‘Let’s make history!’: Amazon staff at UK warehouse vote on union recognition

In Coventry, the GMB has been canvassing hard to represent workers officially – and the potentially historic result is due this week

On a traffic island on the outskirts of Cov­entry, armed with handmade signs and a stack of orange bucket hats, a small but noisy team of organisers from the GMB union are taking on Amazon.

More than 3,000 staff here – “associates,” as Amazon calls them – were given the opportunity to vote in a historic ballot last week that could force the company to recognise a union for the first time in the UK. It is one of several tussles over union recognition globally at the retail-to-cloud-services group founded by Jeff Bezos in his garage in 1994 and now worth more than $2 trillion.