Organising at amazon.com

The GPMU print and paper union has been organising at the Milton Keynes distribution warehouse of e-commerce giant Amazon.com, where conditions are anything but new age.

Staff at the warehouse can work an 11-hour shift (only 10 hours of which are paid) on a basic rate of pst5 per hour. Each worker has strict quotas - for example a picker must select three items a minute and a packer is required to pack 2.5 items per minute. Workers can walk up to 20 miles a night around the warehouse.

According to GPMU organiser Peter Lockhart, the conditions expose the fact that "Amazon are a company with a modern, high-tech image, but who rely on Victorian working practices." Perhaps not surprisingly, GPMU membership at the plant rose from 17 to 57 over Christmas out of a workforce of around

300.