The online retail company Amazon has announced a pay rise worth nearly 10% for tens of thousands of UK employees, after defeating a bid by the GMB trade union for bargaining rights over pay and conditions.
Amazon said the increase would lift minimum pay rates by 9.8% to between £13.50 and £14.50 an hour, depending on location. Staff with at least three years’ service will receive a minimum of between £13.75 and £14.75 an hour.
The pay rise will apply to thousands of Amazon staff from 29 September, including delivery drivers and those employed in the retailer’s UK fulfilment centres.
The company, which has seen UK workers stage a series of strikes, said it had invested £550m in boosting employees’ pay since 2022, and added that staff received benefits such as subsidised meals and discounts.
A spokesperson said: “That’s why we are proud to announce that we are increasing our minimum starting pay for all frontline employees to the equivalent of more than £28,000 a year and we continue to offer industry-leading benefits from day one.”
Rachel Fagan, a GMB organiser, said: “This is too little, too late from Amazon bosses who have been forced to act by worker’s industrial action. Amazon’s reputation is in the gutter over its treatment of its own workers and now company bosses are trying to plaster over the facts. Unsafe working conditions, low pay and excessive surveillance blight the lives of Amazon workers every single day.”
The GMB narrowly lost a statutory ballot at Amazon’s warehouse on the outskirts of Coventry in July, which would have resulted in formal recognition for the union. In the hard-fought vote, 50.5% of workers rejected the idea.
Workers in Coventry have held a series of strikes over the past 18 months, demanding a £15-an-hour minimum wage and the right to negotiate directly with management. They were joined on the picket line last November by trade unionists from Europe and the US, who have raised similar issues in their home countries.
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Amazon has a global policy of declining to cooperate with unions, arguing that it prefers to have a direct relationship with staff. The retail-to-cloud-services group was founded by Jeff Bezos in his garage in 1994 and is now worth nearly $2tn.
Some staff inside the Coventry warehouse accused Amazon of union-busting tactics – including displaying QR codes, which when scanned generated an email to GMB’s membership department cancelling a worker’s membership.
The Labour government has promised to make it easier for trade unions to win recognition, as part of a package of measures aimed at boosting the bargaining power of the UK’s workforce.
