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Amazon Workers Strike In Germany As Christmas Orders Peak
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The Washington Post reports that in Germany, Amazon's second-biggest market behind the United States, hundreds of Amazon.com workers went on strike just as pre-Christmas sales were set to peak, in a dispute over pay and conditions that has raged for months. Amazon, which employs 9,000 warehouse staff members in Germany plus 14,000 seasonal workers at nine distribution centers, says that 1,115 employees joined the strike at three sites. 'Amazon must realize it cannot export its anti-union labor model to European shores. We call on the company to come to the table and sign a global agreement that guarantees the rights of workers,' says Philip Jennings of the global trade union UNI. Verdi organized several short stoppages this year to try to force Amazon to accept collective-bargaining agreements ... The union says Amazon workers receive lower wages than others in retail and mail-order jobs and that other retailers pay overtime, but Amazon does not. 'What Amazon is doing is taking this American race-to-the-bottom roadshow to Germany and trying it out on our German brothers and sisters,' says David Freiboth. Amazon has defended its wage policies, saying that employees earn toward the upper end of the pay scale of logistics companies in Germany. Amazon also says it prefers to address employment issues with worker councils at individual sites rather than through negotiations with the union. Amazon says that there have been no delays to deliveries ... adding that Amazon uses its whole European logistics network during the Christmas period to ensure delivery times. A delegation of German workers was set to rally at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle along with U.S. unions. 'We're standing in solidarity with them. We are asking that Amazon respect the union there in Germany and negotiate in a way that is acceptable to Verdi,' says Kathy Cummings of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, which was also attending the protest in Seattle."
I sense a whole lot more of them in Amazon's (near) future...
coding is life
they're already doing it pretty heavily... this sort of thing... striking in the middle of a christmas season... it inspires drastic steps.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Naive little American, how's your minimum wage that just keeps shrinking and shrinking working out for your economy?
How apt. It's too bad Americans can't see this but Germans can.
Seriously, if you don't want the work don't take it. Nobody forces you to work at Amazon
And, what the hell do you think a strike is, anyway?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
"Amazon also says it prefers to address employment issues with worker councils at individual sites rather than through negotiations with the union."
Yeah, I bet they do.
That's actually the reason we have unions in the first place, you know...
And, what the hell do you think a strike is, anyway?
Posted here already, so I can't give you mod points. But really, this American attitude is quite idiotic. Wages are always negotiated. Sometimes one side is more powerful, sometimes it's not. Walmart left Germany with its tail between its legs, and what a loss is it for the country! (If anyone thinks Walmart makes low prices, Aldi and Lidl do that a lot better while actually providing quality products _and_ paying their employees decent wages). Nobody will shed a tear if Amazon does the same.
Why should a worker be grateful to their employers? They do work, they get paid for part of the value of their work (if they got paid the full value of their work, it wouldn't be profitable for their employer to hire them). While this might be a mutually beneficial business arrangement, I'm hard-pressed to see why the employer is doing the worker a favor or otherwise giving them something that they aren't earning, which is my usual standard for being grateful.
I am officially gone from
Yea cause most of Europe is doing SO economically well...
Business is war, not a matter of "gratitude" because employment isn't a "gift".
Collective bargaining is the only way otherwise valueless workers have leverage. One ant is nothing, but an army of ants is very different.
Americans are carefully indoctrinated nowadays to lick corporate boots, no surprise since business owns the US. Mistakes by unions (who BTW were FORCED to get in bed with the Mob back when business utterly owned the politicians and the cops leaving them zero alternative) certainly hurt them, but that in no way invalidates the utility of collective bargaining. Some of us bothered to read more labor history than is taught in school. I suggest that to others so you can draw your own conclusions.
Workers are not the enemy, business is not the enemy, but to have an equitable relationship to BARGAIN each must have power. The only way workers can have power is collective bargaining unless they are specially skilled AND in short supply.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
OMG. If that is what Europe really wants, then they can keep it. Maybe they don't realize that workers don't magically become "productive" out of the womb. Nor do they when someone hands them a diploma. Productivity increases with experience.
