“Turn up the pressure on the board”
Influential labour union Ver.di has called for the strike to “turn up the pressure on Amazon during the Christmas holiday”, because it feels the number of orders has grown again because of the busy holiday period and that has made the pressure unbearable: “People have to walk up to 20 km per day and nearly one out of five has called in sick every day”.
Ever since the spring of 2013, Ver.di has been embroiled in a long, social conflict with the American online store and it flares up every now and again. The union demands that Amazon implements the (better) wage conditions from retail instead of the current conditions, which hail from the logistics branch. The dispute has already led to several strikes in the different Amazon centers across Germany.
One-off bonus “insufficient”
The American company refuses to budge and maintains that the staff is part of the logistics branch. It has awarded one-off bonuses in the past, but Ver.di believes these are “insufficient”.
Amazon’s nine German locations employ more than 9,000 people. It remains to be seen whether other locations will also go on strike.
