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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.
Amazon must realize it cannot export its anti-union labor model to European shores. ... ... powered by lobbying machine KPMG Consulting, their shill Gerhard 'Let's wrap him in barbed wire and shoot him into the sun' Schröder, Hartz 4 cheap-flexible-workforce-supply powered by German taxpayer and so forth. ... There, fixed that for you.
As much as I love shopping for stuff at amazon, I'm totally with these strikers. Kick them where it hurts is my vote on this! Go, workers rights, go! Voll in die Eier! ... I hope this spills over into the US, a notable signal no-holds barred neo-con corporate-socialism disguised as free market capitalism desperately needs. Here and across the pond.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_trap
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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. Amazon has defended its wage policies, saying that employees earn toward the upper end of the pay scale of logistics companies in Germany.
Please note that the union sees the work as a mail-order job, where wages are higher.
Amazon thinks of it as a logistics job.
The union demands that Amazon recognize that the workers are in the mail-order business and pay accordingly.
What power has law where only money rules.
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.
FTA....
1. Amazon says that it's pay is already near the top of the scale for logistic centers.
2. German Union Organizers have a problem with Amazon defining their distribution warehouses as "logistic centers" because it allows them to pay less than they would otherwise be required to.
Germany's strike is really a strike against Amazon fulfillment centers being allowed to classify themselves as "Logistics" centers. I'm curious what a better definition would be.
"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.
It's sad that Amazon and other organizations in the US have succeeded so much in suppressing Unions.
I guess I'll do a little whistleblowing on a job I had with Joann Fabrics here in the US in one of their warehouses. It was during the Christmas season and they hired many temp employees from temp agencies to fill out their staff to meet orders. I was one of many "pickers", someone who hauls heavy stuff all day (20+ pounds, all day for 8 hours) in a very dusty, dirty warehouse. The air was thick with the dust, so much so that if I didn't wear a mask, I'd be hacking up phlegm within an hour. Most people working there didn't wear masks. One guy said that, because many of the boxes come from overseas, he gets a rash every fall that "is red and itches like crazy". It happens around the same time shipments come in.
They treated us pretty badly, running us hard, as hard as the people who were there for 20 years, and expecting us to perform at their pace or get canned. You had your stats told to you every day. When I started at a whopping $8.00/hr, I was told I'd get a $.25 raise after working for 600 hours. I wanted to laugh in the supervisor's face.
This is the way these warehouses are, generally. As a worker you are paid crap, treated like crap, expected to work insanely hard, and if your health suffers, oh well.
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
You don't understand how this works.
In Europe, *we don't want useless workers*. It is better that they are unemployed than that they do work that a robot should do.
Because of this strike, Amazon will accellerate their robot deployment, and that is *exactly* what Europe want.
I repeat, we don't want useless workers. The social security system requires workers to have a certain productivity, and this excludes certain low paid jobs.
Sorry, but those jobs should go offshore.
What many Americans don't understand is the true opportunity cost of a shitty job. You can either get your workforce to be productive through poverty as in the US, or you can get your workforce to be productive by eliminating unproductive jobs. The latter is what Europe wants to do.
I'm not sure why Amazon is being singled out here, except perhaps that it's a great example. The root problem is the greed of American-based companies and their total disregard or apathy towards their employees. The only people working for these parasitic companies that make money are the directors and C*s; their inflated value of what the "top people" do and the remuneration they award these so-called "top people" is outrageous. There really does need to a proper evaluation of how wages within a US-based company are distributed amongst the employees. Is a CEO really worth the same as 10000 (or more) "workers"? No, of course not. For a start, without workers there is no company and there is no profit because without workers the damn company can't even make a cent. And don't get me started about boards having to look out for their shareholders; if that was truly the case then proper and fair distribution of remuneration throughout the workers would be exactly the same (it's just the the C*s wouldn't earn 10 (or more) figure salaries whilst the minions earn 5 figure salaries, or maybe 6 if they're lucky.) The greed is sickening. The US culture is sickening. More and more countries are realising this. I fully support the workers; if they don't stand up, who will? It does seem that US workers seem to just accept this shit, but fortunately the rest of the world does seem to have more of a clue.
