The structural power of workers

Workers’ structural power is foundational to labor’s struggle and ability to disrupt the circuit of capital to push for their class interests. When it comes to Amazon’s warehouse workers, their marketplace power appears relatively weak. The manual nature of circulating products in warehouses is not regarded as ‘high-skilled’ or scarce on the labor market. According to Amazon’s homepage, Amazon does not require previous experience and merely underlines the minimum age limit of 18. The application is fairly simple, fast and practical: hourly roles may not even require a CV, merely the completion of an online application and assessment, choosing a shift time and finally watching a virtual preview of what to expect in the job. The rest consists of attending in-person office hours for possible new hires.² Warehouse associates receive on-the-job training that can take a few hours (Massimo, 2020; Delfanti, 2021b), which reflects once again the straightforward hiring process at Amazon that may prove advantageous to workers but can also highlight how easily replaceable they are.

As part of its image as an ‘equal opportunity employer’ Amazon presents itself as embracing diversity, and as not differentiating in its hiring process between different workers’ backgrounds as long as they are willing to perform the required manual labor.³ Amazon by and large strategically opens warehouses in areas with higher unemployment rates (there are exceptions, such as in Poland), further guaranteeing the availability of labor power (Boewe and Schulten, 2019). Workers compete with those unemployed in the reserve army of labor who have no alternative employer nearby, and also those willing to accept part-time jobs and contracted seasonal work. Given how easy the hiring and training is for these Amazon jobs and that Amazon offers above national minimum wage and additional benefits, these may seem appealing to workers. It will be interesting to observe how these levels change in the future when national minimum wages are raised, as in Germany starting October 2022, as well as across the EU, given the recent proposal and possible directive aimed to increase minimum wages relative to the national contexts (Syrovatka, 2022).

The general dependence on Amazon’s wages can be magnified then in national contexts where working conditions or minimum wages are less protected and more precarious, considering that such a job offers a guaranteed wage which increases respectively after 12 and then 24 months. These jobs also come with healthcare, vacation days, the possibility of paid time off and the promise (at least) of a flexible work schedule.⁴ Amazon states on its blog that it has been “certified as a ‘2022 Top Employer’ in Italy, Spain, France and Poland”, which “distinguishes employers who create optimal conditions for the development of their employees”.⁵ Workers may navigate therefore toward these jobs and are then highly dependent on their wages and benefits, given the way society and labor markets are organized. Amazon can rely on this revolving door of masses of workers through which the labor process can continue without interruption. This severely weakens the leverage these workers have in relation to Amazon.

Both temporal and spatial dimensions further weaken the marketplace power. Amazon hires hundreds of thousands of temporary workers during its peak season, marked by increased demand in the period of Black Friday and Christmas. This is crucial for Amazon, as its highest turnover comes in Q4. Workers additionally find themselves more vulnerable on the labor market in times of crises, such as the economic crisis of 2006–08 or, more recently, in the first months of COVID-19. For one, this can be connected to job loss in certain sectors such as hospitality, but is also related to for instance Amazon initially raising the hourly wage by an additional hazard pay of US$2, €2 or £2 associated with laboring during a pandemic (UNI, 2020; Kassem, 2022). These points are indicative of how Amazon can continue to hire new workforces to keep up with what has appeared as an exponentially expanding network of warehouses.

Scholars have observed how these labor forces are becoming increasingly racialized and gendered (Reese, 2020; Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2021; Delfanti, 2021b). This can be understood both in relation to the geographical locations of these warehouses outside of and close to urban centers, and also a possible race to the bottom of those willing to accept the working conditions at Amazon. The decision to work at Amazon is closely tied to the options of jobs available for workers in and near these communities, reflecting in turn the larger vulnerabilities of (previously) unemployed workers, as well as of racialized and gendered labor in finding a job. To grasp the growing dimensions of at least those with permanent Amazon jobs in the EU and the UK as it continues to expand, Amazon states they amount to two thirds of those in the entire European steel industry or as exceeding those working globally for top car manufacturers BMW and Renault Group.⁶ Such examples of Amazon becoming what appears to be a top employer in numerical terms in Europe further weaken workers’ marketplace power, given the nature of the labor activity and Amazon’s ability to continue to find workforces to fill these positions (Kassem, 2023).

Depending on their geographical context, workers may feel the pressure of a larger race to the bottom both as a result of the nature of the platform and the nature of the work. In the case of Germany, Amazon can pit workers against each other because of the eastward enlargement of the EU. It has hired to varying extents Czech and Polish workers for the German market, only launching Amazon.pl in Poland in 2021.⁷ In the case of Poland, the first warehouses opened in 2014, close to the German border yet in areas with lower unemployment rates. These have had to attract workers from further away, especially during the peak season (Owczarek and Chełstowska, 2018). Warehouses across the border for the German market allow Amazon implicitly if not explicitly to threaten job relocation, but also extend the labor time and push the UPH even higher. In the process, Amazon pays contracted workers across the German border a fraction of what the German worker earns. While gross hourly wages tend to show small increases over the years, we can take a look at job advertisements for warehouse associates on their homepages in March 2022 to grasp wage levels – though, as previously stated, it will be important to observe how these may change given ongoing and possible developments in minimum wages across the EU. While Amazon advertises a gross hourly wage for a German worker of €12.6 (which differs depending on which German warehouse we are looking at), the worker in Poland receives for the same job 22.5zł, which converted then to around €4.5. Capital’s instrumentalization of the eastward enlargement of the EU to its own advantage is not unique to Amazon but is observable in other sectors such as outsourced steps within the supply chain of the automobile industry (Krzywdzinski, 2014).

The various spatial dimensions of warehouses and their low entry requirements relate in turn to the composition of the workforce and reflect racialized labor markets and may be different in terms of their gendered compositions. Additionally, nationalities in Germany range from North Africans, East Africans and West Africans to those from Eastern Europe, Balkans and Germany. To list another example, in the UK, at least before Brexit, the majority of workers were Polish or Romanian. The different subjectivities of workers may bind certain workers together but can also fragment them because of the language barrier and their different material conditions and contractual agreements (Kassem, 2023). The nature of the platform as location-based can be therefore instrumentalized to weaken the overall marketplace power of Amazon warehouse workers, while the nature of the work in terms of different national and contractual time-wages creates a hierarchy among them.

