Amazon Used AI Tool to Assess Union Activity Risk in UK Warehouses

Summary

Documents disclosed during a legal dispute involving a Canadian union suggest that Amazon used an in-house AI forecasting system called Atlas to estimate the risk of unionisation and other disruptive labour events at warehouses in the US, Canada and the UK. The documents describe Atlas as collecting hundreds of data points, including Reddit posts, responses to internal surveys, workplace information and records of previous industrial action. It reportedly assigned each warehouse a score from 100 to 900, with lower scores indicating higher perceived risk, and placed sites into five tiers ranging from no immediate risk to imminent future activity. The framework could inform staffing, resource planning and other actions intended to mitigate risks to Amazon’s labour structure. Sixteen warehouses were classified as Tier 1, including the Coventry site where worker Garfield Hylton is employed and a £500m robotic-fulfilment centre in Sutton Coldfield. The Coventry warehouse had previously seen strike action and a closely contested union-recognition ballot, which GMB lost by 28 votes. GMB, Foxglove and Leigh Day argue that the documents show intrusive monitoring and possible interference with workers’ right to organise, while continuing legal challenges also address QR codes allegedly used to help workers cancel union membership. Amazon says Atlas operates only at the site or building level, does not track individual opinions, affiliations, union membership or personal data, and is intended to identify where employees need support rather than monitor dissent. Amazon also told the publication that Atlas is not currently used in the UK, but did not say whether a similar system operates there under another name. The disclosures followed a Canadian labor-board ruling that Amazon violated local labor laws. The report also notes Amazon’s earlier €32 million French GDPR fine for excessive worker surveillance.