Amazon Workers Strike In Germany As Christmas Orders Peak 606
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."
Fixed that for you... (This is a good thing, btw.) (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ungrateful krauts (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_trap [wikipedia.org]
Unfortunate (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ungrateful krauts (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Not Amazon's Fault (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fixed that for you... (This is a good thing, bt (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com]-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.
Re:Ungrateful krauts (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Tough negotiations, for sure (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:American race to the bottom roadshow (Score:3, Interesting)
But sorting stuff to ship is menial labor, and deserves menial wages. This is not a job for a grown adult to have to try to support a family. If you are working a job that involves a name tag, you have made some SERIOUS vocational errors, and need to do something about it.
Jobs like this, with no skills are a dime a dozen, and are the types of jobs (like fast food) that are FIRST jobs, ones for young kids to start with and learn the work ethic and then move up and on to better jobs.
Someone sorting mail or flipping burgers does not rate getting $20/hr or more. That's just nonsense.
Re:Robots (Score:3, Interesting)
Just let them do it. Once they add up the cost for maintenance, operation errors (because no software is perfect), replacement parts and robot life expectancy (because all machines break down eventually), they will find out that paying their workers properly might be much cheaper.
Re:Tough negotiations, for sure (Score:2, Interesting)
The truth is, many unions *are* in fact extremely powerful and often self-serving, one of them put Hostess out of business last year, remember?
That said, I do believe the German Amazon workers should get overtime pay if they work overtime.
There needs to be a better system of checks and balances in place between employer and employee; between mega corporations and juggernaut unions, the little guy is still getting squeezed; both ends are getting too powerful.
Re:Ungrateful krauts (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Robots (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the fetching is done via robot. However ,there's still a few things a robot can't or doesn't do. The Kiva systems maintain the stacks and stock in the warehouse, but all they do in the end is fetch a pile of items and bring it to someone who takes the item and packs it.
I would be surprised if Amazon's warehouses in Germany aren't mostly robots - the big army of people are doing the jobs that haven't or aren't automated yet - picking the items off the shelf of goods the robot brings them, stuffing it int the box, adding the necessary filler and then sealing it. Even tasks like assembling the box aren't automated - so the packer has to pick the right box and tape it up or glue it together. And applying all the shipping labels to the box and all that.
And then there's loading the randomly-sized packages onto the truck - as full as possible.
Even though we're talking about 10k+ jobs total, the vast majority of them are doing those things 24/7. There aren't many of them wandering the warehouse searching for items - it's just packing, sealing, labelling and loading.
Oh, and the dozens of people monitoring the conveyor system because a jammed package can mean real chaos - when you're getting what, 300+ orders a second, stopping the line for a few minutes to clear the jam has real repercussions (and it'll take a few minutes since it has to be tagged out before starting the fix). The packers rapidly backup and the loaders run out of packages so the whole system is idle.
Re:Not Amazon's Fault (Score:4, Interesting)
You have masterfully identified correlation, without a hint of establishing causation.
Detroit's affluence came about because of the voracious demand for automobiles by the rest of the nation. It was this nearly insatiable demand that led to the rapid growth of the automobile industry, and with rapid growth comes excess. Unionization of auto workers began because the workers felt they weren't getting a big enough piece of that pie, and at the time there was indeed plenty to go around. The key point, however, is that the wealth came before the unions did.
As the market became saturated, the crunch began to set in. Detroit was already having financial crises in the 1950s and 1960s. The unions basically mortgaged their current wages on the future of their industry. In so doing, they set it up for inevitable failure. The death blow came in the 1970s and 1980s when foreign auto makers, primarily Japanese, were selling better quality automobiles for a fraction of the price of their American counterparts.
Protectionist policies blunted some of the effect of this economic upheaval at the expense of other industries, but even so the Japanese started producing automobiles domestically in the late 80s and early 90s, and continued to eat Detroit's lunch. At this point, cars were a mature industry, and the union wages which were predicated upon perpetual economic growth were not sustainable.
Indeed, the slow break up of unions is correlated with negative economic changes. But once again, the wealth began to disappear before the unions did. The government only exacerbated this problem by maintaining high tax rates, which under rapid growth were affordable, but under stagnation became onerous. People left in droves, and those who remained had little money to tax.
Finally, the standard of living in the United States is at an all time high. Even Detroit, a city that by any reasonable economic assessment should have been a complete and total wasteland by the end of the 80s, has limped along thanks to the nearly unfathomable explosion of wealth in other parts of the country. Hell, there are still auto workers making good wages, especially for being in such a mature and automated industry, but most of them are not in Detroit any more.
Detroit's government and the auto workers' unions killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The city's recent bankruptcy, predicated largely by the government's inability to pay ex-workers' pensions, ought to stand as a clear monument to the folly of spreading today's wealth around at the expense of tomorrow's.
Re:American race to the bottom roadshow (Score:4, Interesting)
These people need to be able to survive their whole lives.
This is the big question. Are they surviving? It would seem so. Do they deserve to get paid $20/hr in a country that already has a generous social welfare system? I find the argument dubious.
Re:Ungrateful krauts (Score:5, Interesting)
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."