Members of the GMB union during a rally outside the Amazon fulfilment centre in Coventry as Amazon workers are staging their first ever strike in the UK in a dispute over pay. Picture date: Wednesday January 25, 2023
MEGA-RICH Amazon is using “dirty tricks” to bust union organising, GMB charged today after it was forced to withdraw a historic push to win recognition at the online retail giant’s Coventry warehouse.
During months of groundbreaking pay strikes, the general union’s membership at the site has skyrocketed from about 60 to more than 800 — well over half the 1,400 employees that Amazon said worked there last year.
But as GMB made an official application to the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), which can force bosses to recognise unions if they represent more than 50 per cent of the workforce, the US-owned firm “flooded” the warehouse with 1,300 new staff, the union said.
It is only trade union power at work that will materially improve the lot of working people as a class but without sector-wide collective bargaining and a right to take sympathetic strike action, we are hamstrung in the fight to tilt back the balance of power, argues ADRIAN WEIR
