Amazon's internal AI scores warehouses 100 to 900 on how likely workers are to unionize
Internal Amazon documents describe Atlas, a forecasting tool that ingests Reddit posts, survey answers and past strikes to rank sites by union risk. Two UK warehouses are in its top tier.
Atlas sorts sites into five tiers, from 'activity imminent' to 'no immediate risk'. Sixteen sites in the US, Canada and UK are Tier 1, including EMA4 in Sutton Coldfield and BHX4 near Coventry.
Amazon says it tracks buildings, not individuals, and that Atlas is not used in the UK.
What the documents say Atlas does
openDemocracy reports on manager training materials, apparently from Canada, released in a court fight with the union Unifor and shared with Truthout. They describe Atlas collecting "hundreds of data points" including Reddit posts, internal survey responses and past industrial action, and scoring each warehouse from 100 to 900 (lower means higher predicted risk).
Voices in the story include GMB organiser Rachel Fagan, Leigh Day's Michael Newman and Foxglove's Rosa Curling. Context: a 2022 CNIL fine of €32m on Amazon for worker tracking, and the GMB's 2024 Coventry recognition ballot lost by 28 votes.
Amazon's answer
Amazon says Atlas covers only site-level activity, does not track individual opinions or union membership, and is not currently used in the UK; it did not say whether a similar system exists under another name.
The thread: the label changes, the features do not
One commenter claiming to have built this kind of tooling said the vocabulary is the disguise:
"Did workforce analytics at a big logistics outfit and this stuff is usually sold internally as "attrition risk" or "engagement heatmaps", never as union anything. Same features though, shift churn, grievance counts, break room badge patterns." — a self-described ex-workforce analyst at a logistics company (new account, unverified)
Another pointed at the input side, the survey the score feeds on:
"It's scary to think that any answer but "Strongly Agree" will very likely flag you as a risk." — pera, HN user since 2012 with 11k karma, reacting to the survey item "I am optimistic about the future of AI at Amazon"
For UK staff, that makes Amazon's denial hard to test: if the same signals run under an "attrition" or "engagement" product name, only the name has to differ. Ask what such tools score, not what they are called.
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