Amazon has announced a pay rise of nearly 10 percent for tens of thousands of UK employees.
The decision follows a series of strikes and a narrow defeat for the GMB trade union’s bid to secure bargaining rights over pay and conditions.
The pay increase will see minimum hourly rates rise by 9.8 percent. This will bring wages to between £13.50 and £14.50 an hour depending on location.
Employees with more than three years of service will see their hourly rate increased to between £13.75 and £14.75.
The new pay rates, effective from 29 September, will apply to thousands of Amazon staff. This includes those employed in the company’s UK fulfilment centers.
Amazon stated the increase is part of its broader investment in employee pay, which has totaled £550 million since 2022.
Amazon’s Pay and Benefits
The company highlighted that the pay increase will push the minimum starting pay for frontline employees to more than £28,000 annually.
A spokesperson for the online retail giant 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.”
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GMB Union Criticizes Amazon’s Response to Strikes
Despite the pay rise, the GMB trade union criticized the timing of the announcement. The union argued it was a direct result of worker-led industrial action.
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 criticism comes after a hard-fought ballot in July at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse. The vote saw 50.5 percent of workers narrowly rejected GMB’s push for formal union recognition.
The union had been campaigning for a £15-an-hour minimum wage and greater rights to negotiate directly with management.
Workers in Coventry have been staging strikes over the past 18 months, backed by trade unionists from across Europe and the US, who have raised similar concerns over wages and working conditions in their home countries.
Amazon’s Global Stance on Unions
Amazon has consistently declined to cooperate with unions, arguing that it prefers to have a direct relationship with its employees.
The company, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, now has a market valuation approaching $2 trillion and operates globally in retail, logistics, and cloud services.
Some employees at the Coventry warehouse have accused Amazon of employing union-busting tactics, including displaying QR codes that, when scanned, generated emails to GMB’s membership department to cancel a worker’s membership.
Future of Union Recognition in the UK
The Labour government has pledged to make it easier for trade unions to gain formal recognition as part of its efforts to improve workers’ bargaining power.
The proposed reforms could make it simpler for unions like the GMB to secure the right to represent Amazon employees in the future.
