This book examines the extraordinarily rapid unionization of Amazon's BHX4 warehouse in Coventry, England, between August 2022 and July 2024. Over this period, membership of the GMB Union grew from around 60 to over 1,400, 37 days of official strike action took place and workers achieved a combined pay rise of 28.5 per cent, greater than any other country in Amazon Europe. Yet in July 2024, the union narrowly lost a ballot of the workforce – by just 28 votes on an 86 per cent turnout – that would have forced the company to recognize the union and enter into formal negotiations. This book provides a detailed assessment of the union's practice during this campaign and the critical factors leading to its successes and defeats. It draws on an intensive period of ethnographic research between January and July 2024, interspersed with personal essays by worker-leaders and organizers who were directly involved. The intensity of this struggle brings into stark relief underlying features of labour relations and union strategy that may be harder to detect in other contexts. This is used to systematize a distinctive organizing model that has widespread relevance, as a form of ‘middle range’ theory that is well suited to understanding the outcomes in particular workplaces.

Key insights for trade unionists, workers and organizers include: practical strategies and tactics to reach the workforce (Chapter 3), sustain engagement (Chapter 4), develop leadership (Chapter 5), respond to workers’ needs (Chapter 6) and build wider support (Chapter 7), and a coherent framework to bring these elements together into a coherent model (Chapter 8) that creates space and time for organizing, even where an employer operates a tight regime of control and opposes union access.