Amazon workers demand £15 an hour to be “able to pay their bills,’ says GMB union
Amanda Gearing, GMB senior organiser, was asked whether Amazon would be able to attract care home workers (who are also on low pay) by offering sign-on bonuses.
She said:
It’s not a place where you work for very long. They work you really hard. It’s a pressure cooker environment in there. They are using computers to assess the targets and workers don’t know what the targets are.
I can’t see workers wanting to come from care homes and other places to work for Amazon.
They should be listening to their workers and their workers are asking them to give them better pay, terms and conditions and get around the table with the union.
They just can’t live on that I’m afraid. £15 would mean that they are able to pay their bills. We’ve got the biggest cost of living crisis in decades and people are having to choose between heating their homes and eating. It’s not good enough. Not from someone like Amazon that got billions and billions of pounds of profits during the pandemic.
Coventry might be the start of it but it won’t be the finish. We think people are watching on. We know there are workers at other centres that feel exactly the same and they are just waiting to see what happens.
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