
Amazon's German Workers Strike - Varcht
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSBRE9BF0M220131216
======
conorh
If you have not read it already I recommend reading The Guardian article -
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/01/week-
amazo...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/01/week-amazon-
insider-feature-treatment-employees-work).

One quote from it that stands out for me: "At the Neath working men's club
down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last
resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And
it's this that's so heartbreaking."

There was another previous thread on Hacker News where people compared Amazon
warehouse workers to Costco workers. I wish Amazon could be more like Costco
in regards to their warehouse workers (I don't shop at Amazon any more for
that reason).

~~~
patrickaljord
> "At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me
> that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if
> you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking."

So Amazon is the only employer offering jobs to people who tend to be rejected
everywhere else, providing people that have no skills to offer to society a
chance at getting a job, learning some skills and maybe getting a better job
rather than staying at home and living on welfare, which is lower than Amazon
wages and provides no future.

Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.

~~~
gizmo
> Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.

Because taking advantage of desperate people isn't an honorable thing to do.
People are willing to put up with all sorts of abuse in order to keep their
family afloat, but that doesn't justify anything.

~~~
patrickaljord
> Because taking advantage of desperate people isn't an honorable thing to do.

They're not. They're offering them a decent job for a decent wage knowing that
these people are totally unskilled. The alternative would be living on
welfare. The fact that most of the workers are not on strike proves that
they're satisfied with their jobs. Plus, nobody forced them to accept those
jobs. And again, what would be the alternative for people with no skills?
Unemployment, no opportunity to learn skills etc. No thanks.

~~~
isleyaardvark
>Plus, nobody forced them to accept those jobs. And again, what would be the
alternative for people with no skills? Unemployment, no opportunity to learn
skills etc. No thanks.

So nobody forced them to accept those jobs, yet their only other option is
unemployment, no opportunity to learn skills, and other reasons that you
yourself find unacceptable?

How would you define "force"? It seems to me that victims of sexual harassment
suffer the same choices. I'm assuming you think sexual harassment should be
illegal. Is that not "force"?

~~~
jjoonathan
Libertarians typically neglect the forces imposed by the lower tiers of
Maslow's hierarchy (and by those controlling access to whatever is necessary
to meet such needs) because once you start paying attention to those forces
the claim that free-market capitalism maximizes individual freedom becomes
significantly harder to prove.

EDIT: changed "laughable" to "significantly harder to prove" because I'm not
in the mood for a fight today.

~~~
VMG
By that logic, not only Amazon, but everybody who refuses to hire those
workers or pay them more than their work is worth is exerting force. It's
absurd.

~~~
jjoonathan
It might be disappointing that the concept of force/consent doesn't simplify
the "which system is best" problem, but I don't see how it's absurd.

If a moral dilemma vanishes when you look at it from a different viewpoint,
the most likely scenario is that the new viewpoint is obscuring the crux of
the problem rather than miraculously simplifying it.

~~~
Crito
Say my neighbor and I both own small farms:

My neighbor calls up a local employment firm and hires 50 people to harvest
his fields with sickles. He pays them minimum wage for this backbreaking work.
They go home with blistered hands, crinks in their backs, and barely enough
money to afford groceries for the week.

I instead pay another local farmer, one with deeper pockets, to harvest my
field with his swanky combine harvester. He sits in his air-conditioned cabin
sipping on a bottle of coke, and gets the job done in two days. For his time
and machinery, I pay him a few thousand dollars.

How do these two situations compare? My neighbor is arguably "exploiting"
workers who are down on their luck. I am paying a single guy with some
entrepreneur spirit arguably too much money to get the same job done. On the
other hand, I have failed to provide jobs for 50 workers. Had I forsaken
mechanization, the increased demand for labor that my farm would have created
could have improved the working conditions, or at least pay, for those bottom-
tier farm hands. Instead I eliminated those jobs and the money stayed with me
and the wealthier farmer.

Is my neighbor abusing the manual laborers? Am I abusing the wealthy combine
owning farmer? Am I abusing the manual laborers? Is the wealthy combine owning
farmer abusing me? Surely the manual laborers are not abusing the combine
owner, but is the combine owner abusing the manual laborers?

