In Spain, Amazon Workers Win with Quick-Hit Walkouts

At an Amazon fulfillment center in Spain, we used a flurry of brief walkouts late last year to force the company to improve wages and time off.

We struck for three days in November and in December in a series of “flexible strikes,” timed to hit production with intermittent walkouts during the holiday “peak” season. On December 22, the union committee announced a settlement, negotiated through government mediators.

The facility, RMU1 in the city of Murcia, employed 2,000 workers at the time, and our union the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was one of four unions that represented them. [European countries don’t have the same “exclusive representation” system as the U.S., so multiple unions can have a presence at the same worksite. –Editors]

About 75 percent of the workforce, made up of workers from Spain and immigrants from Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Morocco, participated in the strike, reaching beyond the ranks of the CGT to include other union members.
Our experience shows what’s possible, even at a multinational corporation designed to neutralize organizing. Building from below, workers can organize a well-planned strike—over the objections of more conservative unions—draw on their knowledge of the production process, hit the company where it hurts the most, and wrest real gains.

Here’s how we got Amazon to negotiate with us when it didn’t want to.

OVERCOMING THE INSTITUTIONAL BLOCKADE

Union representation at Amazon RMU1, is structured through union sections that make up comités de empresa, or Works Council, employee representative bodies linked to unions that meet with management.

In the last union elections in 2023, the CGT became the second-largest union in the fulfillment center, after theConfederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), or Workers’ Commissions, the largest trade union federation in Spain. CGT’s representation within the plant increased thanks to a campaign based almost exclusively on direct contact with the workforce, shift by shift and area by area.

From the outset, we hit up against a strong obstacle at RMU1: the majority of the CCOO and the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores), a major labor federation affiliated with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, refused to call a workers’ assembly to discuss a strike vote. Workers felt growing discontent over stagnating standards since 2018, as skyrocketing inflation has bitten into their wages.

In 2024, we collected more than 800 signatures to hold a workers’ assembly, which the law says must be held if one-third of the workforce supports it. An assembly hadn’t happened in Murcia in over 40 years.
But Amazon managers pressured workers not to hold the assembly, saying signatures were illegitimate, questioning whether they were actually from Amazon workers in the fulfillment center. Other unions chose to remain quiet and not rock the boat. Labor authorities failed to enforce the law.

Bowing to Amazon, the regional labor bodies requested a list of the workers who had signed, but the union refused because it would put workers on a blacklist, exposing workers to company reprisals.

PREPARING THE TERRAIN

The setback forced us to halt our efforts for a time, but also gave us time to analyze and map out a strategy.

By last September, the mood in the warehouse was unsustainable. Workers were getting more and more frustrated with health and safety violations and stagnant wages—especially in Murcia, where wages had been frozen since 2018. (Amazon’s sectoral agreements vary across provinces.)

We launched a campaign on these issues and decided to keep our tactics simple: talking with people, publishing our union newsletter (La Cegetera), and openly talking about a strike. There weren’t any grand events or symbolic gestures. The aim was to stir up a hornet’s nest through daily and constant organizing.

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In an assembly for the CGT union section, we decided, by an overwhelming majority, to call the strike in two phases: November as a dress rehearsal and December as the main offensive.

BREAKING THE SCRIPT

From the beginning, we knew a traditional strike wouldn’t work—Amazon would be prepared for that. Our central tactic was to go to work, and stop at the right moment.
The key was breaking the script the company had expected. During the strike, workers showed up to their stations as usual. There weren’t any visible pickets at the start of shifts. For management, the lack of any visible conflict generated a false sense of control.

The strike began at peak production times, when every minute counts. At those moments, workers left their posts in a coordinated fashion and went outside, where CGT activists were organized and ready.

The impact was immediate. On the first day of the strike in November, more than 40 trucks didn’t leave on time, a huge problem for a logistics company. When workers returned to their posts after the peak production period, the damage was already done, and the company descended into organizational chaos, unable to reassign the workforce or restore production flows.

ADAPTING ON THE FLY

Another decisive element of strategy was decentralized decision-making. The strike wasn’t directed from above, though the union selected the strike days to maximize our impact on Amazon’s shopping bonanza.

Within those selected strike days, workers organized themselves into small groups by area or department, deciding collectively exactly when to strike, for how long, and how to coordinate with other groups.

The union encouraged this dynamic and reinforced it: we provided information, not orders. When Amazon tried to neutralize the strike by changing peak production schedules, workers were the ones who picked up on that, and adjusted their tactics in real time.

This approach allowed us to adapt to every move the company made, and it also reduced the individual cost of the strike, since no one lost a full workday. That flexibility allowed massive and sustained participation.

The most decisive departments were shipping and inbound, though participation was high throughout the warehouse. The shifts with a greater CGT presence were especially strong, but the strike even extended to workers affiliated with other unions.

TURNING A STRIKE BLOW INTO A CONQUEST

The strike didn’t stay confined to Amazon. The impact on production and the visibility of the conflict attracted the attention of civil society organizations and political groups. The Regional Assembly of Murcia unanimously approved a declaration of support for the Amazon workforce.
This support, coupled with the economic damage, shifted the balance of power. Although Amazon avoided direct negotiations, our ally Unión Sindical Obrera (Workers Union), used the momentum generated by the strike to unblock the renewal of a sectoral agreement that had been expired for over 10 years. The wins were clear and measurable:

• Cumulative salary increase of 14 percent by 2026, with additional increases of 4 percent in 2027 and 2028
• Bonus of 40 euros before taxes per Sunday worked
• One additional personal day and one additional vacation day
• Improved sick leave benefits up to 100 percent of the base salary
• Progressive increases in the night shift bonus
• Integration of the transportation allowance into the base salary, cementing this right for the long haul

Our strike succeeded because workers knew the production process better than the company, we trusted in the collective intelligence of the workforce, and we broke with predictable mobilization models that the company could have anticipated.
Amazon keeps being Amazon, but during those weeks we demonstrated something fundamental: even at the heart of global logistics, a well-planned, surgical strike from below can bring the machine to a standstill and win.

Alfonso Martínez Valero is an Amazon worker and Secretary of the CGT union section at the fulfillment center RMU1.