GMB union urges Health and Safety Executive to investigate ‘shocking’ figures revealed by the Observer Ambulances have been called out to Amazon warehouses more than 1,400 times in the past five years, the Observer can reveal. The figures, which were described as shocking by the GMB trade union, raise fresh questions about safety at the American giant’s UK workplaces. Amazon centres in Dunfermline and Bristol had the most ambulance callouts in Britain, listing 161 and 125 across the period respectively. Continue reading...

In Coventry, the GMB has been canvassing hard to represent workers officially – and the potentially historic result is due this week On a traffic island on the outskirts of Cov­entry, armed with handmade signs and a stack of orange bucket hats, a small but noisy team of organisers from the GMB union are taking on Amazon. More than 3,000 staff here – “associates,” as Amazon calls them – were given the opportunity to vote in a historic ballot last week that could force the company to recognise a union for the first time in the UK. It is one of several tussles over union recognition globally at the retail-to-cloud-services group founded by Jeff Bezos in his garage in 1994 and now worth more than $2 trillion. Continue reading...