By saying a nation should only employ productive workers and leave the unproductive unemployed, you are effectively saying that anyone young should just be a dependent of the state while older people get to reap the benefits of labor shortages.
So what happens when your older "productive" workers all retire? All of those "unproductive" young people you wanted to keep unemployed will still be unproductive. I suppose you could just import productive immigrants. But eventually nobody will want to come to your country because you're going to have to tax most of their pay in order to support the multitudes of unproductive people in your country.
No. I think I prefer America's way of doing things. We provide subsidies to our low-wage earners in the hopes that they increase their productivity through experience. It isn't perfect, but it is at least sustainable.
I didn't like my old job because the pay and benefits were unfair. Now I got a new job and the pay and benefits are good. That's what I think of unions. Oh and here's the kicker: the former company was doing terrible financially. A union would have made them go bankrupt.
The minimum wage is/was *supposed* to be for kids in or just out of high school, college students, etc.
The real cause of this, the point at which we jumped into the race to the bottom was in the 80's, when two things happend:
Union busting actually became popular. Reagan busting the air traffic controllers, and the unexpected level of approval from Americans, was a tipping point. Upward pressure on wages fell away across the economy.
Supply side economic policy has been the norm since (under Reagan) taxes on the super rich was basically cut in half.
Income inequality is the real devil here. The flatter the line is the better off everyone is, even the super rich. To fix it we need two things, upward pressure on labor wages, and an artificial friction to acquiring wealth. By that I mean the more wealthy you are the harder it is to get more wealthy. A progressive tax system does this, but maybe there are other methods.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
... I've got to say: the American posters on here that are largely big-company bootlickers are really pathetic. I think that Free Market Capitalists are almost as bad a Religionists in that you both believe in fairy tales and you want to be on your knees "worshipping" said fairy tale.
I don't respond to AC's.
Is a CEO really worth the same as 10000 (or more) "workers"? No, of course not.
Yeah actually they are. Every decision a CEO makes is a decision with potentially billions on the line. A hundred workers could do their best to destroy the company and they won't be able to do as much damage as one decision by a CEO. CEOs are paid a lot because there is a high demand for people who won't make billion dollar fuck ups.
So in other words you subsidise underpayment of staff by big business. You reward businesses for undervaluing their workers.
What happens if they do make a billion dollar fuck up? They get a big golden parachute and dismissed. Big deal; i.e. there is no risk for them.
I had horrible low paying jobs at times. If there are less horrible or better paying jobs available you can move to them. If not, well, it's nice to have a job when you need one.
The people complaining about the horrible, just horrible conditions at Amazon would appear to have never had to work a low-paid, low-skill production-line job.
I did that for a while when I was at school, and would have switched to Amazon without a second thought if they'd been around at the time.
You sit on the board of directors of a failing corporation. Your investors are starting to sell their shares, and your bond rating was just downgraded. What do you do? The "easy" solution is to hire some well known CEO to shore up the company's image. Of course, you have to convince someone who is probably not a complete moron to lead a company that's headed the way of the Hindenburg. So you offer a ridiculously generous compensation package, meant not only to convince the person to take the job in the first place, but also to cover for any loss of reputation he or she might suffer from being associated with a failing enterprise. So what seems like the rape and pillage of a worker's paradise is actually a last ditch effort to keep everybody from losing their jobs, workers and management included. Of course, this strategy rarely succeeds in the long term, but it does keep the corporation limping along a little while longer.
Everyone derides management, but few people are competent at the task, and fewer still want to do it. It ought to come as no surprise that most managers are incompetent. People see only what they let themselves see, and "workers" are no different from "management" in this aspect.
The people complaining about the horrible, just horrible conditions at Amazon would appear to have never had to work a low-paid, low-skill production-line job.
Tell me about it. I worked a summer before college in a recycling plant. Awful, dirty, and hazardous place. Some of the people there were doing it full time for a living. It impressed on me why I was going to college.