In contrast to the marketplace power which is weakened by the platform’s organization, the latter can in fact be the source of the workplace power. Though the competitive nature of work may divide workers, their common collective interests to improve their working conditions can unite them. Factories have historically been central in concentrating within the same walls large crowds of workers who do not know each other. The location-based nature concentrates Amazon workers within a single warehouse, which can play a crucial role in their socialization. As each customer order depends on their collective labor, the hypertaylorized division of labor facilitates the possibility for workers to resist across this circulation line. Warehouses are like factories in which workers “were united and disciplined by the very instrument of production which coerced them” (Dunayevskaya, 1975: 47). Amazon’s organization of platform may alienate workers, but precisely the nature of its platform provides conditions for them to instrumentalize their workplace power.

Before delving into collective forms of disruptive power, it is helpful to shed light on the possibilities for individual everyday forms of resistance. While workers have historically been able to slow down their productivity through individual acts of resistance, these appear to be constrained in the warehouses because of technological and political–economic conditions. As Amazon’s hypertaylorized division of labor is managed by algorithms and the social eye of their supervisors, it is easy to observe and track workers’ activities, the time taken for tasks and times of inactivity (Delfanti et al, 2021). It is more difficult for workers to resist by attempting to reduce their productivity because of this pervading surveillance and the fact that the time-wage disguises how workers are evaluated based on UPH performance. In fact, some workers mentioned that they tend to skip health and safety instructions as given by Amazon so they can fulfill their rates. Similarly, workers may skip the ‘six-sided check’ to examine all six sides of a commodity to ensure it is not damaged, as this process takes additional time away from achieving the UPH rate. Workers may relieve themselves by taking longer to get their equipment and additional social breaks to communicate with co-workers or go to the bathroom. In doing so however, they run the risk of being questioned by supervisors, labeled as a ‘low performer’ and asked to attend a feedback talk (Transnational Social Strike Platform, 2019). The technological conditions that organize and surveil the labor activity, along with the social dimensions assumed by supervisors in a location-based platform, strongly inhibit smaller forms of resistance that affect productivity when workers are governed by metrics.

Individual resistance is additionally restricted by material and political–economic conditions, closely related to their weak marketplace power. Workers often find their contract to be initially fixed, and only feel relief after receiving a permanent contract. The conditions of the latter differ according to the specific industrial relations in which workers labor. The German warehouse worker, for instance, can only be given fixed contracts for a sum of two years and must subsequently receive either a permanent contract or not have it renewed, a decision for which Amazon does not need to provide an explanation (Boewe and Schulten, 2019). The more precarious the contract, given the weak marketplace power, the less likely it is that even a class-conscious worker will risk resisting individually through everyday forms of resistance, let alone more direct collective ones. The same logic applies to those on a work visa or residence permit in a foreign country, where their status within it is bound to their employer, in this case Amazon. Some workers may symbolically resist by distancing themselves from the work culture and ridiculing various facets: from the “Work hard. Have fun. Make history” mantra and Amazon’s safety tips to its culture of greeting by fist bumping. Workers may also decide not to attend holiday events or the summer festival, where the latter has taken place on a Sunday, a day off for German warehouse workers. Similarly, workers may refuse to hand in kaizens, as these are not financially compensated, or to answer the voluntary end-of-day survey question that pops up, for instance on their hand scanner. While these forms of symbolic distancing could be considered as rejecting the work culture, these should not be romanticized in terms of their disruptive effect on the circuit of capital.

The essence of the structural power is rooted in the collective strength of workers. The location-based nature of warehouses may facilitate the formation of different solidarities and allows for physical disruptions of work through industrial action such as strikes. Workers, depending on their national and material context and work contracts, may, however, have different obstacles to deal with. Whether a contract is fixed or permanent acts as a central motivation to pursue industrial action and strike (Apicella and Hildebrandt, 2019; Krähling, 2019). It is more difficult for workers to strike if their right to do so is not protected and may result implicitly or explicitly in the termination of their employment. While those in Germany are more likely to receive a permanent contract and be directly hired by Amazon, the situation is less homogenous and more precarious across borders. Amazon states that warehouses typically employ between 1,000 and 2,000 workers on permanent contracts, yet those in the UK report many on fixed and zero-hours contracts. In the case of Poland, contracts can be as short as one month to three months mediated through temp agencies.⁸ Contexts strongly vary in their industrial relations, legal parameters and material conditions, which further project themselves on the composition and fragmentation of the workforces.

These compositions can be integral to how workers organize and communicate and have repercussions for the mobilization of their power resources. While the disruptive power in the UK is further complicated by two thirds of the workforce not speaking English as their native language (at least pre-Brexit), in Poland workers face restrictive labor laws that necessitate a ballot vote in which half of workers place a vote to support strike action in the first place (Owczarek and Chełstowska, 2018; Boewe and Schulten, 2019). In fact, one worker in Germany, who works at one of the newer warehouses known to have an especially racialized manual workforce, stated to me that there are around 90 nationalities within their warehouse, where the realities of these workers, their languages and their knowledge regarding their rights can strongly differ. The implications of these different national contexts become clearer when discussing the associational power where unions and workers attempt to coordinate their workplace power.

