they can’t afford to pay their bills; some have become trapped in cycles of high-interest debt. Last year, Amazon’s core UK division posted a profit of £222m and paid no corporation tax for the second year running.…