Nothing is being obscured here, it is an extraordinary simple situation that
actually plays out every day.

~~~
jjoonathan
Both of your proposals are exploitative and needlessly unjust.

The big problem with the market is that it forces us to choose between the
two. It snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by coupling the "workers
starve" outcome to the "workers don't have jobs" outcome. There is no
fundamental reason why they need to be coupled. Just because only 80% of
people have to work to meet demand doesn't mean the other 20% deserve to
starve.

Many systems are possible in which marginal incentives are maintained (the
farmer and tractor driver get significantly more money than the out-of-work
laborers) but the laborers don't go hungry. I search for my favorite solution
among these (I'm a big fan of basic income / negative income tax).

As you note, we are automating away more and more of our economy every day. If
we keep our current course, such automation becomes a club used by those who
have enabled the automation (or otherwise accumulated capital) to beat down
those who have not. I think that's a terrifying idea that at best leads to
terrible injustice and at worst leads to violent overthrow of its perpetrators
(including myself). We _need_ an economic model that maintains the dignity of
the labor force even in the face of shrinking demand for labor.

~~~
Crito
To be clear, are you saying that the hypothetical farmer "me" in the story is
being unjust and exploitative for hiring the combine? Or are you just accusing
the _societal system_ , not the hypothetical me, of being unjust and
exploitative?

I ask this because I think you are actually getting at the point I was trying
to make.

~~~
jjoonathan
Yes, I'm accusing the societal system (which presents you with two
exploitative alternatives), not you. I think we do fundamentally agree and
that the confusion might have stemmed from the fact that I answered a question
which I thought you were implying rather than your literal question.

You asked "The current system gives choices X,Y. Isn't X>Y?" and I ignored the
"Isn't X>Y?" part because I assumed it was mostly a rhetorical device designed
to make concrete the first part ("The current system gives choices X,Y") which
was more relevant to the philosophical issue being discussed.

My answer was "Yeah, it sucks that X,Y are our choices, because I think that
one of M,N,O, or P might be better."

------
functional_test
"The Amazon system is characterized by low wages, permanent performance
pressure and short-term contracts" \- one of the union board members

For me, this sentence captured the entire article. Of course the wages are
low-- the jobs require no skills and have been largely automated by Kiva et
al.

It's hard to argue that performance pressure is a bad thing -- logistics is an
industry where performance matters. And again, the competition is robots.

Complaining that contracts are short term does have some legitimacy. That
said, it's clearly a seasonal business; do the unions honestly expect them to
hire people year round when they just aren't needed?

I really want to be on the side of the people, but I'm afraid that asking for
more money/longer contracts/etc. is just a way to make the automation even
more compelling.

~~~
BitMastro
Also, choosing a critical period like just before Xmas has the effect of
making the protest look like ransom

~~~
eplanit
That's very typical for unions. This is also the time of year for hotel unions
to act against their employer and customers in order to demand more. In San
Fran the hotel union employees will conduct noisy picketing demonstrations at
6 a.m. I guess it's a universal tactic for unions. The BART union held the Bay
Area hostage twice this year.