Given however these political–economic dynamics where in Germany the industrial relations and material conditions allow at least more room for labor organization, the first strike in Amazon’s history took place in Bad Hersfeld, Germany, on 9 April 2013, as overall 1,100 workers formed a picket line in front of its gates. Bad Hersfeld, the first warehouse to open in Germany in 1999, along with warehouses in Rheinberg, Werne and Leipzig, is among the warehouses with the strongest disruptive power, with around a half of shift-workers likely to lay down their tools and walk out. Disruptive power today can additionally range from temporary blockades and unannounced walkouts during busy shifts to ‘in-out’ strikes where the corporation is meant to bear additional costs by preparing for the strike, rerouting orders or employing additional workers (Cattero and D’Onoforio, 2018; Boewe and Schulten, 2019). As Amazon continues to grow its empire, industrial action has expanded beyond Germany, with workers across Europe and the US, but also the Global South such as India, increasingly claiming their agency to collectively protest, strike and walk out. Through their labor struggles, these workers resist the conditions by which they are alienated. Poland’s first spontaneous protest, in 2015 in Poznań, was sparked by workers who were supposed to labor longer to undermine the strike in Bad Hersfeld (Owczarek and Chełstowska, 2018; OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, 2019; Boewe and Schulten, 2020). While this underlines the importance and the potential for transnational industrial action and labor organization, the case of the national strike in Italy in March 2021 highlights, on the other hand, the power of mobilizing on the national level even beyond the warehouses and across Amazon’s distribution chain (Delfanti, 2021b).

The different labor compositions within a local, yet alone national context, are bound however to project themselves on the transnational one – both in terms of the fabric of solidarity, but also the difficulties, a point I return to shortly. The struggle to improve working conditions and health and safety measures was further magnified in light of COVID-19, a time in which Amazon experienced a surge in orders (Kassem, 2022). Amazon claims to have invested US$11.5 billion in 2020 on health and safety measures, ranging from temperature checks, testing and additional cleaning to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and social distancing (Amazon Staff, 2020). Yet health and safety concerns associated with COVID-19 triggered a series of industrial action across warehouses and continents to disrupt the circuit of capital. Workers “on the front lines of this crisis” initially reported a lack of PPE, an inability to maintain social distancing given the pace of work and a lack of transparency when it came to outbreaks (Heikkilä, 2020b). These instances of labor organization and mobilization were therefore initially concentrated around the beginning of the pandemic, but continued at different instances – especially during the peak season. Workers thus demonstrate how they mobilized their workplace power even during times of weakened marketplace power amidst a pandemic (Kassem, 2022, 2023).

These instances also demonstrate that despite the rather heterogeneous compositions of the manual workforces, these can come together and form solidarity through their similar material interests for better working conditions – may these be health and safety conditions or higher wages. In the context of rising inflation, these political-economic conditions appear to further motivate and spark continued labor unrest at various warehouses. Amazon unilaterally decided to raise wages by a mere 3 percent at the German warehouse of Winsen in September 2022, despite inflation at the time being around 10 percent. Considering that Amazon raised wages elsewhere by up to 7.4 percent, workers at Winsen from dozens of different nationalities, organized and mobilized in an unprecedented manner to strike during different shifts for better working conditions (ver.di, 2022; Kassem, 2023).

Meanwhile in the US, home to Amazon’s largest workforce and potentially largest disruptive power, workers too mobilized during these times. The first industrial action at Amazon warehouses unfolded, however, in Europe and not the US, as a result of the latter’s anti-union landscape and Amazon’s union-busting activities. It was only in 2019 that the first strike took place in the US, in Minnesota, initially sparked by Amazon refusing to give the majority Muslim East African workforce additional breaks and space to pray during the upcoming Ramadan. While this industrial action was small in size, it was strongly supported by the worker-led Awood Center, a community center that aims to strengthen and support East African workers. The name is derived from the Somali word awood, which translates as “power”. As Abdirahman Muse, its executive director, emphasizes, “[p]eople thought we were crazy and that we would never achieve anything. But we created a space that’s culturally relevant to organize migrant workers and we had organisers who spoke their language” (UNI and ITUC, 2019: 5).⁹ Such an action cannot be underestimated as it set a precedent in what had remained a strike-free terrain for Amazon workers for around a quarter of a century and would be followed by other protests such as on Prime Day. The case further demonstrates the strengthened potential when additional dimensions of race and/or gender complement class solidarity.

Given the mentioned health and safety concerns of workers during COVID-19, workers across the US mobilized their workplace power through walkouts – one of which gained a lot of attention after organizer Christian Smalls at the warehouse in Staten Island was fired for supposedly violating his quarantine. He was described in a leaked report as “not smart, or articulate”, and smeared as the face of the labor movement (Blest, 2020; Paul, 2020; Kassem, 2022). When viewed holistically, labor mobilizations of workplace power are increasingly gaining momentum across Amazon warehouses globally. These underline their collective potential, guided by similar health and safety concerns and against intense and alienating working conditions with the aim of improving these. These are bound to further intensify in light of the political—economic conditions that are characterized by rising inflation, which as of fall 2022 has not been accompanied by a proportionate rise in wage levels. The contemporary material conditions thus play a crucial role in motivating and sparking labor struggles of workers in an unprecedented manner.

While spatial and temporal dimensions of marketplace power weaken workers’ leverage, workers can magnify their disruptive power by instrumentalizing these. The moment in which workers disrupt circulation can be vital, as they have strategically coordinated action on Prime Day and during Amazon’s peak season during Q4. This has taken place both prior to and during COVID-19: from coordinated national industrial action on Black Friday in 2018, when Spanish, German, Italian and British took global strike action and protest, to Black Friday in 2020 and 2021, when there was industrial action in over 20 countries (Biron, 2021). This temporal dimension has been especially crucial in the context of the pandemic, as Q4 overlaps, at least in the northern hemisphere, with winter and therefore a surge in coronavirus cases. In 2020 this was followed by more national measures such as lockdowns that pushed many into online shopping. Given Amazon’s growing market share and global supply chain, such coordination of action on Black Friday is also instrumental in spatial terms, potentially causing a ripple effect across warehouses. The Italian national strike exemplifies in contrast the importance of coordinating action spatially across the supply chain, especially given Amazon’s growing concern of controlling last-mile deliveries and relying less on the better-organized workers of the postal sector (Różycki and Kerr, 2019). While the nature of the platform presents obstacles to (trans)national labor organization because of the differing industrial relations and material conditions, the location-based nature of the platform can be a source of strength as their collective labor gives workers various points at which they can disrupt the accumulation of capital (Kassem, 2022).

