Ambulance every day
Julia Lobig, a reporter for the German RTL, went to work for Zalando’s Erfurt logistics center and experienced first-hand the strain the German pure player’s employees are under. On busy days, she had to travel 27 km and she testifies an ambulance was present almost every day to hospitalize an employee.
Other employees told her someone had died of a heart attack in the toilet, because of a lack of water and air-conditioning during work hours.
Zalando denies
Immediately after the report aired on television, Zalando sent out a declaration stating it would investigate the situation. It also immediately denied any correlation between the report and its own working situation and categorically denied that a death had ever occurred at any facility.
It is not the first time Zalando has featured in a report about working conditions, as it had already been the focus of a report in 2012. The company says a lot of things have changed since then, with external audits to see if the working conditions are up to par.
Zalando also said that a recent poll among workers proved more than 80 % is happy to work at Zalando and that is why it will research whether the report featured a structural problem or whether it was a one-off problem.