~~~
vkou
If BART is that important to the bay area, perhaps the people working for it
should get paid more? I mean, most of us don't go to work out of charity.

~~~
sparky
This sounds like you're advocating a free market approach in this case, where
BART employee wages should rise until their employer can no longer operate.

As in other markets, the sticky part is switching costs; one big reason
employees have leverage in situations like this is that the employer can't
practically fire everyone and have equally trained workers the next day. The
employer then has to weigh the cost of increased wages vs. the economic harm
that would be done if the business were to shut down while they found and
trained new workers.

For unspecialized positions, a worker's leverage is proportional to that
economic harm, not that worker's skill, or length of service, or particular
suitability to the job vs. someone else. The economic harm is proportional to
the economic value which was created by others, often including the public at
large (e.g., power plants and transportation systems exist by laws and permits
that essentially divide up natural resources owned by everyone). A moral
opposition to leveraging the efforts and resources of others to enrich your
own bargaining position ('hostage-taking' in anti-union parlance) is the
counterargument to 'perhaps they should get paid more if the BART is so
important'.

Obviously there's some middle ground here between abusive behavior on either
side of a labor dispute. One idea to reach it is for both sides to have more
alternatives/lower switching costs (make it more socially acceptable for
workers to look for contingency jobs while already employed, and for employers
to train backup workers while the positions are already nominally filled).

------
fredm-de
This strike is so ridiculous. I agree that warehouse work isn't the easiest
work(physically), but that's part of not being skilled. If you take a look at
the wages Amazon pays (10€ for the first year, 11,77€ in the third year) and
take a look at other jobs for the unskilled (McDonalds, DPD, Hermes), you can
clearly see that this is actually a decent wage. Especially in the Area of
eastern Germany, wich is still economically much weaker than western Germany.
I worked part-time in a large themepark for 4 years and none of their regular
workers got paid that much. Also they we're mostly unemployed in offseason.

Also consider that there are only about 15% of their workers striking. The
Store is drawn much bigger than it actually is.

Also the Union VerDi is just a big Joke. They're not about fair treatment of
workers but their own advantage. They're just giving these workers a
runaround.

------
kayoone
Id actually be interested if something like this happens in the US as well in
this form ? Amazon Germany defends itself by saying they already pay above
average (for the logistics sector) salaries but ive heard the average is
pretty miserable.

Overall i think the logistics workers cant win this, as the work they do is
pretty expendable, its just a matter of quantity and they will probably find
enough people to work for less.

As a german i have always had the feeling that these unions are way to
aggressive and often times prefer short term goals (more money yay people are
happy) over long term goals (successful business, stable jobs).

~~~
hwh
This is about the only political instrument the workers have. And unions are
important to provide the infrastructure to allow for strikes. What constitutes
the aggressiveness you speak of?

"As a german" I see that the political opinion in this country got a bit too
streamlined to the view that the vast number of low-paid jobs in this country
guarantee "long term goals". Yes, business is successful. After all, Germany
has a big sector for low-paid work, and reworked the former restrictions on
fixed-term and part-time jobs. "Stable jobs" is a bit too general, then this
comes at a price where I would dispute the view that they are "stable". They
don't provide enough means for sustain a life after retirement anymore. Yes,
Germany as a nation is economically doing fine. The low-paid job sector is
booming - and the price for that will be paid by a lot of people struggling to
finance their daily needs.

~~~
roel_v
"They don't provide enough means for sustain a life after retirement anymore."

German pension payment are compulsory, so even if you work one of these jobs
for 40 years, you still get a pension. Unless I didn't understand what you
were saying.

~~~
sentenza
Yes, but his point was that the pensions which will be payed out to those
workers are so small that they are essentially working their way into poverty.

------
thenmar
It's interesting to see the negativity towards the strikers in this topic. Why
shouldn't workers be allowed to get together and act as a collective? What's
so frightening about the workers having more power?

~~~
prodigal_erik
Markets set efficient prices through competition. When I have just one vendor
to buy from and have to pay whatever they demand or go without, it's
recognized as an abusive monopoly and market failure. Why is it suddenly okay
for a bunch of vendors (of labor) to openly form a cartel, declare all
competing vendors off limits through intimidation and violence, and extort
whatever they can? Why don't unions have to compete for contracts and thereby
set sane terms?

------
mokash
I actually worked at Amazon's Milton Keyne's fulfilment centre for a while. It
was tough, I almost always came home with blisters on my feet. Picking is THE
WORST. The targets they set were absolutely ridiculous, I don't think I
reached them once during the two months I worked there.

------
lafar6502
Amazon has already made a decision to move some logistics to cheaper countries
in Eastern Europe, so next year they'll have a nice excuse to fire all
'troublemakers' in Germany.

