The Conversation Weekly28 Nov 2024

The story of one Amazon warehouse in the UK that pushed to unionise

The online retail giant Amazon is known for its resistance to unions. In this week’s episode, we tell the story of what happened at one warehouse in Coventry in the UK when its workers tried to gain official recognition for the GMB union, one of the country’s biggest labour unions.

We talk to Tom Vickers, a sociologist at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, who spent weeks observing workers’ efforts to unionise at the warehouse as part of a research secondment with the GMB. And John Logan, a professor of labor and employment Studies at San Francisco State University in the US, explains why some companies, many of them American, are so doggedly anti-union. The episode also includes an introduction from Sarah Reid, business and economy editor at The Conversation in the UK.

This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with sound design by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.

Further reading:

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(297)

Can we ever fully trust AI agents?

As more incidents emerge of AI agents going rogue during testing, can we fully trust them?In the latest hack, Australia revealed OpenAI agents hacked into a government database containing healthcare d...

24 Sep 23min

Australia's 'barking mad' bet on nuclear submarines

The multi-billion dollar AUKUS defence deal between the US, UK and Australia is one of the most significant in our modern history.The three countries wanted to curb China’s growing military presence i...

17 Sep 20min

Ratko Mladić: the war criminal who became a martyr for Bosnian Serbs

To most of the world, former Bosnian Serb military general Ratko Mladić was a brutal war criminal whose actions during the Bosnian War killed thousands. For others, he was a martyr who defended the Se...

10 Sep 16min

Inside the booming ‘shadow fleet’ industry keeping rogue states afloat

It’s the middle of the night in April 2023 in the East China Sea.A North Korean-linked oil tanker sailing under another country’s flag suddenly goes dark. It stops transmitting its location and simply...

3 Sep 21min

The music that made Dolly Parton a global icon

It was 1967, and country musician Porter Wagoner was introducing a guest on his weekly TV show.The camera cuts to a woman with big, blonde beehive, wearing a magenta mini dress with the same shade of ...

31 Aug 20min

How Ukraine is bringing the war home to Russia

In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have targeted large warehouses across Russia, destroying millions of dollars of merchandise stored inside them.These warehouses and logistics hubs belong to Wildberri...

27 Aug 18min

How Timor-Leste is fighting back against Asia’s scamming gangs

🔁 Rerun: originally published 12/12/25. We're revisiting this episode as we take a quick break but we'll be back next week with a new instalment of The Conversation Weekly. Oecusse, a rugged, remote ...

20 Aug 24min

Loonies and bins: Britain's long love affair with novelty politics

It's pretty grim when your main political opponent is a man with a bin for a head.That's the situation that's faced Nigel Farage in the Clacton byelection in the UK.Count Binface has pledged to nation...

13 Aug 23min