Amazon attempts to counter these efforts by instrumentalizing the political–economic and technological favorable conditions, coming to hold the “‘dubious record for longest labor dispute’ in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany” (Boewe and Schulten, 2019: 9). Amazon has previously used ‘strike-break’ rewards of, for example, €200 there to divide and polarize workers by incentivizing them to labor during strikes such as on Black Friday. It may also move workers prone to striking from strategic positions ahead of a strike (such as loading and unloading trucks) and provide them with the most laborious tasks, such as picking (Boewe and Schulten, 2019). As previously mentioned, Amazon additionally exploits the larger context of precarity and unemployment, low marketplace power and national legal boundaries to (in)directly threaten workers with the termination of their contracts. Just as workers worry about not having their contracts renewed, so they fear similar repercussions if they talk about organizing, let alone pursuing, industrial action.

The fixed, precarious and seasonal contracts may not only rupture the formation of solidarity and willingness to mobilize, but can also further fragment workers by creating a hierarchy according to their different rights and wages. Thus workers may be either unwilling to jeopardize their contract by sympathizing and organizing or be completely uninterested if their employment does not last long enough for them to benefit from potential gains. This can be exacerbated for migrant workers on a visa or with a temporary residence permit, who do not want to risk jeopardizing their status or their employment relations both to secure their living in their new home, but also as they may be sending money to their family in their countries (Kassem, 2023). Fluctuations and turnover further complicate the formation of solidarity within the warehouse or newly opened warehouses, which requires continuous efforts and resources (LaVecchia and Mitchell, 2016; OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, 2019). While the peak season provides workers with a high potential for disruptive power, this may be weakened by Amazon’s revolving door of seasonal workers on short-term contracts, which is not conducive to labor organization.

Amazon can further instrumentalize the (trans)national nature of the platform to further undermine solidarity and industrial action, appearing one step ahead by adapting delivery times and shifting orders to other warehouses with largely similar inventories. As Barthel identifies, the decentralized network of warehouses means there are no clear choke points within its logistics network and supply chain. No one warehouse occupies a strategically more important position that could bring their totality to a halt (Barthel, 2019; Vgontzas, 2020). Amazon cannot just shift orders to warehouses within a country, but in the case of Europe it benefits greatly from the EU enlargement and hence can shift these across borders to absorb strike impacts. As previously mentioned, when workers strike in Germany, Amazon can quickly shift the orders to Polish warehouses and in effect use Polish workers as strikebreakers. This only further underlines the necessity for workers to organize transnationally, considering the measures Amazon resorts to in order to ensure customers receive their orders in time (Krähling, 2019).

Accordingly, Amazon warehouse workers, who have a weak marketplace power, must navigate both Amazon’s counterstrategies and the general political–economic conditions. The location-based nature of the platform provides both opportunities and obstacles for workers’ agency, though limits to the time-wage in the form of temporary contracts ensure workers are kept in precarious and vulnerable positions. As Amazon continues to monopolize the e-commerce market and expand across transport and logistics, it becomes increasingly important for solidarity to be cultivated among its heterogeneous manual workforces. It is integral for their labor organization that the workplace power be mobilized locally and (trans)nationally across its supply chain and even different platforms. As discussed in Chapter 11, given that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is its profit-making platform which can absorb losses from Amazon.com, it would be a further opportunity for different Amazon workers to strategize and coordinate collective action to increase their leverage.

The associational power of workers

The nature of the platform and of the work at Amazon’s warehouses, reminiscent of factories, allow for a more classical understanding of labor organization through unions that may help workers in recognizing their class interests and mobilizing. Far from the days in which unions were radical and revolutionary, unions today can be perceived as ineffective or restrained by the political–economic systems in which they operate. “[H]elp[ing] workers sell their labor as advantageously as they can” (Azzelini and Kraft, 2018: 5), unions have become a component of the institutional fabric within capitalism. While it is necessary to critically evaluate unions in our current neoliberal age, it is important to emphasize that they can offer workers supporting structures, resources or compensations for missed wages when striking. Workers in turn may decide whether to support a union depending on past experiences or the union’s accomplishments in representing workers’ interest (Apicella and Hildebrandt, 2019). When workers come from a national context in which such rights are not protected, they may additionally find themselves feeling more vulnerable, unprotected and possibly unaware of their rights within the new national context.

Though union membership rates, strategies and national industrial relations may differ, the landscape of the associational power on a national level shows potential. While Amazon organizes the division of labor similarly across warehouses, the nature of its platform strongly impacts opportunities for workers to organize themselves to further mobilize their workplace power. Germany, where the right to join a union is constitutionally protected, is often regarded as an exemplary case because of the activity of ver.di (Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft) and resources dedicated to organizing Amazon warehouses.¹⁰ It was over a decade after the first warehouse opened in Germany that ver.di began its organizing effort in pursuing a collective bargaining agreement. This was in turn crucial in sparking the first industrial action in 2013 in Amazon’s history, because of Amazon’s unwillingness to bargain. Ver.di has since channeled resources in rank-and-file and shop steward structures to further raise awareness among workers of their rights. While ver.di aims to increase its membership, the previously mentioned composition of the laborforce can prove critical and require additional efforts. Depending on the local context – migrant workers may be more reluctant to join the union given the associated risks and financial cost of one percent of their gross monthly wage (Kassem, 2023) – yet warehouses also demonstrate that these workers can (especially once they receive a permanent contract) unionize and become part of the organizing workforce.

Engaging with ver.di’s labor struggle would, however, mean a recognition of the union on Amazon’s part (Cattero and D’Onoforio, 2018; Boewe and Schulten, 2019; Vgontzas, 2020; Apicella, 2021). While Amazon currently aligns its wages with that of the logistics industry, interestingly enough, it deems itself a retailer and not a logistics company as in other countries, such as the US. This is one of many examples that reflect how Amazon exploits the system to its advantage. While ver.di has not yet been able to win the long sought-after collective bargaining agreement, workers have made some gains discussed in the section on institutional power (Boewe and Schulten, 2019; Apicella, 2021). Victories in any national context are considered instrumental to those elsewhere, sending ripple effects for workers across their power resources, setting possible precedents and strengthening solidarity among Amazon warehouse workers.