~~~
TheHippo
One of the main points why Amazon moved to Leipzig/Germany in the first place
is, that it is only 25km / 15 miles to the next airport. This airport is also
one of three global DHL hubs and the only global DHL hub in Europe. I would
suspect they don't want to give up this position.

~~~
lsaferite
I'm waiting for the day Amazon takes out the logistics middlemen and has it's
own long-distance delivery fleets (trucks and planes). I think it is
inevitable at the scale they operate under. If/when that happens, it will be
interesting to see where the locate their warehouses.

~~~
aidenn0
I don't know. Right now they commoditize delivery (the customer doesn't pick
_who_ delivers the package, just the delivery terms) so they can take
advantage of the best rates for any individual package. It will be hard to
compete with that internally.

------
avar
One thing not covered in the article: Amazon.de is also used in other parts of
Europe, e.g. I'm in The Netherlands and frequently order from there (or
amazon.co.uk).

So I wonder to what extent this'll also impact secondary markets in the
countries that surround Germany.

~~~
pilsetnieks
Also quite a few times when ordering from amazon.co.uk, my orders have been
actually shipped from Germany.

~~~
JanezStupar
If you went to both sites, you would also notice that a lot of the items and
indeed merchants are the same on both domains.

------
acd
I've stopped buying products from Amazon due to them previously hiring nazi
security guards and Richard Stallmans stand on them. It's simply not worth
saving a few cents for workers not having proper rights.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amazon-
ends-c...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amazon-ends-
contract-of-neonazi-security-firm-over-alleged-mistreatment-of-immigrant-
workers-8500115.html)
[http://stallman.org/amazon.html](http://stallman.org/amazon.html)

------
whalesalad
"... 1,115 staff had joined the strike at three sites, but there had been no
delays to deliveries."

I laughed out loud when I read this. It sounds like Amazon is the only company
who's giving jobs out to the slackers. Then the slackers are expected to work
hard, can't meet those expectations, so they go on strike. Meanwhile Amazon is
unaffected. Amazing.

------
franksmule
There was a good BBC Panorama on this with the UK Amazon Warehouses. Very
tough targets for low pay.

~~~
yapcguy
Highly recommended.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELVNmxCFP8I](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELVNmxCFP8I)

A handheld device beeps at you, tells you where to go to get the next item in
the cart, you have 15 seconds... and then it repeats all over again... and if
you're slow it starts flashing, beeping and you get warnings about not hitting
your targets. It's like trying to work but with someone over your shoulder all
the time. Terrible.

~~~
sparky
What part of that is objectionable? I worked logistics at a big box retailer
10-ish years ago, and that kind of thing was completely standard. The feeling
was that, yes, the beeps were annoying when you were helping a customer,
getting an occasional drink of water, etc., but your (human) supervisors
ultimately used their discretion in how they interpreted the efficiency
numbers, and could take all that into account. If your supervisor punishes you
for taking a bathroom break, that's a separate issue in my book.

What's the alternative? Should companies not measure efficiency, or not care
what it is, as some sort of gift to their employees? The time for humanity is
in interpreting what the machine tells you and hearing the worker's side of
the story.

~~~
sentenza
There is a difference between measuring efficiency and having a mechanical
monkey on your shoulder that screams at you every 15 seconds.

~~~
sparky
Likewise, a beep and a statement of fact on a screen ("target has been
missed") is a far cry from screaming.

If the work can fundamentally be measured on 15 second intervals, what is the
rational basis for not doing so? If your issue is with giving the picker
instant feedback on how they are doing with respect to their performance
goals, what interval would be more satisfactory, and why?

