Amazon Workers Strike Intensifies During Busiest Period

Amazon workers in Germany have hit the company where it hurts - by striking in the busiest period of the year.

The strike by the online retailers distribution centre workers, which originally flared up in Spring, entered its fourth day yesterday in a dispute over wages and working conditions. Germany is the second largest of Amazon's territories with 14 per cent of its 61 billion global sales.

Workers at Amazon's largest distribution centre in Bad Hersfeld walked out on Monday and have already voted to continue the strike until Saturday. Officials at the Ver.di union said 600 workers at the centre were involved in the dispute which is seeking comparable pay for warehouse workers as retail staff in the country receive.

'There was a clear decision in favor of extending the strike,' Ver.di union official Manuel Sauer said, according to the Wall Street Journal. The official said workers will meet on Saturday to discuss further action.

Ver.di wants Amazon to allow collective bargaining on pay by the workers, which is standard practice between employees and employers at many other German companies. The dispute has also caused a storm of negative publicity in the country for the company not least over the treatment of some workers by staff at a third-party security firm.

But Amazon has dismissed the premise of the workers argument that warehouse staff deserve retail wages.

'Our people stow, pick and pack,' a spokesperson for Amazon in Germany told the Financial Times. 'It is not like Harrods where you have customers in front of you and need a special level of education to do that. Many [workers] had no proper education. Some have not even properly finished school.'

Amazon insisted to the FT that the number of workers on strike is too low to affect its trade over the busy Christmas season. The company estimates that 1,115 people were on strike on Monday out of more than 9,000 full-time employees. It has also hired an additional 14,000 temporary workers to help with the spike in demand at the end of the year.