The GMB has lodged an employment tribunal claim over union membership on behalf of five workers at Amazon’s Coventry centre.
The union is claiming that Amazon has “engaged in widespread attempts to coerce staff to cancel their trade union membership” using union-busting tactics imported from the US.
The Amazon workers’ inducement claim focuses on their employer’s alleged attempts to persuade them to pass up their trade union and collective bargaining rights and lure or “bully” them out of their union.
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Company bosses are said to have erected QR codes in Amazon fulfilment centres which generate an email to the union’s membership department requesting that membership is cancelled.
The GMB has also accused Amazon managers of forcing workers to attend hour long anti-union seminars to listen to anti-union messages on work time.
It said the retail giant has also displayed anti-union messages throughout Amazon workplaces, using billboards and screens.
Amanda Gearing, GMB senior organiser, said the company was “out of control” and was trying to do “everything in its power to stop minimum wage workers from forming a union.
“Their latest American anti-union campaign proves they will stop at nothing to beat the rules that every other employer in the UK is expected to follow,” she added.
Amazon is throwing everything at trying to stop workers from organising for better pay and conditions and from having an independent voice at work” – Paul Nowak, general secretary, TUC
Rosa Curling, director of non-profit Foxglove Legal, which specialises on big tech employee rights, said: “Workers are cornered in the warehouse and told to leave the union, hustled into anti-union propaganda seminars, then have a QR code shoved in their face that terminates their membership with just one click to quit. If only it was so easy to quit Amazon Prime!”
She alleged that Amazon was “raining cash on Coventry to flood the warehouse with new hires and shut down GMB’s union recognition push”.
Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, gave his support to the GMB: “Good employers recognise the value of unions. But Amazon is throwing everything at trying to stop workers from organising for better pay and conditions and from having an independent voice at work.
“Its union-busting tactics should have no place in Britain, and are further proof of why Labour’s new deal for working people is so badly needed.”
The tribunal case comes after the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), a statutory body, last week ruled that the GMB could proceed with a vote to gauge worker support for a collective bargaining unit at its Coventry warehouse.
It found that GMB union members represent more than a third of employees at the site, well above the 10% threshold required for the CAC to force a vote on a proposed bargaining unit.
Amazon has previously refused to recognise the GMB, or any union, at its Amazon UK Services’ Coventry fulfilment centre. However, GMB members at the site – and more recently also in Birmingham – have staged several strikes in pursuit of union rights and a pay increase.
Last year the GMB was forced to withdraw its first application to the CAC after Amazon recruited more employees, meaning the union no longer had the members needed for statutory union recognition.
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