In recent months the cost of that has gone up from £7 to £11.Īnother striker says straightforwardly. Without public transport links to the site, which sits just outside the village of Allesley, he gets an Uber to work. We sometimes take small breaks, five minutes, but it’s not allowed.” The work is physically demanding, one worker says. Wearing hi-vis GMB tabards, staff are reluctant to give their names – but they have similar stories to tell, of their fury at the 50p an hour pay rise announced by Amazon last summer, and the struggle to make ends meet. Outside one, a small band of workers were manning a smoky brazier on Wednesday morning, as part of a 24 hour-long strike – the first at the company anywhere in the UK, reports the Guardian’s special correspondent Heather Stewart. The analysis suggests these warehouse roles often provide more regular hours, and that competition for staff has pushed up wage rates – but some interviewees said they found the jobs extremely demanding.Īmazon’s Coventry warehouse, known in the company as BHX4, is so big that its two entrances are in different postcodes. They found that the pandemic “intensified existing trends” in online shopping, which meant a renewed shift from traditional shop-floor jobs towards work in warehouses, away from direct contact with customers. This week’s strike at an Amazon depot in Coventry is throwing the spotlight on to a hidden army of workers in the UK’s retail sector, many of whom face “particularly gruelling” conditions, according to recent research commissioned by the TUC, reports Heather Stewart.įive academics at the Centre for Research on Employment and Work (Crew) at the University of Greenwich analysed data about the retail workforce during and after the Covid pandemic, and carried out in-depth interviews with 30 workers. 12.24 GMT ‘The job is not human’: UK retail warehouse staff describe gruelling work She added that the 50p pay rise, “made them very angry, and they’re not a militant bunch”. Because this isn’t us, as the GMB, this is workers – they want more pay,” she said. Amazon are being stubborn about this, they don’t want these workers to organise a union, but I think at some point they’re going to have to get round the table. “They are making an impact, and I think that their voices are really being heard. Local GMB organiser Amanda Gearing, just about to grab some sleep after a long stint around the brazier, said “about 70” Amazon workers walked off their shift at midnight, welcomed by colleagues outside. One worker emerged to say that managers were manning the packing lines. The GMB said that some lorries arriving at the site on Wednesday morning had refused to cross the picket line and turned around but others appeared to be coming and going as usual. They are afraid of losing their job,” he says. “Most of the other people – at least 70-80% – they don’t even understand English and they don’t understand the law. In total, fewer than 200 staff voted to strike.īut one GMB member taking part stresses the difficulties of organising in this workplace, where any discussion of unions is frowned upon. The successful strike ballot in December was the second held, after a first go earlier in the year failed to breach the threshold of 50% of members needed to legitimise industrial action. GMB organisers freely admit the small proportion of staff at the site that have been able to sign up as members – around 300, of perhaps 1400. More from Heather Stewart reporting from the Coventry depot: “We appreciate the great work our teams do throughout the year,” they said, stressing the firm’s “competitive” pay rates of £10.50-£11.45 an hour. As reported earlier, a spokesperson for Amazon stressed the “tiny proportion,” of the firm’s UK workforce involved in Wednesday’s action, insisting that operations at BHX4 were continuing as usual.
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