I understand that, emotionally, it is preferable to receive negative feedback
less frequently than more frequently if given the choice, but I can't help but
feel that a lot of the unease with the scanners on HN is the result of
projecting best practices in one's own field (software development or some
other form of creative knowledge work) onto another. We can all agree that
beeping at a software developer if they don't type X characters every 15
seconds would be absurd, but we don't scoff at test-driven development, spell-
checkers, and other instant performance feedback mechanisms. Most of us don't
interpret a red squiggly line in Word as emotional abuse; what makes the
scanner beep so much worse?

~~~
jodrellblank
And if you can find a way to measure joint stress and wear through the day, we
can optimize the workers to pick the heaviest parcels each can lift such that
it only damages them a bit but not more over the course of a week than nights
and weekends of rest can cope for, that would be great too, thanks.

And dim the warehouse lights, they can have individual torches. No sense
lighting parts of the room people aren't looking at. Oh hang on, batteries -
better make them hand cranked torches, then the power comes from their lunch,
ha ha!

The issue isn't with instant-feedback, it's with degradation and treating
humans like industrial farm animals. The question isn't "is this effective",
but "is this ok?" and "can anyone come up with something less dystopian but
still workable? - please?".

------
obtino
I can't help but think that society itself is to blame for things like this.
We, as consumers, always demand lower prices while the pool of resources
continues to deplete. Businesses are forced to contend with this, and hence,
they try to reduce their costs. They pay staff less, economize on quality, and
eventually, when that fails to yeild the appropriate dividends, they move
their venture elsewhere - and so the cycle begins again.

This has to somehow stop.

~~~
pointernil
You seam to forget that actual humans make up an businesses. There is ALWAYS
an actual human being deciding what and if measures are undertaken to satisfy
the public "demands". Those humans are to blame.

It has to get personal. We need to prevent humans from hiding behind
corporation-walls when living their destructive phantasies. Mr. Joseph
Stiglitz called for similar measures when discussing the finance-disasters and
their legal "consequences" on the court floors...

"Phantasies" like treating their workers like their actual "mechanical turks"
they help to enable on aws for others... which btw. should have been a warning
to all: this IS the technocratic nightmarish model they apply to their
"workforce".

Obviously customers should make use their money to vote... it could be their
employers are learning from amazon just right now.

------
novalis78
Verdi (the union) is quite a strange animal. As many other unions in Germany
they have been losing members for years now but are still a political force
(or at least perceive themselves as such). The "American capitalist" Amazon is
thus a perfect "enemy" to target, fight - even if just to show off - and
improve their own standing in the public arena.

------
bayesianhorse
As far as I have understood it, the pay and working conditions aren't actually
that bad at Amazon, at least for people who can't get any other job.

What makes these workers so miserable is that the work they are doing is
sucking your heart dry, and it must be almost as bad as cleaning toilets all
day (which pays less, by the way).

------
eli_gottlieb
Solidarity!

~~~
angersock
Workers of the world unite!

~~~
kybernetyk
And get replaced by robots!

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Actually, famed anarchist David Graeber has hypothesized that the capitalist
class _figured this one out_ a long time ago, and in fact designed the current
neoliberal system to enable them to profit off cheap, indebted labor _in
preference to_ mechanizing, which (according to Marxian analyses, at least)
could reduce their rate of profit.

Thus, the fight for labor rights becomes an important way of _forcing_ the
capitalists to mechanize and increase productivity.

Certainly if you look at some simple economics, it makes sense, as a
hypothesis: a higher price of labor means a greater comparative advantage for
machines, a lower price of labor makes massive sums of heavily exploited
manpower easier to pay for than expensive mechanization infrastructure.

~~~
angersock
One may note also that one of the main driving forces of technology has been a
relatively high cost of labor--it is theorized that one of the reasons
Europeans had such an advantage against the Chinese and Indians in the 1800s,
for example, was that they had developed systems not requiring large numbers
of people.

------
wil421
I absolutely love shopping on amazon but the stories like this that have been
coming out in the last couple years are about to make me stop shopping there.
I've heard stories from people as well. I'll give them a year or two max to
improve and then I will stop.

------
gasparhaspar
The complete lack of basic economic understanding displayed by the posters in
this thread is astonishing for a site like HN that is largely devoted to
technology entrepreneurship.

------
ffrryuu
Solidarity to all people.

------
kriro
Wait, I can get fresh groceries from the interwebz soon? Sweet.

~~~
kybernetyk
When I was living in Gdansk, Poland a few years ago this was a standard
service offered by a few grocery chains. I ordered in the morning from my
office and scheduled delivery in the evening. The groceries were delivered by
the courier on the same day.

Then I moved to Germany and was shocked that such service doesn't exist here.
I miss it. :(