While in Germany Amazon workers unionize freely and have relatively higher union membership rates than in other EU countries, the situation is certainly more complex in other European countries. The UK, for instance, has a more labor-restrictive legal system, allowing for more union-busting. The GMB Union, which is not allowed on Amazon’s premises, has struggled to become a recognized union, as this necessitates support by a majority of workers – though it can still turn to the highest labor authority under specific conditions to claim statutory recognition (Boewe and Schulten, 2019).¹¹ Within this struggle, the GMB has found other ways to support workers, ranging from the creation of an online game, through which online users experience the productivity pressures during peak season, to surveying workers about their health and safety concerns and working closely with reporters to expose how 600 ambulances were called over a three-year period (Butler, 2018; GMB Union, 2018a).

While the UK is interesting as it is in a close race with Germany for the largest market outside the US, the Polish case is integral to the German market, as workers there can be used as strikebreakers and are organized by two competing unions. The coordination of workplace and associational power of German and Polish workers can prove integral to the larger labor struggle given their interdependence; however, workers in each country are confronted with their own industrial relations landscape. Within Poland’s labor-restrictive landscape, which requires a ballot vote to strike, both the anarcho-syndicalist rank-and-file OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza (IP) and the more social partnership model-based Solidarność compete to organize its precarious warehouse workers. Cooperating could strengthen their associational power, which showed potential after their joint call for wage increases in 2019, when the Amazon-recognized Solidarność refused to negotiate without the presence of IP (Owczarek and Chełstowska, 2018; Boewe and Schulten, 2019; OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, 2019). Such cross-national differences underline the difficulties workers navigate in organizing uniform transnational industrial actions.

As these labor struggles continued and intensified during COVID-19, the associational power was crucial in many cases in coordinating the mobilization of workplace power on Prime Day, Black Friday and the peak season more generally. The French and US cases particularly underline the evolving nature of labor struggles where the context surrounding COVID-19 can be regarded as further strengthening the associational power. For one, the French Union syndicale Solidaires (SUD) played a crucial role during the first lockdown by taking Amazon to court after protests were followed by labor inspections over health and safety concerns. The first ruling limited sales to essential items or risk a fine of €1 million per day until conditions were improved in warehouses, later magnified by a €100,000 fine for every non-essential item. Amazon initially shut down its warehouses to avoid these financial costs, only to reopen once it had reached an agreement with the union (Alderman, 2020; Kassem 2020, 2022). In this case the union was able to push for regulation of Amazon, even if it was short-term.

In contrast, across the Atlantic workers in the US have been pushing for their organization: from Amazonians United, “an independent and democratic organization of workers” to unprecedented, organized union drives.¹² Warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL, presented the first example of this kind of organized drive to legally oblige Amazon to recognize the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), an expression of their traditional associational power. In quite a historical moment Amazon workers at the Staten Island, NY, warehouse JFK8 have presented the first successful majority to join the newly established grassroots union, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). ALU was in fact created by Smalls, the previously mentioned warehouse worker that was dismissed after organizing a walkout in 2020 (Kassem, 2022, 2023). According to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, workers must prove through a vote to the labor authority that the majority of the workforce supports unionization. While winning such a vote allows the union to conclude collective bargaining agreements that apply to the entire workforce, without this initial majority vote workers find themselves without such a legal collective organization (Domhoff, 2013). The process of unionization in the US is thus different from that of, for instance, German workers, who can simply join a union of their own volition–though these decisions are also informed by their material realities.

Bound by both class and racial subjectivities given the Black majority workforce, an organized effort was initiated for unionization in Bessemer in 2020 (Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2021). This labor struggle dragged out until 2022 and continues, as RWDSU complained of unfair labor practices to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after not winning the majority union ballot vote (RWDSU, 2021). Amazon organized a counterstrategy, including installing a mailbox outside of the warehouse in a tent plastered with “Vote No” or hiring anti-union consultants for US$10,000 a day. Above all, it has been holding mandatory captive audience meetings that spread misinformation about union dues, although these are prohibited in Alabama (Logan, 2021; Gurley, 2022b). Though the NLRB ruled that Amazon had violated labor law and workers had a renewed chance of an election, as a result of interrelated factors, workers two years later continue to struggle for union recognition. These tactics of Amazon were echoed to varying degrees during the organizing campaign at JFK8. Workers were confronted with similar captive meetings and anti-union material, for which Global Strategy Group, a consultancy and polling firm, had been hired. In the process, Amazon has been retaliating against workers and union organizers: at one event organizers were arrested for trespassing as they distributed food to workers. Amazon’s efforts amounted in 2021 to them spending over US$4 million on anti-union consultants (New York Times, 2022; Palmer, 2022; Kassem, 2023). Amazon continued to invest in challenging these ALU union results to the NLRB, which a labor official has concluded to “be set aside and Amazon Labor Union be certified to represent workers at the warehouse” (Scheiber, 2022).

There had been previous attempts to mobilize associational power, ranging from the call center in Seattle that got shut down for just attempting to organize or previous efforts by the RWDSU and International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Other instances include the Minnesota walkouts or the movement against Amazon establishing its second headquarters in New York City. Both RWDSU and Teamsters continue their general organizing efforts of Amazon warehouse workers. Yet the organizational drives in 2020–22 have been setting a precedent at Amazon, because of their scale, and having a ripple effect across the US labor market, given that Amazon is the second largest public company employer, coming only second to Walmart.¹³ From traditional unions to more novel grassroot ones, Amazon’s anti-union tactics in the US against these efforts explain the reputation it has gained as a union-buster, which it has exported beyond its US borders. These indicate the terrain workers have had to and continue to navigate to assume their associational power in growing organized drives (Kassem, 2023).

