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UK Factory: How Cost of Living Crisis Triggered Strike in Amazon | labor dispute

UK Factory: How Cost of Living Crisis Triggered Strike in Amazon |  labor dispute

 


Amazon workers say they are working in exploitation workshops as fears over safety concerns and a cost of living crisis have triggered strikes in warehouses across the country.

The Observer spoke with four employees involved in the strike at three Amazon warehouses, including Tilbury in Essex, where protests began on August 4th. Everyone says they will struggle to survive this winter with a salary increase offer of 35-50p an hour, well below the current 13% inflation rate.

Fearing Amazon’s reprisal, employees who spoke anonymously said the company is speaking up to emphasize how its very affordable, very convenient, and super-fast delivery model works.

Amazon employs over 70,000 people in the UK, adding 25,000 more in 2021 alone. Many people work at Company 21 fulfillment centers, and some say they have to do long physical shifts with difficult goals for low salaries.

Starting salaries for Amazon warehouses will soon increase to 10.50-11.45 per hour depending on location. An Amazon spokesperson said this represents a 29% increase in the minimum hourly wage paid to employees since 2018. They also said the increase was due to a comprehensive benefit package worth several thousand pounds per year and a company pension plan.

But employees say the company, which generated $121 billion ($100 billion) in revenue in the second quarter of 2022 alone, is too low for the type of work being done, especially given the ongoing economic crisis.

It was shocking to hear, said an employee of an Amazon warehouse in Tilbury. This is ridiculous. Inflation is 13% and wages increase by only 3%. The worker is renting a house with his husband for $1,350 a month without utility bills. My salary is 1,600. I am lucky I am married. Otherwise Id is homeless.

Some employees are asking for a two-hour pay raise at a tech giant.

Hundreds of Amazon employees stop working on controversial pay raise video

Another employee at an Amazon warehouse in Tilbury said they were afraid of how they would survive this winter. Recently, there was a scenario where someone was living. [an] Amazon [warehouse], he said. To be honest, we will see that happen again.

You can see people always staying in the canteen because they can’t afford to go home.

Workers are protesting poor pay offers and conditions that keep employees in cages throughout the day in warehouses picking up items for delivery to customers. (Amazon says the workstations are meant to protect workers from moving robots.)

It’s a Chinese plant in the UK, said a second employee at Tilbury. This is how they set up the model.

The employee suffered from mental health problems while working for the company. I realized how bad Amazon was for my mental health, he said. The anxiety of going into a job knowing that you have to do the same thing every day is terrifying.

Those concerns are repeated by an employee who worked with his wife for three years at an Amazon facility near Bristol. He said the staff was good at first. There was a lot of safety awareness and the goals were pretty reasonable. But now they just push it higher and higher and exploit people.

About 100 Amazon employees in Bristol protested at a company premises canteen on Aug. 10, claiming that the incident paid off salaries by field management. The majority of people went back to work at that point. Because in the end you have to think about yourself financially as much as you want to fight for it.

A Bristol warehouse worker says managers used to prevent employees from lifting heavy items from boxes on high shelves in the warehouse without ladders. Hyperextension for 10 hours hurts the neck and back, he said.

This has since changed as employees feel pressure to meet ever-increasing demand. Employees pushing carts around the warehouse have restricted the use of only one cart at a time for safety reasons. It is now known that managers blind an employee who pulls two carts at a time. They don’t say anything because they’re interested in getting the job done as quickly as possible, he said. Safety goes out the window.

He said he lifted objects weighing up to 25 kg on his own, despite the rule that two people must lift anything heavier than 15 kg.

An employee at an Amazon facility in northwest England said his warehouse manager had similarly disregarded the rules of lifting heavy objects from high places without running on the field to achieve their goals. It is selected every minute.

Amazon declined to respond to certain allegations.

Martha Dark, director of Foxglove, a nonprofit that works to highlight issues within tech companies that support Amazon workers, said:

They are desperate and cannot survive on a wage. Meanwhile, Amazon threatens to dock paychecks and send employees to HR to uncover the truth about warehouse life.

she added. Amazon must respect workers’ right to organize, stop punishing those who fight for survival and offer real pay increases now.

Two employees said they plan to leave the company because of conditions and salaries. But some hope things will change.

If many of us more experienced leave Amazon at this point, we’ll get a new group of people who can adapt to this depressing way of working, a Bristol employee said. That’s the problem.

Sources

1/ https://Google.com/

2/ https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/14/a-sweatshop-in-the-uk-how-the-cost-of-living-crisis-triggered-walkouts-at-amazon

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