After Amazon workers in Germany began striking, the company expanded eastward, where looser labor laws brought record productivity.
by filing charges with the National Labor Relations Board accusing the corporation of violating labor laws.Demonstrators display a banner at a rally of Amazon workers in Leipzig, Germany, on Sept. 28, 2019.
Unlike in Germany, where any group of at least 10 employees can form a union and hold a legal strike, in Poland more than half of a workplace, regardless of union membership, must approve. While individual fulfillment centers in Germany and elsewhere in Europe are registered as stand-alone entities, the nine warehouses in Poland collectively exist by law as a single workplace, which means any strike would require approval from at least 9,000 employees across all the country’s facilities.
The Poznan warehouse shipped 1.02 million packages in 24 hours at its highest point that winter, the first in Europe to hit seven figures in a day and just short of the Delaware record of 1.1 million, according to the former senior manager. The following December, with orders again funneled to Poland fulfillment centers, the Poznan warehouse exceeded the American mark, a record that lasted three days before the Wrocław facility surpassed it.
“There are situations in which we do not see the possibility of further cooperation with the employee,” Amazon spokesperson Eichenseher said in response to a question about the incident. “In this case we have no choice but to exercise the right to terminate the employment contract.”As is the case at Amazon warehouses everywhere, the company’s management in Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia rely on a constant stream of new workers to cycle in.
“Everything was about productivity,” he said. “It was hard for me. It was all so stressful, working under that kind of pressure.”Gabriel hoped to keep the job as long as he could, but to do that he had to raise his numbers. He remembers Oct. 22, 2017, his 19th day as an Amazon employee, as being a particularly stressful shift. A manager, bearing a stack of papers listing the required numbers, “kept coming back to us to check how are we meeting the productivity targets,” he said. “All the time.
every fourth Wednesday. Minimum rates are set each week based on the 80th percentile of performers the previous week; in other words, the bottom fifth of workers had to increase their productivity to avoid a reprimand, which is called “feedback” in company language. As the employee handbook warned, a worker would be recommended for termination if they received six feedbacks in a year.
Experienced associates on permanent contracts learn to keep a pace that just barely hits the week’s quota to help minimize its growth. Some hold informal competitions over who can get closest to the minimum rate without going under, two workers said.
By the time of the inspectorate’s June 2018 examination, Amazon’s Poznan and Wrocław warehouses had already undergone at least one energy measurement each, on court orders tied to wrongful termination complaints. Conducted by Envilab, a private research laboratory, the tests determined that 18 of the 20 jobs measured in Wrocław on April 27, 2015, and nine of the 36 jobs measured in Poznan on April 12, 2018, were classified as heavy.
to terminate workers, the HR officer at the Szczecin warehouse would break the news to each of them in a small, barren room on the ground floor. The process played out the same at Amazon warehouses across central Europe. At the Bratislava warehouse in Slovakia, workers call the small windowless room on the ground floor “samotka,” the Slovak word for a solitary confinement prison cell.
Over his first year in Szczecin, the HR officer estimates that he terminated 350 workers. He fired workers who used more than six days of sick leave in three months or three in one month. He fired anyone who accrued three unexcused absences over any stretch. He fired workers for missing their quotas six times in a year or four weeks in a row, even if they were consistently reaching 90% to 99% of the mark.
At least three workers in Poland who didn’t sign mutual agreements have sued Amazon for wrongful termination and won. In the case of Joanna Piotrowska, a Poznan associate who was fired in 2016 after her fourth unexcused absence in 10 months, a judge found that Amazon’s decision “does not constitute a valid reason for termination of the employment contract” because the company couldn’t prove that her absences had created additional costs to its business, according to the court ruling.
The Szczecin warehouse stood as Amazon’s most technologically advanced warehouse in Europe when it opened in 2017, the biggest one on the continent to be fitted with a robotics unit that sped up the shipping process, increased storage capacity by 50%, and eliminated the most notorious task in the company’s logistics operation — instead of workers walking 10 to 15 miles a day to pick items from shelves, the 3,000 robots would bring the shelves to them.
In the years since, at least two other Amazon workers in Poland, both in Poznan, have died while on the clock. In both cases, prosecutors also ruled the deaths accidental.
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