Amazon workers in 20 countries are expected to strike or protest on Black Friday, pushing the company to respect their rights and commit to more action on the climate. The protests are coordinated by the Make Amazon Pay campaign, run by a global umbrella body of trade unions and workers’ rights groups.

Amazon is known for its resistance to unions. In this week’s episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we tell the story of what happened at one warehouse in Coventry in the UK when its workers tried to gain official recognition for the GMB union, one of the country’s biggest labour unions. The ballot was narrowly defeated by a margin of 28 votes, with 50.5% voting against forcing recognition.

We talk to sociologist Tom Vickers, who spent weeks observing workers’ efforts to unionise at Coventry as part of a research secondment with the GMB. And we find out why some companies, many of them American, are so doggedly anti-union, and the tactics they use to persuade workers not to form one.

In January 2023, around 300 workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry went on their first official strike. The three-day strike followed months of disgruntlement at a proposed pay rise of 50 pence per hour.

Tom Vickers is an associate professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK where he’s director of the Work Futures Research Group, a new institute co-funded by the university and the GMB Union. Since January 2024, Vickers has........

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