Striking Spanish Workers Just Showed That Amazon Is Not Invincible

https://truthout.org/articles/striking-spanish-workers-just-showed-that-amazon-is-not-invincible/

Striking Spanish Workers Just Showed That Amazon Is Not Invincible

The workers used creative, disruptive tactics to win. Their victory holds lessons for the global labor movement.

By Jonathan Rosenblum , TRUTHOUT
Published January 23, 2026

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Workers won a 14 percent wage increase that took effect this month (January). They also won annual increases of 4 percent in each of the next two years, improved Sunday and night shift pay, and more paid time off. Strike leaders cautioned that the 14 percent increase can be somewhat misleading — it’s an increase from 2018 wage tables, thus largely an inflation adjustment. But as Alfonso Martínez Valero, an RMU1 worker and strike leader, told Truthout, benefits like pensions and unemployment pay are calibrated to base wage rates, so those benefits now will increase substantially.

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Creative strike tactics were decisive. As Martínez Valero explained to Truthout, “this strike was not a classic mobilization, where people don’t go to work.” Instead, he said, “we played a game of deception, which means that everyone showed up for work on the strike days, creating a false sense of demobilization and confidence in the company.” He explained that only when production peaks occurred, “our colleagues left their workstations” and picketed outside. The workers would then return to work when production slowed down. Workers “were coming and going and clocking in and out several times during their shift,” Martínez Valero said, “causing great organizational chaos and confusion [for Amazon] about where to put people.”

“This was disastrous for the company, as in November it was unable to ship out many goods, or did so very late. We know that on the first day of the strike, more than 40 trucks were delayed,” Martínez Valero said.

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The strike victory in Murcia, Spain, isn’t a copy-and-paste template for U.S. trade unionists. The legal and political terrains between the two countries are quite different. Amazon’s warehouse network is much denser in the U.S. compared to other countries, rendering single-site strikes here much less effective. But the core principles of Murcia’s success — rank-and-file leadership, union democracy, a confrontational posture, and a majority-participation, production-disrupting strike — are exportable anywhere Amazon workers seek justice. “It’s a collective effort, and we have to dispel the myth that Amazon is untouchable,” Martínez Valero said. “As the Spanish saying goes, ‘torres más altas han caído’ — taller towers have fallen.”

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