As “[a]t its core, capital is global [and] [a]s a rule, labour is local” (Castells, 1996: 506), it is important for workers to organize transnationally, because of Amazon’s transnational character. The formation of transnational solidarity and mobilization is, however, directly tied to underlying national contexts and problems – including differing union memberships and representations, resources, industrial relations, linguistic obstacles and racialized and gendered material realities and subjectivities of workers. Workers must navigate their different terrains to overcome their divisions to collectively struggle for their common interests through a transnational associational power as embodied for instance in the Amazon Global Alliance. What was initiated by UNI Global Union (UNI) as an Amazon Working Group in 2014 to plan joint campaigns across Europe and quickly expanded to coordinating meetings since 2015 among for instance ver.di, GMB, Solidarność, Italy’s Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), France’s Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and Spain’s Comisiones Obreras (CCOO). The alliance of unions has continued to grow, amounting in December 2019 to 23 unions across 19 countries and even beyond Europe, and has invited researchers and institutions such as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

In their bi-annual meetings, predominantly full-time trade union secretaries along with some shop stewards primarily exchange country reports on obstacles and accomplishments. They also discuss past and future transnational industrial action on peak days such as Prime Day or Black Friday. While UNI sparked an effort to create a European Works Council, which led to its establishment in 2022 (UNI Europa, 2022), it has recognized the importance of strong local and national foundations for achieving stronger transnational impacts. It thus focuses its resources on increasing membership, which translates into associational power, and on mobilization, which translates into workplace power. Rather than competing with shop floor efforts, these are meant to complement coordination of solidarity and industrial action, though each union anchored in its own national context expresses these in its own nationally legally permitted ways. Thus, transnational action may not be identical, but has been motivated both prior and during COVID-19 by similar concerns over better and safer working conditions or collective bargaining agreements, while sharing central messages of warehouse workers, such as “Amazon, we are not robots” (GMB Union, 2018b; UNI and ITUC, 2019). A growing transnational associational power co-evolves alongside growing national ones and is in turn bound to magnify mobilizations of workplace power.

The associational power of Amazon workers extends beyond a traditional union structure, as exemplified by the wider political movement fighting capitalist and intersectional inequalities, the Transnational Social Strike (TSS) and its Amazon Workers International (AWI). AWI organizes its own bi-annual meetings between the US and France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Spain and Poland in its expanding network. It stands, however, in stark contrast to UNI, with its more grassroots ‘from below’ orientation, aiming to be inclusive across race, sex, contract status and sectors and overlapping subjectivities and solidarities (Heikkilä, 2020a). Dating back to 2015 with the previously mentioned first communication and industrial action between German and Polish workers, AWI presents a less traditional and more alternative form of associational power. It too organizes its own (digital) rank-and-file meetings to struggle for better working conditions, wages and contracts, aiming to slow down and possibly disrupt the valorization of capital both before and during the pandemic. Given the centrality of the disruptive power, AWI focuses on prioritizing actions including slowdowns, assemblies and picket lines to strike collectively for their common interests against Amazon, their binding employer (AMWORKERS, 2019). This form of associational power is characterized by its transnational nature, ultimately underlining that the “biggest challenge is to gain more power and to organize a majority of the Amazon workers worldwide. We have to overcome the idea, that this struggle can be won on a local base” (Barthel, 2019; Krähling, 2019: 17).

In an era in which technology is linked to the wider socio and political–economic fabric, it is important to highlight the additional potential of the digital sphere. A similar, less formal and institutional example of an attempt to organize the geographically, temporally and dimensionally dispersed Amazon labor force has been Former And Current Employees (FACE) of Amazon. Created by anonymous former Amazon employees in response to a 2015 New York Times article exposing Amazon’s alienating corporate culture, FACE shares posts on personal grievances from Amazon workers regardless of which platform they work for and where they are located (Kantor and Streitfeld, 2015; Kim, 2016). FACE of Amazon has additionally attempted to organize the associational power through its Amazon Employees Internationally Organized Union, according to US labor law. Coupling this effort with the growing workplace power covering various platforms, FACE of Amazon directed an open letter to Bezos stating: “[i]f you choose to ignore us and continue to deny the clear facts of what is going on in your company, we will initiate a labor movement to regain our rights through unionization as was necessary for generations of mistreated employees before us.”¹⁴

Unlike UNI’s Global Alliance and AWI’s current efforts, FACE of Amazon instrumentalizes the Internet to transcend temporal and spatial boundaries to form transnational cross-platform solidarity. There appear, however, no known cooperation between FACE of Amazon and the other associations. In contrast, the Make Amazon Pay campaign and now coalition, which supports global strikes, actions and protests, has brought UNI and AWI together. These join dozens of unions, social or environmental organizations, watchdogs and activists, including the Progressive International movement in the attempt to “Make Amazon Pay”, stating “Amazon is everywhere, involved in almost every step of the global economy, but we are too” (Progressive International, 2021).¹⁵ While cross-coordination of associational power is restricted to navigating different national contexts and union strategies, magnifying the impact of (trans)national coordination of those strategies proves crucial in view of the growing dimensions of Amazon’s expansion.

Just as Amazon strategically counters the structural power of workers, so too does it undermine the associational power, earning itself a reputation for being “fundamentally unwilling to cooperate with trade unions on regulating working conditions” (Boewe and Schulten, 2019: 12). The implications of fixed contracts, of the vulnerabilities of precarious workers and of a reserve army of labor extend to the associational power. This explains, for instance, why many workers in Germany join a union only after receiving a permanent contract, despite that right being legally protected. The additional speed at which Amazon is opening warehouses and its revolving door of precarious, contracted or seasonal workers make it difficult for unions to maintain their membership and degree of organization with their limited resources. This is especially crucial when these overlap with peak times and the largest potential for disruptive power (Barthel, 2019). Unions must therefore navigate the terrain that Amazon creates through the organization of its platform, which essentially ruptures the mobilization of such power resources.

