For union organizers, trade union recognition tends to be seen as an end goal. There's no doubt that it is incredibly important, but, like many of our preconceptions around organizing, our experiences in Amazon challenged the concept of recognition being a final destination. As we saw with the Amazon Labor Union at Staten Island in the US, even when a campaign for recognition is successful, a company that holds an ideological opposition to trade unions will still fervently resist collective bargaining. This shaped how we approached the bids for statutory recognition at Amazon Coventry.

The fundamental aim was to support workers in building their union in their workplace. Ultimately, it is collective, industrial strength that leads to real benefits for workers:

• • We supported workers in campaigning for decent pay.

• • We built strength through industrial action.

• • We helped a network of organic workplace leaders create aneffective union structure.

• • Amazon Coventry wasn't a union-recognized workplace, but weoperated as if it was.

The strategy worked. By 25 April 2023, there were 718 union members at the BHX4 site, just over half the 1,400 employees the company was reporting in December 2022. It looked like we met both tests for statutory recognition – at least 10 per cent of the workers in the proposed bargaining unit in the union and the majority of workers appeared likely to favour recognition. On that basis, we made the first application for recognition. Amazon responded with massive recruitment, increasing the size of the workforce by 93 per cent in 27 days, purely to dilute the number of workers asking for recognition.