TheStandard.com - November 22, 2000, 8:11 AM PST
Amazon Workers Seek European Union The fight for representation is taken up in France and Germany. Holland may be next.
By Bernhard Warner, Kristi Essick and Boris Groendahl
The pre-Christmas union push at Amazon.com (AMZN) has crossed the Atlantic. Trade unions in Germany and France have taken up the cause, trying to recruit warehouse workers to join in a global effort to fight for better working conditions.
Details of a possible Amazon union emerged last week from the U.S. Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, or Wash Tech, launched an effort to organize some 400 customer-service workers at the company's headquarters there. Earlier this week, Prewitt Organizing Fund, an independent union-recruiting group based in Washington, D.C., began to seek union representation for some 5,000 workers in Amazon's distribution centers throughout the U.S., as well as in France and Germany. There is no evidence of a similar movement in the U.K., but there is talk of organizing activities in Holland.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos maintains that unions are unnecessary at the company because employees have stock options.
"Everyone is an owner," he said in a recent interview. He added that Amazon employees are given opportunities to bring up grievances with management.
Amazon officials in Europe on Wednesday referred all calls to the U.S. headquarters.
Luc Lecornu, a spokesman for SUD, a French trade-union group, said his organization was contacted by Prewitt Organizing Fund to lead the fight on French soil. "We decided to give them a hand," he said.
On Tuesday, the SUD held a small press conference in front of Amazon.fr's Boigny-sur-Bionne distribution center near Orleans, which currently employs around 50 people. The organization handed out pamphlets and engaged in discussion with employees leaving the compound, Lecornu said.
The idea was to show solidarity with the U.S. cause and to inform Amazon.fr workers of what is happening over there, he said. SUD also talked to the employees about the possibility of starting a union in France, he added.
"We just wanted to introduce ourselves and explain what's happening," he said. "It's a question of solidarity for the moment." Should the U.S. Amazon workers decide to fight to create a union, SUD will rally for the same cause in France, he said. At the moment, though, interest in union action in France is minimal.
A similar rally was planned today at Amazon's distribution center at Bar Hersfeld in Germany, where 500 full- and part-time staffers work. Hans Ries, a union representative at the Projekt Logistik, a joint initiative by the four German unions HBV, DPG, DAG and ...TV, gave few details about today's scheduled event. It is expected that workers there will be informed of the complaints expressed by Amazon's U.S. workers.
Ries said workers in Germany were the first Amazon employees to join a union back in April. One of their primary complaints is wages. Amazon factory workers in Germany are paid $7.24 per hour - below the average of $7.84. Amazon's German workers also get 500 stock options, priced at $67. However, they are unlikely to exercise those options anytime soon: Amazon shares closed Tuesday at $24.25, down more than 6 percent.
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TheStandardEurope.com - November 7, 2000
Unions get connected
"Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another." - The Communist Manifesto (1847), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
By Chris Davison
Marx and Engels don't come up much in conversation about the new economy; they just don't sound right in the same sentence as stock options, bandwidth and flexible labour markets.
[rest at <http://www.thestandardeurope.com/article/article_print/0,1153,12190,00.html>]