(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. has narrowly avoided a strike in the UK during the crucial holiday shopping season.
(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. has narrowly avoided a strike in the UK during the crucial holiday shopping season.
Employees at a warehouse near Coventry failed to muster enough votes to walk off the job, the GMB union said Wednesday. Under labor rules, at least 50% of union members needed to participate, and only 49% did so by the deadline. Still, all but one of them voted to strike, according to GMB spokesman Jon Parker-Dean.
The month-long ballot, which invited the 291 GMB union members out of the warehouse’s 1,400-strong workforce to vote on whether they wanted to strike as soon as next month, was the first of its kind in the UK. The vote followed a series of informal work stoppages, slowdowns and walkouts at warehouses across the country earlier this year.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The strike ballot was called after Amazon offered workers a raise of between 35 pence (40 cents) and 50 pence per hour, bringing starting pay to between £10.50 and £11.45 an hour, amid rising inflation and a cost-of-living crisis. Union members want Amazon to pay a minimum hourly wage of at least £15, they said in a statement last month.
Earlier this month, Amazon announced a £500 bonus for UK warehouse workers in two equal payments in October and December. The second payment is contingent on staff taking “no unauthorized absence,” between Nov. 22 and Dec. 24, when GMB members had planned to strike, according to a copy of the message sent to workers and reviewed by Bloomberg.
A GMB spokesman said linking such a payment to attendance could be interpreted as unlawful inducement not to strike, and the union has instructed lawyers to take legal action.
Amazon spokesman David Nieberg confirmed that the company would view any GMB strike as an unauthorized absence but said paying tens of thousands of workers £500 each would not be a cost-effective way to discourage staff from striking.
The e-commerce giant has about 30 fulfillment centers and plans to employ 75,000 people in the UK by the end of the year — up 4,000 compared with 2021. Amazon also offers workers a company pension plan and benefits including private medical insurance, life insurance, income protection and subsidized meals.
In the US, meanwhile, workers at an Amazon facility in upstate New York on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a bid to unionize. The outcome was a setback for the upstart Amazon Labor Union, which won a historic victory earlier this year in New York City.
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