If this is Amazon’s stance in countries where unions are part of the social partnership and institutional fabric, the cases from the US, on the other hand, underline the extent of union-busting tactics aimed at defeating unionization where in some cases even the NLRB has deemed these in violation of the law. As Amazon aims to manage the threat of associational power that it regards as unnecessary in the first place, 2020 has shown us how far it is willing to go to defeat these. This has ranged from posting a job that included in its description investigating threatening organized labor (Kollewe, 2020), to the leak that it had turned to Pinkerton operatives. This is a detective agency with a notorious record of union-infiltrating and busting, aiding Amazon in its efforts of spying on workers, especially during the peak season (Jones, 2018; Gurley, 2020). When discussing the agency of Amazon workers in their traditional, alternative, transnational and digital expressions, we must therefore put it in perspective not just in view of their weak marketplace power, but also in view of Amazon’s systematic efforts to rupture and extinguish any efforts to mobilize workplace power and to form associational power given their co-evolving and strengthening dynamics. The lengths Amazon goes to to create fear are closely related once again to the platform’s organization and national context, which more often than not favor Amazon.

The institutional power of workers

While institutional power, rooted in cooperation and concessions between workers and capital, is reformist in nature, workers can still mobilize it to make gains depending on their context. Industrial relations and the organization of the platform can limit the spaces to be navigated, but these can, as the German case exemplifies, support the general pursuit for institutional representation through works councils and shop steward structures. Ver.di has been organizing shop stewards called Vertrauensleute, who are union members elected by the rest of the workers to act as a link between them and the union. These listen to workers’ grievances regarding, for example, performance pressures or strategize industrial actions supporting the desired collective bargaining agreement. They also play an essential role in announcing strikes, and essentially in mobilizing workplace power (Boewe and Schulten, 2019). Such structures in the warehouses underline within this context the interconnectedness of the different power resources and structures in support of labor’s struggles.

The German Works Constitution Act entitles workers to co-determination on two levels: first, the ‘level of the establishment’ at any ‘private sector establishment’ with at least five workers; and second, the ‘board level’ constituting equal numbers of worker and shareholder representatives wherever 2,000 or more workers are employed (The Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, 2019). Consisting of both pro-employer Amazon members and more class-conscious union members, works councils have achieved some successes for German workers such as modest wage increases or decentralized break rooms. In Bad Hersfeld it was even able to abolish the dreaded mandatory supervisory feedback talks. While Amazon may present accomplishments in start-meetings as being generously provided by the corporation, co-determination can act as a motivator for workers to mobilize for their institutional representation (Cattero and D’Onoforio, 2018; Apicella and Hildebrandt, 2019; Boewe and Schulten, 2019; Kassem, 2023). As the nature of the platform is bound by the national context and industrial relations where such expressions of institutional power may be possible as in Germany, workers in other contexts may need to struggle for their collective interests outside of the institutional setup. In contrast, the time-wage, determined by the conditions and length of the contract, can impact the extent to which workers partake in these struggles or benefit from their outcomes.

Since the corporation cannot prohibit the creation and presence of works councils in Germany, Amazon attempts to make these as divided and ineffective as possible by, for instance, supporting pro-employer lists and offering to print flyers or information at its cost. When interviewed, workers said that Amazon uses further tactics such as withholding information and extending the discriminatory treatment that it utilizes for those striking or unionized to works council members. A works council need not be necessarily pro-union or pro-labor, especially in newer warehouses without a history of labor dispute or organization. Amazon also attempts to curb the institutional power by circumventing possibilities for group/central works councils. By establishing its European headquarters in Luxembourg it does not just benefit from tax advantages but Luxembourg’s laws are also applied to the corporation, which do not include the representation of workers at corporate group levels. Amazon can dodge the creation of group/central works councils by organizing warehouses within its supply chain as “‘profit centers’ and subsidiaries” for Amazon EU Sarl in Luxembourg (Boewe and Schulten, 2019: 21). Amazon additionally attempts to eliminate any possibility for co-determination at board level by deliberately keeping the number of workers in a warehouse to under 2,000, as at its Graben warehouse, where the workforce dropped from the initial 5,000 to under 2,000. The only exception has been Bad Hersfeld, with its 3,500 workers, though these had to apply pressure for co-determination even though it should have been granted automatically (ver.di, 2014; Boewe and Schulten, 2019). While Amazon attempts to limit the institutional power of workers in Germany, there is potentially more possibility for this in some other national contexts.

Amazon’s approach to institutional power can be understood as making as few concessions as necessary, limiting institutional powers to what is legally mandated and navigating industrial relations to its advantage. Central to this has been the pursuit of a collective bargaining agreement, which would result in an improvement of wages and working conditions. While I discussed the pursuit for the German collective bargaining agreement by ver.di in the associational power, it would represent a larger manifestation of the institutional power for the union and the workers. In fact, as reflected in a previous quote from Bezos, Amazon appears to use the institutional power of having works councils that are regarded as employee participation to dismiss this form of institutional power in Germany (Kassem, 2023). Amazon thus far rejects a collective bargaining agreement for the German retail industry and does not need to consider one in the US, at least until a formal associational power is officially achieved. It cannot, however, escape France’s obligatory industry-level collective bargaining agreement for the entire non-food retail industry or the successful negotiation by Italian Filcam-CGIL, the retail section of CGIL, for the first workplace collective agreement in 2018. However, both of these are meant as a starting point and foundation stone to build on (Cattero and D’Onoforio, 2018). It also remains to be seen what the role of the newly established European Works Council will be and how this will translate into the possible strengthening of transnational power resources. Once again, the concrete manifestation of these powers can only be understood as arising from the specific configuration of the organization of the platform and the history of labor struggle within this constellation.

