I undertook the bulk of the research that informs this book during a part-time secondment to the GMB Union between January and July 2024, funded by Nottingham Trent University. GMB organizers requested my assistance in documenting their campaign at Amazon's BHX4 site because they were receiving many questions and requests to share their approach with other organizers, but were too busy organizing to document this themselves. The resulting research took the form of an activist ethnography, drawing on Reedy and King's concept of ‘friendship as method’. This involved me taking an explicit and open position of solidarity with the GMB workers and foregrounding the seldom-heard and often-marginalized perspectives of worker-leaders and frontline union organizers, contributing to what Sandra Harding calls ‘strong objectivity’, which, to be fully realized, must be accompanied by a ‘strong reflexivity’ and a ‘strong method’. Consistent with this methodology, I was at the same time an academic researcher and an active participant in GMB organizing work, for example, helping to distribute union literature on picket lines, informing the union on matters of immigration policy, and brokering relationships with community, migrant and legal advice organizations. Holgate discusses the pros and cons of such ‘insider-outsider’ research with trade unions, with benefits for access and understandings produced through membership of the ‘epistemic community’ that is being studied, but cautions that in order to maintain academic rigour, the beliefs and behaviour of the researcher should be opened up to scrutiny and participants should be provided with opportunities to comment on findings prior to publication; these measures have been implemented throughout.