Nearly a thousand Amazon.com Inc, employees on Monday participated in strikes at two of the e-commerce giant’s German sites and services union Ver.di threatened further action as the year’s busiest shopping season begins.
“It lies completely in Amazon’s hands whether more strikes will take place in the upcoming Christmas season,” said Ver.di representative Mechthild Middeke. The workers were striking because of wages and benefits.
The union said about 600 workers at Amazon’s Bad Hersfeld site and another 400 at its Leipzig facility took part in the strikes. Amazon employs about 9,000 people at its nine German logistics centers, with Bad Hersfeld the largest site with more than 3,000 employees.
Amazon has been a target of repeated strikes this year in Germany, its second-largest market after the U.S. The union wants the company to adopt industrywide wage agreements for employees, rather than using its own pay scale.
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“The moment Amazon agrees to talks we’ll be sitting at the table instead of standing in the door,” said Ms. Middeke. “Employees need an appropriate and reliable wage determined by collective agreement rather than by the employer alone.”
Among the benefits a collective wage agreement would bring is a Christmas bonus or “13th-month salary,” a traditional component of wage agreements in Germany.
The union acknowledged that Amazon this year initiated a one-time payment of €400 to €600 ($542 to $813) to be paid this month. But Ver.di stressed the payment was voluntary on Amazon’s part, and less than half of what employees could expect if the company participated in collective agreements.
The union also wants Amazon’s Germany-based employees to be paid in line with the retail and mail-order sector, which offers a higher entry-level wage than the logistics sector, where Amazon classifies the majority of its employees.
A spokeswoman for Amazon defended the company’s pay policies, saying employees earn toward the upper end of the pay scale of logistics companies in Germany. She said Amazon cooperates with the works council of each of its logistics centers in addressing employee concerns.
The Amazon spokeswoman said neither a strike nor heavy order volumes would cause a blip in customer service in the coming weeks. In the event of a strike, she said the company can fall back on its European logistics network.
Ver.di said it plans to increase the pressure on Amazon before Christmas, raising the possibility of further strikes. This year, only Bad Hersfeld and Leipzig have staged industrial actions, but other sites could begin participating in 2014, Ver.di representative Joerg Lauenroth-Mago said.
Although Amazon has so far declined to talk to the union, he said larger-scale action would eventually force the company to the table.
Date: Nov. 25, 2013