The societal power of workers

While the discussion on the power resources paints a complex terrain that workers must navigate, our current moment appears to be conducive to their societal power. As more and more people come to rely on Amazon and its growing empire, only to be exacerbated by COVID-19, it continues to make headlines from the perspective of capital for its newest expansions, inventions and technologies, booming valuation or stories about Jeff Bezos. These appear to be increasingly countered by the working realities of workers, thereby strengthening their growing discursive power. Workers underline the importance of making their grievances public through the media as a means to tarnish Amazon’s image, given how much it prides itself on being the most customer-centric company. While the nature of the platform allowed undercover documentaries to expose its catastrophic working conditions as seen in BBC’s Amazon – The Truth Behind the Click and ARD’s Ausgeliefert! Leiharbeiter bei Amazon, these efforts have since been complemented by anonymous reports by workers, especially during the peak season. The media can strengthen not only the societal power of workers to influence the public but can also increase and strengthen workers’ other power resources, especially in relation to traditional and grassroots union organizing, as well as other forms of collective organization and ultimately their overall labor struggle.

While the discursive power is essential to their struggle, so too is their power to create coalitions, as workers underline the importance of further instrumentalizing this moment to gain the support of politicians and social and solidarity movements. Such an instance presented itself at the strikes in protest against Bezos receiving the previously mentioned Axel Springer award, in which ver.di took to the streets alongside other unions and Make Amazon Pay. The latter can in fact be regarded precisely as a manifestation of coalitional power, bringing together over 70 (global) labor, social, technological or environmental organizations and activists. In addition to those previously mentioned, it also includes Oxfam, IndustriALL, Data 4 Black Lives, 350.org and Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. While it aligns its common demands with protecting universal labor rights and aims to hold Amazon accountable in environmental and economic terms, it has also called for global actions, such as protests at Amazon’s corporate EU headquarters. Supported by some Members of the European Parliament, this further underlines how such efforts can expand the coalitional, workplace and associational power (UNI Europa, 2021a).

Unions too, through their direct associational power, have further cultivated the coalitional power by expanding the scope of the Amazon labor struggle as embodied in UNI’s global symposium organized along with the ITUC. Entitled Symposium on the Unchecked Power of Amazon in Today’s Economy and Society, and coinciding with Cyber Monday in December 2019, its participants included activists, researchers, NGOs and politicians to problematize the corporation’s growing digital, economic, political and societal power as well as its environmental carbon footprint. It encouraged in many ways cross-platform and transnational solidarity (UNI and ITUC, 2019). Not just the economic dimension but also the political dimension of the labor struggle have been previously highlighted by politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have underlined the importance of breaking Amazon up; Sanders was also a strong supporter of increasing Amazon’s minimum wage to US$15. Other instances have included Ilhan Omar’s show of solidarity with the workers in Minnesota or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s support for the movement against HQ2 in New York City (Hamilton, 2018; Lieber, 2018; Rosenberg, 2019).

On the other side of the Atlantic, concrete coalitional power manifestations are attempting to “Europeanise Amazon”, as the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) underlines Amazon’s attempts at “undermining the European social model” regarding collective bargaining, working conditions and labor rights and tax avoidance (ETUC, 2021). While these efforts culminated in a hearing at the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs of the European Parliament, Amazon declined to attend this altogether. As UNI’s Hoffman states, “Amazon had $44 billion in sales in Europe and paid no corporate taxes. The fact that they are failing to appear to answer questions from duly elected members of the European Parliament is a slap in the face to Europe and reflects Amazon’s general contempt for democracy” (UNI Europa, 2021b). The expansions of this corporation, spanning continents, sectors and industries, not only poses a wide array of threats to these but also allows for various points for workers to gain public and political support. It also allows for the creation of a solidary network and movement from various societal sources. The networks and labor struggles expand, magnify and co-evolve along with Amazon’s exponential growth.

Amazon counters societal power by continuously constructing itself in a positive light as an employer that is tolerant and embraces diversity within its warehouses, the same warehouses that are open for public. All one needs to do is to sign up for one of its ‘Fulfillment Center Tours’, where visitors can see workers laboring and ask any questions they may have. These tours allow Amazon to underline its commitment to transparency and dismiss reports on poor working conditions. These tours are now even offered virtually, making these even more accessible, no longer tied to cost of traveling to the warehouse. It has also created its own blog ‘day one’ – and uses it along with articles written by ‘Amazon staff’ to inform those interested in its newest developments, post its own videos featuring workers with positive perceptions of work or to respond to media attacks.¹⁶ Amazon additionally has had active Twitter ambassadors, essentially “[an a]rmy of fulfillment center employees [who] jump to [the] company’s defense online when it faces a barrage of bad press” (Tynan, 2018a). These various tactics demonstrate how Amazon quickly, repeatedly and strategically distances itself from any negative press and image-tarnishing efforts. It diverts attention away from its workers and their labor realities and more toward employee and customer satisfaction, technological developments and capital gains – all of which mask the huge ongoing economic inequalities within the corporation. If it features any workers, these appear as happy and satisfied. Our current moment and growing attention around the platform economy in general, and Amazon in specific, appear to be strengthening possibilities for solidarity, resistance and organization.

What appears to the customer behind the screen as a human-less process is based on the exploitation of warehouse workers in these factory-like lines of circulation. Examining the relations of alienation demonstrates the ways in which a location-based platform estranges and robotizes its workers and reduces them to a number, whilst the time-wage masks the exploitative UPH regime. Though this may individualize and fragment workers, they are not mere appendages of the machine. They can consciously struggle for their collective class interests bound by the various facets of their material, racialized and gendered subjectivities and solidarity. Amazon’s location-based nature allows it to exploit the wider contextual conditions and precarious contractual agreements to further fragment and intimidate workers from mobilizing their power resources. While acts of individual resistance are complicated in the times of digital Taylorism and increased precarity, workers may navigate their material obstacles and Amazon’s counterstrategies to instrumentalize their workplace and disruptive power derived from their assembly within warehouses. As labor organizations support associational and institutional powers (trans)nationally and digitally to improve their working conditions and fight back against the various facets of alienation, workers are increasingly gaining momentum in organizing themselves and making their movement intrinsic to the wider public debate. It is crucial to continue to cultivate these power resources holistically, given how these co-evolve. In doing so, they are claiming their agency and conceiving of it in broader terms of a possible transnational, inter-platform and inter-sectoral movement. As Awood’s Abdirahman Muse highlights, as Amazon continues to adapt, so too must the labor movement.¹⁷