It added that it had recently announced another increase for its UK teams, taking starting pay (depending on location) to £11-£12/hour, and said that over the past seven months, its minimum pay has risen by 10% and by more than 37% since 2018. The GMB has been steadily increasing its representation at Amazon UK over the past decade, and said it had signed up hundreds of new members at Coventry and other sites since the beginning of the dispute.Īmazon, which has a well-documented policy of non-cooperation with unions, has previously suggested the workforce is already able to communicate with senior managers.Amazon told Drapers in April that it respects its employees’ rights to choose to join or not join a labour union and regularly reviews pay to ensure it offers competitive wages. It’s no coincidence that 16 days of strike action have come before this offer.” Workers have said the pay rises do not recognise that they worked throughout the pandemic, or offer them adequate support during a cost of living crisis that has pushed up their household bills.Īmanda Gearing, a senior organiser at the GMB, said: “It is no surprise that Amazon have discovered flexible working offers after Coventry workers have found their voice and their strength. “We are working with the CAC as part of the GMB’s formal application for recognition.”Īmazon has given workers a one-off £500 cost of living payment and two 50p pay increases in the past 12 months – the first after an informal walkout last summer and second this spring, taking pay to £11 an hour – although this has been labelled “an insult” by the GMB. “We respect our workers’ rights to join or not to join a union,” said Neil Travis, Amazon’s regional operations director, in an interview with the BBC. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If granted, this would be the first time a union in the UK has won the right to negotiate with the US tech company. The CAC has to make a decision over the size of the relevant bargaining unit, and whether more than half of the workers in it support the GMB’s request for recognition. The union wrote to the CAC – the arm of the Department for Business and Trade that rules on union disputes – after Amazon rejected the union’s request for voluntary recognition. The GMB has said it represents a majority of workers at the Coventry site, and has made an application to a government body, the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), for statutory recognition. They have been demanding a pay increase to £15 an hour, from £11, and have previously said they were frustrated by the company’s refusal to talk. GMB members at the huge Coventry centre, known as BHX4, have taken 16 days of strike action since January, in what was the first industrial action taken against Amazon in the UK. The offer of new contracts comes as Amazon is locked in a dispute with the GMB, after months of strikes at its Coventry warehouse. It has also launched a flexible part-time contract, for a minimum of 80 hours a month, that allows employees to pick suitable shifts, whether part-day or full-day, during the daytime or night, and weekdays or weekends.Īmazon will hope the move can attract potential candidates looking for flexible employment, despite two recent rounds of job cuts that culled nearly 30,000 employees worldwide. The company said those on the new contract would be entitled to full-time benefits, and it hoped the move would encourage more people back to work.
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