By Birmingham Left Horizons supporters
The workers at Amazon took further strike action in the last week of March, in their fight for £15 an hour and recognition of their union, the GMB. For the first time, pickets were put on Amazon’s new giant site at Minworth in Birmingham, which opened in October.
The new battle line is increasingly around union recognition. Last year, the GMB took their case to the independent Central Arbitration Committee, which found in their favour so that if GMB membership rises to 50 per cent of the workforce, Amazon will be forced to recognise it.
Management over-recruit to try and undermine union membership growth
The response of Amazon management was predictable. As GMB membership continues to rise, so they have resorted to ridiculous measures. They recruited an extra 1,300 non-union workers (supposedly for the Christmas rush) and have retained them to make it more difficult for the GMB to reach the 50 per cent threshold.
Working conditions at Amazon are already infamous – now, although taking on extra workers, they haven’t increased facilities, and pickets told us you can spend 25 minutes trying to find an available toilet while the canteens can’t cope. And this in a regime where ‘facility’ time is strictly monitored and can lead to disciplinary measures.
Amazon know they now have too many workers, so have introduced a new tactic – the ‘VTO’, or Voluntary Time Off. Just before you are due to start your shift, you can receive a VTO by text: this means you must take unpaid time off. If you refuse, you can be sent to a different area of work, which may be more physically demanding or just unfamiliar and so you can face disciplinary measures for not keeping to time quotas. So many feel forced to accept a VTO despite desperately needing the work – it is ‘zero hour contracts ‘ at its worse.
Meanwhile, in their campaign against the GMB membership, in the week before the latest strike action, management issued all workers with a leaflet demanding they leave the union, with a QR code on it which took you through to an email addressed to GMB Midlands which you should send saying you want to cancel your membership.
Amazon workers show tremendous tenacity
In the face of such intimidation, the tenacity of the strikers can only be marvelled at. Many are migrant workers, and when you hear their tales of the conditions they faced back home, their struggle to get to the UK, and then the fight to find work, you would be forgiven for thinking that if they had ignored the union and kept their heads down to ‘keep out of trouble’, it would be understandable.
Instead, they chose to fight, and are fighting for the rights of ALL workers.
A group of us from the local Labour Party visited the picket line and were very well received and applauded.
Our duty as Labour Party members in supporting this fight is to make sure that our Labour leadership does not back track on dismantling the Tories’ vicious employment laws, and when in office make sure employers like Amazon – or the likes of P&O – can never again get away with such employment practices that are more akin to the Victorian era than the 21st century.
The featured image at the top of the article shows striking Amazon workers with local Labour Party support at the picket line at Minworth in Birmingham
