Employees of Amazon German distribution centers are on strike until Christmas Eve

The German trade union Ver.di has announced that the employees of several Amazon distribution centers are on strike. In some cases, the strike will continue until Thursday, December 24. The employees demand that the company conduct collective bargaining.

Amazon has been refusing to start negotiations for some time, as a result of which the employees have had to do without a collective agreement until now. They are therefore now hitting distribution centers in Leipzig, Rheinberg, Werne, Bad Hersfeld, Graben and Koblenz, in some cases up to and including Christmas Eve. The high workload and the twenty percent reporting sick rate are also part of the conflict.

According to the German Tagesschau, a total of about ten thousand employees work at Amazon in Germany, spread over nine locations. It is not clear how many employees have joined the strike. Strikes also took place in 2013, but little has changed since then. The employees are still paid as warehouse employees instead of ‘retail and mail order employees’. The current conflict is about concluding a collective labor agreement at that level.