A Case Study of Amazon Organizing Drives

in Europe
By Alessandro Powell

May 18, 2019

The case of Amazon logistics workers organizing in Europe is highly international. While
limiting the scope of the case to European nations seems to contradict the theme of
internationalism, as Boewe argues in his report, “The Long Struggle of the Amazon
Employees”, transnational networking of employees must work in the European context at a
minimum (5). If internationalism is a viable approach to organizing at Amazon, then it makes
sense that it should be easiest for Europe. European nations are culturally and geographically
close. They also share trade and legal frameworks thanks to the European Union (EU).
Although Amazon Europe is headquartered in Luxemburg, outside of the EU, its European
workers enjoy a similar degree of labor protections, guarantees, and history.

For this and other reasons, the conflict at Amazon in Europe has become a “laboratory of
resistance” (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 5). The Amazon employment model is reminiscent of
Taylorism in many ways, but its structure presents new challenges for the labor movement.
Some criticize a focus on novel disruptor companies in labor studies, because they have not
been profitable. Amazon, for example, only became profitable (for the year) in 2017 (15). Uber
is still losing billions of dollars. Yet, however unprofitable, they are still here—we must still
consider strategies to organize these new business models.

There exists a credible threat that the employment conditions and practices of Amazon will
spread to other businesses and industries. As Boewe and Schulten (2017: 7) argue, decreased
standards in one field may seep into another. As Amazon’s business model is based on
diversification, using its logistics base to branch out into industries as varied as big data and
entertainment, the Amazon model could easily become the future of work (23).

Because structural and mass unemployment are essential for the Amazon model (Boewe and
Schulten 2017: 18), Amazon needs an excess of cheap manpower, for the “reserve army” of
workers to be as large as possible. As inequality continues to rise and national economies
flounder, a growing number of nations have become ripe for the Amazon model since the global
recession.

The following case study follows the progress of union organizing drives in Europe. The main
focus will be on Germany and Italy, as that is where the most concrete progress has been made.
First, we describe the ‘Amazon model’. We consider the business model, their human resources
and labor relations strategies, and union organizing tactics. Second, the relevant power
resources will be analyzed. Finally, we draw conclusions from the case.

CASE DESCRIPTION

Due to the highly digital nature of much of Amazon’s operations, this case focuses on logistics
in e-commerce. The majority of these workers are employed at fulfillment centers and in
delivery (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 15). As delivery is often contracted out, this study, and
Amazon organizers, focused on fulfillment centers. These centers are factory like logistics halls
located near transport hubs (16).

It is worth noting that although the majority of the workers are clustered in Amazon’s logistics
segment, as Cattero and D’Onofrio (2018) write, the company is increasingly “a digital
conglomerate whose sources of profit are not in e-commerce, which has never been profitable
for it, but elsewhere, primarily in the Amazon web services cloud services to business and
governments. . . .the economic costs of trade union conflict are probably irrelevant and in any
case amply compensated. . . .” (160). This calls into question even successful organizing
strategies that do not take the employer’s profit center into account. Amazon was hardly phased
by a series of strikes that successfully spread to eight of the nine fulfillment centers in Boewe
and Schulten’s (2017:9) report. Their only response to the Christmas strike was a statement that
punctual deliveries would not be affected (9). Amazon seemed happy to eat the cost of the
strikes, relocate labor, and refuse to negotiate collectively despite significant concessions.

After the waves of successful German and Italian strikes and blockades in 2017 and 2018,
Amazon has invested significant resources into creating work and logistics systems and backups
to reduce the effectiveness of any strike (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 52; Cattero and D’Onofrio
2018: 155). They also relocated several centers to Poland the next year.

Amazon’s HR and Labor Relations

While other disrupters, such as Uber, openly flout labor regulations, Amazon instead fully
exploits legal loopholes without breaking the law (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 42). Where other
disruptors misclassify workers as independent contractors, Amazon actually uses fixed term
contracts (43). It might seem like these contracts give Amazon workers more security than at-
will employees in the U.S., but the short contracts allow Amazon to increase or decrease their
workforce without paying unemployment or firing anyone. They can just choose not to rehire
any employee who they fear might be organizing.

On the shop floor, Amazon’s HR policy can be described as a form of intensified, digital,
service-Taylorism. They squeeze as much time out of their employees as technology allows
(Boewe and Schulten 2017: 16). Every act is seamlessly recorded. Just as with Taylorism, the
Amazon model creates psychological pressure as well (16). Benchmarks pit employees against
one another, as below average performers are stigmatized (19). Boewe and Schulten (2017)
report that Amazon workers are driven so hard that sickness rates at the centers reach as high
as twenty to forty percent of the workplace.

The central contradiction of Amazon’s labor policy is that while they create a highly fractured
workforce by pitting workers and ethnic groups against one another on the shop floor and
generating an atmosphere of denunciation and blanket suspicion (though the use of metal
detectors, for example), they also invest in building a sense of team spirit. “Amazon places
great importance on giving employees the feeling of being part of a successful team at the global
e-commerce leader…” (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 17). This team spirit narrative is central to
Amazon’s anti-union strategy.