A friend of mine down on his luck and desperate for money worked last year for a few weeks at one of Amazon's fulfillment centers during their holiday hiring surge. Told me some stories that were Orwellian in the degree that people were "managed", with a ruthless efficiency that rivaled the mechanical processing of the products themselves. From the moment the trucks rolled in with the goods to the second they rolled out again, every moment of every item including the employees were tracked, itemized, stamped.... It was pretty unbelievable the conditions people were working in a Modern Times-like cog-in-a-machine way.
The pay was shit, the turnover ridiculous, and my friend like most people there didn't last very long. David Sederis or someone would have a field day with this.
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."
Actually, things are pretty fine in Germany.
There is no minimum wage here in Germany, at least not currently.
There is a number of exploitation of cheap labour, mostly from east European countries, some say it's the only reason why our economy is the strongest in Europe. It's basically modern slavery, they earn 5€ per hour, which for them is a lot of money, but would be ridiculously low for German living costs including insurance, health care and other expenses.
Workers in adjacent countries, like France, lose their jobs because their parent companies rather have goods shipped to Germany and processed there. Then shipped back again, because it's way cheaper than processing goods locally in France, where the minimum wage is almost twice as much (9.4something€ per hour).
Our Lobbyist Kiss-asses, err, I meant to say politicians, fear that minimum wages will ruin the economy of Germany, will destroy jobs. Now that a minimum wage (around 8€) was promised to be introduced in 2016 from the coalition of Germany's upcoming government, we'll see how things will develop.
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.
Americans are carefully indoctrinated nowadays to lick corporate boots, no surprise since business owns the US.
Do you live in the US or have you just been told this? I grew up in Texas which is pretty conservative and the education I received was that unions where the worker's hero. My daughter receives the same information from her schools. I am trying to recall a recent movie (outside of Atlas Shrugged) or show where a big business was the hero and the unions were the bad guys.
So in other words you subsidise underpayment of staff by big business. You reward businesses for undervaluing their workers.
Amazon will implement whatever workaround is necessary to remain the internet's Walmart
I don't know if you wanted to be funny, but in Germany, Walmart came, saw and went home beaten. They never found the leverage to implement their business model in Germany, never became competitive, and finally gave up.
But it is no wonder companies have so much anymosity towards employees when they pick the busiest time of the year to stop work.
Of course they did: If you're going to strike, you pick the time that will have the most impact. Just like how a corporation tends to have lockouts and contract negotiations when there is high unemployment in the region near the factory.
As far as the animosity towards employees, the fact is that workers and management have an inherently adversarial relationship: The worker wants to maximize the amount they are paid for the work they do, and minimize the work they have to do to earn it. Management wants to maximize the amount of work performed, and minimize how much they have to pay to get it done. To pretend that these are other than diametrically opposed is just plain silly. And if you feel thoroughly dedicated to your job, know that management loves people like you because you'll work those 16-hour days without complaining or demanding any kind of compensation.
I am officially gone from
The maximum income tax in Denmark is 51.7%, but there are a lot of ways to decrease the taxed part of the incomes (e.g. union membership, transportation costs, debt, pension savings) so the actual average tax rate on income is in the mid 30s.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
In the EU the seller has to handle all issues and warranty claims, for 2 years.
I just hope they continue to stand up to the unions. The time for unions is long in the past, and they do nothing but distort the market now.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
Very funny. You think it's still 1950.
Vocational schools are still very much alive and kicking in today's world, despite what you may have been led to believe.
No User Serviceable Parts Inside was the motto of the last half of the 20th Century. Now it's more like Ending is better than Mending.
OK, so maybe your laptop doesn't have any "user serviceable parts," a contention with which I still beg to differ, but you know what does? Your vehicles, buildings, HVAC systems, plumbing, electrical generation, transmission, and distribution, factory robots (like the one that made your laptop), et. al.
Believe me, so long as technology exists, there will be a need for people who know how to fix it.
The old time TV/Radio repair shops are virtually extinct. Last one I saw did primarily replacements on projector bulbs.
A guy in my town opened an LCD/LED/Plasma repair joint last year, and has to continually hire new people to keep up with demand. Kinda seems like the industry is evolving more than "going extinct."
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.