Inside Amazon's global worker movement

But the real challenge to Amazon management isn't from publicity stunts. It's coming from a new, digitized, international labor movement that is borrowing from the e-commerce giant's own playbook to press for higher pay and better working conditions around the world.

Known as the Amazon Workers International, the informal network of mostly warehouse workers brings together dozens of worker groups from the United States and six EU countries. With hundreds of participants, it is growing fast. Instead of gathering in person or joining picket lines, the AWI's key organizers do most of their work in videoconference sessions where "comrades" from multiple countries Zoom in to plot strategy on how to press their demands to Amazon management.

"Can you hear me?" Polish warehouse worker Agnieszka Mróz said late last month as she connected from her hometown of Poznań with French and Italian colleagues gathered a thousand kilometers away, at the office of French union Sud Solidaires in an old railway factory in Lille, northern France. Other workers from Poland, Germany and the United States had also joined the call, AWI's annual gathering, to discuss Amazon's response to the pandemic and upcoming actions.

The network's online-first approach -- and the emphasis on international coordination -- underscores a lesson that these workers have absorbed over the last decade: They have little chance of winning concessions from management if they pitch demands locally, via traditional union methods.