The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 24th November 2023
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 24th November 2023
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
As readers might be aware, Christmas is only a month away. One sign is the ancient tradition of Black Friday, which was invented to encourage a frenzy of unnecessary shopping the day after American Thanksgiving Day, which celebrates the start of the extermination of the native population of America.
One of the main beneficiaries of all this nonsense is the predatory retailer Amazon. At their warehouse in Coventry over 1,000 workers hope to disrupt this highly profitable feeding frenzy this Friday. They are taking strike action in pursuit of a decent wage for the 28th time since this March, the previous strike being on the 7th–9th of this month. This is in pursuit of a £15 hourly wage and started after they rejected a miserable 50 pence per hour rise (on £11–12) from one of the world’s richest men. This has now increased to a whole £1, which is still properly deemed unacceptable. The first strike saw 350 workers take action, so the present numbers show the workforce is growing in confidence.
On the same day a picket should have taken place outside Amazon’s UK HQ at Shoreditch in east London, supported by the workers’ union, GMB, and the Global Justice Now and War on Want charities. It is interesting that charities founded to deal with Third World poverty find it necessary to get involved with a very modern First World organised poverty.
The action in Coventry was paralleled by strike action in Italy and the USA, the Great Satan itself, as part of the global ‘Make Amazon Pay’ campaign.
Amanda Gearing, GMB Organiser, pointed out that: “The truth is that this Black Friday will see the largest day of industrial disruption in Amazon’s 30-year history. Coventry is the beating heart of Amazon’s distribution network; strike action on Black Friday will ripple throughout the company’s UK logistics.”
She also welcomed that fact that: “With industrial action escalating and workers joining strike action in Europe and the USA, it’s clear that Coventry workers are inspiring Amazon workers worldwide to fight for their share of company profits.
“As a union representing thousands of Amazon workers, we can no longer in good faith watch as our members walk into unsafe workplaces and endure poverty pay.”
Another GMB organiser, Rachel Fagan, warned of further action, saying: “Now we’re seeing industrial action snowballing with workers launching a new strike vote at Amazon Birmingham. With a winter of strike chaos looming, it’s time for Amazon bosses to urgently listen to their workers.”
From further afield, Rainer Reising of Amazon workers from Germany offered solidarity, saying: “Every day, we face the same challenges in our Amazon warehouse – low wages, high stress, and a lack of respect for our rights. This is an unprecedented and historic moment, with lowpaid workers taking on one enemy.”
Giampaolo Meloni, who works at the biggest Italian Amazon warehouse at Castel San Giovanni in Emilia-Romagna, said: “This strike on Black Friday is more than a protest; it’s a message that we’re all in this together, across borders, fighting for what we deserve.”
Finally Jessie Moreno, an Amazon Teamsters worker from California, added: “We have taken our picket line across the country and now we’re joining our colleagues from around the world to demand respect, fair wages, and a workplace where our health and safety are a priority. Amazon is no match for the power of its workers united.”
Apart from low wages, a common issue is Amazon’s intense performance monitoring, which has inflicted stress, pressure, anxiety and a sense of mistrust among its employees across eight key countries. A survey by the Swiss-based UNI Global Union confederation shows that over half of Amazon employees report adverse health effects, most of which was due to the monitoring.
The necessity of this action has been made crystal clear from the example of the Amazon warehouse at Rugeley in Staffordshire. This warehouse is scheduled for closure as Amazon has discovered it built too many during its dramatic pandemic expansion.
However the left Labour magazine Tribune has recently done some investigations into conditions on the warehouse floor.
Apart from the never ending surveillance and impossible targets it is the scene of high injury rates. In May 2018 a Freedom of Information (FoI) request from GMB exposed the fact that there had been 115 ambulance call-outs to the Amazon warehouse compared with only eight calls in the nearby Tesco warehouse of a similar size over the same period.
In 2021 the Daily Mirror issued FOI requests to nine ambulance trusts and found that from January 2018–August 2021, 971 ambulance call-outs were made to UK Amazon warehouses, or at a rate of five per week. At Tilbury alone, where a male employee died in 2021, 178 ambulance call-outs were made.
The bosses at Amazon have taken drastic steps to change this situation. Instead of taking steps to improve health and safety, however, such as dealing with high over-stocked shelves, which might cost money, it has taken steps to improve its image by avoiding the scrutiny that calling out an ambulance can involve. At Amazon the long hours alone are responsible for many health problems.
As local taxi firms are not subject to FoI requests, Amazon has entered into contracts with them to ferry injured workers to hospital and more importantly to avoid bad publicity.
A Tribune report says a female worker told of a fellow worker who slipped on ice at the entrance: “She broke her arm and hit her head really bad. She needed an ambulance to take her to hospital mainly because of the hit she took to her head. But Amazon didn’t call an ambulance. They told her she had to make her own way to the hospital. Her arm was broken and she needed surgery.”
On another occasion a worker fell ill at work, on ringing her doctor she was told she needed to go to the hospital and could not drive there, but the health and safety desk “would not call an ambulance for her and that she would have to make her own way to hospital”.
On a more positive note they would sometimes offer to pay for the taxi, which shows just how compassionate Jeff Bozos can be.
These were not isolated cases. Similar examples have been reported at Doncaster, where a worker told the magazine that “Amazon don’t really call out ambulances anymore”. Instead: “They ask workers if they can get themselves to the hospital: ‘Can you drive? Can you phone up somebody to pick you up and drop you to the hospital?’.”
He himself was taken to hospital by ambulance, which Amazon had generously paid for using the local firm it contracts to for that purpose. Their last reported QUARTER year profits to June were $65.01 billion, a year-on-year increase of 18.61 per cent. Wages have not risen 18.61 per cent.
In 2019 Amazon claimed that: “According to the UK government’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Amazon has 43 per cent fewer injuries on average than other transportation and warehousing companies in the UK.” The HSE, however, speedily refuted these claims.
Readers might remember that these pages have reported many other cases of atrocious working conditions at Amazon. At Christmas 2016 a tent city grew up near the Dunfermline warehouse, whose agency workers working a 60-hour week were only able to afford a weekly journey back home across the River Tay. Two years ago a Sunday Post journalist managed to secure a job there where he spent eight hours a day at a standing workstation grabbing boxes from the conveyor belt, scanning items and repacking them to send to the relevant section by conveyor. The reward for not doing 350 per shift was a formal disciplinary warning. He calculated that in the week he earned £490 for his 40 night hours, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gained an extra £1 billion.
To leave the last word with Rachel Fagan: “These accounts are very similar to the shocking practices members have described to me, where Amazon will go to such lengths to protect their public images that they risk workers’ lives.”