Increase will lift minimum rates by 9.8% and comes after online retailer defeated GMB union bid for bargaining rights on pay Amazon has announced a pay rise worth nearly 10% for tens of thousands of UK employees, after defeating an attempt by the GMB trade union for bargaining rights over pay and conditions. The online retailer 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. Continue reading...

Gig economy workers for Deliveroo and Uber Eats in the city are living in appalling conditions, while putting in long hours, earning low pay and facing mental health problems Two lines of dirt-encrusted, ramshackle caravans stretch along both sides of a road close to the motorway that winds its way into the heart of Bristol. Rats dart between water-filled concrete sluices to rubbish-flecked mounds of vegetation. Drug users stumble out of the nearby underpass while lorries thunder overhead. This is the grim encampment where about 30 Brazilian delivery riders working for large companies such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats are forced to live to make ends meet. Continue reading...

TUC insists fight will go on after GMB fails to secure right to represent retailer’s staff by just 29 votes * Business live – latest updates The TUC has insisted the battle for union recognition at Amazon will go on, after workers at the US retailer’s Coventry warehouse rejected the right to collective bargaining by a majority of just 29 votes. In a historic ballot that could have forced Amazon to recognise a union for the first time in the UK, 50.5% of the workers who voted chose to refuse the proposal for the GMB union to represent them. If 15 had switched sides it would have gone the other way. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...