The monopoly online retailer has extracted vast rents from workers and citizens who raise their voices globally today.
On this day, Black Friday, three years ago, Amazon warehouse workers and their progressive allies co-ordinated a global protest for the first time in the company’s history, under the banner ‘Make Amazon Pay’. During the pandemic, Amazon—its founder, Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world—had forced workers to be at the warehouses without protective equipment. But on Black Friday they pushed back with strikes and actions in 15 countries to demand safety and dignity.
Today, Amazon workers in Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and the United States are making their demand to Make Amazon Pay even louder, with a new wave of strikes. It is a display of the collective power they have built, together with supporters in their workplaces, on the streets and in parliaments.
Biggest challenge
This growing day of action confirms what became clear during wide-ranging discussions at the Summit to Make Amazon Pay, held at the end of October in Manchester. For the first time it brought together workers, trade unions, civil society and parliamentarians from the global Amazon movement. The company is facing the biggest challenge to its abuses in its history.
This year in Germany, Prime Day saw strikes at ten warehouses across the country, organised by the union Ver.di. In the US, Amazon delivery drivers formed the first-ever drivers’ union with the Teamsters. They set up rolling pickets for better pay, safe jobs and union recognition. At the same time, members of the Writers’ Guild of America won a major victory against Amazon and other film and television production studios, establishing guardrails so technology cannot drive down their working conditions.
In the UK, the GMB union organised 1,000 Amazon warehouse workers in less than a year—and brought them out on strike for a total of 28 days. When they filed for official recognition of the union (which, under UK labour law, requires 50 per cent of workers in a workplace to be unionised), Amazon hired thousands more workers to thwart the attempt. But the workers kept fighting.
Not alone
This Black Friday, they take industrial action again but they are not alone: strikers from Germany, Italy and the US join them on a historical international picket line at the Coventry warehouse in the English midlands. Together, they say: Amazon’s union-busting must end.
Amazon workers draw support from civil society and the progressive movement across the world. In more than 30 countries, activists and citizens are today organising protests in solidarity and to hold the company accountable for its harms to communities and our planet.
In Luxembourg, Amazon’s European headquarters, a coalition of unions, tax-justice and climate organisations are challenging its recent layoffs and its tax avoidance in the centre of Europe. Although it made €50 billion in revenue in 2022, for the fifth consecutive year Amazon did not pay any taxes in Luxembourg.
In seven countries—Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the UK and Canada—climate activists will protest at Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities. They condemn Amazon’s ‘greenwashing’, its data centres’ growing climate impact and electricity consumption and AWS’ contracts with fossil-fuel companies.
Threat to democracy
But the demand to Make Amazon Pay resonates not just in warehouses and on the streets. Political leaders are increasingly recognising the threat the company poses to workers, communities and democracy at large.
A number of US states—including New York and Minnesota—have introduced legislation to protect warehouse workers. The outgoing progressive government in Spain passed legislation allowing workers and their unions a degree of control over the algorithms designed instead to control them. Barcelona’s municipal government introduced the so-called ‘Amazon tax’, which levies a fee on last-mile deliveries’ free use of public space. In Ireland, a bill has been progressing through the Oireachtas (houses of parliament) which would stop Amazon dumping new and unused products.
On a wider canvas, the US Federal Trade Commission’s anti-trust case and the European Union’s Digital Markets Act show policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic understand the urgent need to tackle Amazon’s monopoly power.
Public money
These are positive developments. What remains rarely acknowledged, however, is the role public money plays in propping up the Amazon business model, of destabilising industries, avoiding taxes and busting unions. Amazon’s e-commerce growth has been fuelled by the profits generated from its cloud-services arm, AWS—and public contracts have been key to AWS’ growth.
In 2021, UNI Europa, the European service workers’ union federation, published research showing that the total estimated value of AWS contracts with public institutions in Europe amounted to as much as half a billion euro a year from 2019 to 2021. That’s €1.3 billion in public money in just three years. The research was based on publicly available data, so the actual figure is most likely higher. Worse still, in follow-up research UNI Europa showed that up to 99 per cent of public contracts going to Amazon were awarded without open competition.
It is wrong that public authorities are rewarding Amazon—and, by extension, its business model—with lucrative cloud-computing contracts. The company is a prime example of why UNI Europa has campaigned for public contracts to go only to those with a collective agreement in place.
Need for reform
The EU public-procurement directive needs to be reformed, so that the rules stop bad employers such as Amazon—as opposed to good employers which respect their workers and collective bargaining—from receiving public money. A recent hearing in the European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs committee confirmed a broad consensus around the need for reform, among the social partners, experts and parliamentarians.
The next parliament and commission, after the elections in June 2024, should turn that into reality. It is the least the thousands of Amazon workers on strike today deserve that our public institutions do not fund their exploitation—but rather support their rights and dignity at work.
Oliver Roethig heads UNI Europa, the European service workers’ union.