Amazon employees in Germany have been battling the retailer with a series of wildcat strikes, most recently at the end of November. These protests, involving hundreds of Amazon workers at two fulfillment centers, have been the first strikes against the e-commerce leader anywhere in the world.þþOn Monday the strikers are hoping to increase the pressure by taking the battle to the retailer’s Seattle headquarters. A rally is scheduled for 10 a.m., with the organizers hoping to draw in local union workers as well as sympathetic members of the public.þþWill that add up to more than a token crowd? The tech companies, including Amazon, are getting ever richer and more powerful, but there seems to be a bit of a backlash developing. In San Francisco last week, protesters briefly blocked a Google bus transporting workers to its Silicon Valley campus. Amazon’s announcement two weeks on “60 Minutes” that it is pursuing delivery by drones inspired not admiration but widespread mockery. Amazon, critics said, was dwelling in fantasyland.þþPerhaps Amazon started talking about drones as a form of wish fulfillment. For the retailer, the moment when machines prepare and deliver packages could not come too soon. Humans are too much trouble. Germany is Amazon’s second largest market, and the labor turmoil there shows no sign of resolution.þþOn the surface, the dispute is about money. The German labor union Ver.di wants Amazon workers classified as retail employees, but Amazon says they are logistics workers who should be paid less.þþUnderneath this is a bigger question of whether the warehouse workers should have any control over their workplace. The employees, also known as “pickers,” assemble the orders. Amazon warehouses are marvels of engineering and efficiency, but picking is still hard physical labor. There is constant monitoring and little job security.þþAmazon, in its race to stay the dominant e-commerce company, wants maximum flexibility to use its workers as it will. Negotiating would impede efficiency and innovation, Dave Clark, the company’s vice president of worldwide operations and customer service, told The Times last summer.þþPickers see it differently.þþ“The workers are treated more as robots than human,” Markus Hoffmann-Achenbach, an organizer for Ver.di at the Amazon warehouse in the city of Werne, said by email. He was on his way to Seattle to participate in the demonstration.þþ“As a worldwide company,” Mr. Hoffmann-Achenbach added, “Amazon should treat their workers fairly and with respect in every country. The solidarity of American unions and Ver.di, the united services union of Germany, is a sign that social movements are not bounded by national borders and that in times of globalization the workers worldwide stand together as one.”þþAlso traveling to Seattle was Nancy Becker, an American who has been an employee of Amazon in Germany since 2001. “I’m coming to Seattle to dare Jeff Bezos to try working as a picker for a single week,” she said. “I’m sure he would not survive.”þþAn Amazon spokesman declined to comment but Ralf Kleber, the top Amazon executive in Germany, dismissed the strikers in a recent interview with Reuters, saying the walkout did not slow down deliveries. He also said the workers were largely unskilled and had been unemployed for a long time, with the implication that they should be grateful to be working for Amazon.þþThe union is promising another strike before the holidays. Amazon is accusing the strikers of trying to steal Christmas, according to reports in the German media.þ
Source: NY Times
