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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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