Amazon already knows how many seconds pass between your scans. Now it appears to be predicting whether you'll try to organize. According to openDemocracy, internal documents disclosed during a Canadian labor dispute describe Atlas, an in-house AI forecasting tool that ingests "hundreds of data points" — Reddit posts, internal surveys, the "Voice of the Associate" board, turnover — and scores each warehouse 100–900 on union-organizing risk.

Low scores mean likelier organizing. Sites fall into five tiers, Tier 1 meaning "future activity is imminent" — and 16 are Tier 1, including Britain's Coventry (BHX4) and Sutton Coldfield (EMA4). The scores exist to "inform staffing decisions, resource planning, standard actions, and ownership to mitigate risks to Amazon labour structure."

Amazon disputes the framing. A spokesperson told openDemocracy the tool operates at "site/building level activity only," does "not track individual employees' opinions, affiliations or union membership," and is "not currently used in the UK" — leaving unanswered whether a similar system runs there under a different name. "The GMB's characterisation is wrong. This isn't surveillance," the company added.

The workers being scored see it differently. Garfield Hylton, 62, a Coventry GMB member, said: "It's not right in a democracy… the employer should not be interfering." Michael Newman of Leigh Day said the documents "make it clear that they think the union is bad" — a "very different story" from Amazon's claim it doesn't fight unionizing.

The context is why it lands. GMB fell 28 votes short of union recognition at Coventry in July 2024, after Britain's first Amazon strike there in January 2023. The union and Foxglove allege "dirty tricks" to swing that ballot — mass-hiring non-unionized workers, QR codes to cancel GMB membership pasted across the warehouse — and are now in court over the codes. Foxglove's Rosa Curling called Atlas "highly intrusive," a "very intentional policy to try and bust organising, bust unionising efforts."

The AI-labor debate has been about jobs disappearing; Atlas is the other shoe — predictive models aimed at collective behavior, a legal right scored as a risk. France's CNIL fined Amazon €32m in 2022 for tracking workers so closely it flagged idle gaps of one to ten minutes. Atlas scales that logic to the crowd.

Watch two things: whether Parliament's Business and Trade Committee, which holds GMB's October 7 letter, presses Amazon on the "not currently used in the UK" wording — and what Foxglove and Leigh Day add to their legal challenge next.

— via openDemocracy