Amazon’s European Workers Go On Strike As Bezos’ Net Worth Tops $150 Billion
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Mon, 07/16/2018
Three months after Jeff Bezos was booed by disgruntled Amazon employees in Germany demanding higher pay and better working conditions, Amazon’s European workers are boycotting the company ahead of Amazon’s global “Prime Day” to highlight the poor conditions that fulfillment-center staff have endured for years.
On Monday, a growing number of online workers, but also gamers, and shoppers planned to boycott Amazon over its treatment of low-level workers, who have criticized the company’s tough working conditions on multiple occasions Forbes reported. To get the company’s attention on these issues, organizers hope their boycott will make a dent in Amazon’s bottom line on July 16, 2018, better known as Amazon’s “Prime Day”, one of the retail-and-technology giant’s busiest sales days of the year.
This will hardly come as a surprise: after all, most of the roughly half-million blue-collar, part-time employees at Amazon don’t make six figures while spending their workdays writing code, and instead unload trucks, drive forklifts and walk miles collecting products to fill orders—all for around the same pay as workers in other companies’ warehouses. Due to their menial, repetitive task, they are also rapidly being replaced by robots.
Last Tuesday, Amazon workers in Spain launched a general strike that is expected to last through Monday. Workers at other European Amazon facilities have reportedly joined the walk-out, including groups in Italy, France, England, Germany, and Poland, with a German labor union confirming its members with Amazon will strike on Prime day.
To be sure, this won’t be the first time the online retailing giant’s European workers have express displeasure: in the past several years, workers at Amazon fulfillment centers have repeatedly protested against the company’s long hours, tough working conditions, and high-pressure “rush” periods, as around Prime Day and Black Friday.
In 2017, Amazon workers in Germany and Italy staged a strike to coincide with Black Friday, when they say short-term workers are forced to work long, grueling shifts without adequate compensation or conditions, among other complaints.
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