As Amazon VP of Global Ops Dave Clark said during the German campaign, “Every permanent
employee in Germany is a co-owner. . . .Verdi is not part of that relationship” (Boewe and
Schulten 2017: 40). Indeed, Amazon’s grassroots presence on their shop floors is significant.
Boewe and Schulten (2017) are skeptical that the anti-union caucuses that sprang up in the
fulfillment centers were actually started by workers (9), but they later admit that ver.di was
“given a lesson in successful counter-organizing” (40). Amazon contributed significant
resources to shop floor organizing. They held as many as three individual feedback meetings a
week (42). Amazon even allowed its supporters to collect signatures during working hours (40).
This conflicts directly with Amazon’s Taylorist imperative to squeeze as much time as possible
out of its workers.

Dedicating resources to counter-organizing has been especially effective for Amazon in Europe,
where unions traditionally do not focus on grassroots organizing. Where Amazon has faced
unions without much organizational capacity, as they did in Britain, they have defeated unions
in elections by large margins (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 27). By reimagining itself as a rank-
and-file union, ver.di has achieved better results.

Union Organizing Tactics

As Boewe and Schulten (2017) write in their report, “Amazon’s movement is essentially
borderless, and so must [unions] be” (7). A number of national unions, like Verdi and CGIL
have spearheaded organizational efforts. But UNI Amazon networking meetings have been
where the organizing strategy for Europe takes place (5). This transnational union federation
has enabled international solidarity to take place.

For a long time, organizing at Amazon seemed like a dead end. Resources seemed like they
were constantly about to run dry. Nonetheless, fulfillment centers in Germany became hubs of
union activity (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 9). Employees made progress and won concessions,
but until recently the media did not cover the organizing drives (10). The 2017 ver.di walkouts
finally reached a scale where the international media took the story up. The David and Goliath
narrative effectively attracted the attention of the media and their readers.

While large, bureaucratic unions like ver.di struggled to reimagine themselves as rank and file
organizers, the transition eventually led to remarkable success. Within a year of beginning its
grassroots campaign at one German fulfillment center, ver.di brought a workforce from zero
union support to five hundred members and twenty stewards (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 37).
The steward system, which is organized during the workers’ valuable free time, is ground
breaking for the German retail sector (9).

While the rank and file organizing strategies had measurable success, the psychological tactics
employed by the union played a key role as well. Amazon’s service-Taylorism hinges upon
psychological control of the workforce. Amazon could easily punish workers (by not hiring
them) so low risk actions and wins were vital for building momentum. Throwing a spanner in
the precise machinery of the Amazon model proved particularly effective, given tight control
and low slack.

Campaigns like the one insisting that Amazon refer to its workers using the formal German
second person were particularly popular and effective—as the forced informal “you” is a
carryover from work systems in Communist East Germany (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 52). As
Burns (2018) writes in “How European Workers Coordinated this Month’s Massive Amazon
Strike”, just as Amazon attempted to link the success of the company with worker self-worth,
Polish union organizers stressed how workers received no additional benefits for beating
production records. Another vital psychological aspect of the union strategy was to prioritize
immunizing the workforce (53). Amazon’s anti-union campaign was itself grassroots, so the
unions needed to focus on getting to the workers before Amazon could turn them against the
organizers.

Analysis of Power Resources

Structural Power

Amazon organizers have shown they can wield significant structural power. As Amazon’s e-
commerce operations are bottlenecked at the fulfillment centers, disruptive actions can cost
Amazon in this segment. These actions are especially effective in regions that are import-export
crossroads, such as Italy (Curcio 2018: 261).

Even without collective bargaining, ver.di organizers have won significant wage and benefit
concessions from Amazon. Amazon seems eager to yield to the use of structural power to
discourage the strengthening of associational power.

Amazon’s fulfillment workers are not highly positioned on Amazon’s economic ladder or in
the surrounding economies. They are, however, a vital part of Amazon’s operations since they
are some of the only wage earners and production relies on them. That being said, withdrawing
their labor would not have detrimental effects on the surrounding economy or society. They do
not provide a vital service, like firefighters for example, but a luxury. That could change in the
near future, with Amazon’s expansion into the online pharmacy market.

Associational Power

While the rank and file structural power of Amazon workers has grown significantly, it did not
arise organically. Established unions like ver.di built up structural power through
their associational power in resource intensive campaigns. They did not act alone. As Boewe
and Schulten (2017: 10) explain, the unions understood “the need to build up international
collaboration between unions at the level of union activists at the plant (not just worker
councils)”. UNI, a global labor federation, played a vital role in networking and building
associational power between unions and nations.

Although associational power is just bearing fruit for Amazon workers, with Amazon finally
recognizing a union in Italy in 2018, this recognition may be purely formal (Cattero and
D’Onofrio 2018: 160). E-commerce, where the organized Amazon workers are employed, is
not even a profitable segment of the company, as Amazon relies on its big data and
entertainment operations to generate profit. Amazon has shown it can shrug off the economic
consequences of strikes in e-commerce, so there is a limit to how effective associational power
can be on its own.

Institutional Power

Institutional power seems stacked against the Amazon organizers. While Boewe and Schulten
(2017) consider local politicians as potential allies against Amazon, their reasoning that they
will hold Amazon accountable for diminishing tax revenue from city centers is unconvincing
(10). We have seen local politicians across the U.S. woo Amazon with tax incentives to set up
operations in their towns. Amazon customers and voters are one and the same—politicians
won’t want to disrupt their voters’ lifestyles by attacking Amazon.
Amazon establishes its fulfillment centers in underdeveloped regions for a reason—they are
bringing jobs to investment starved communities. They have the institutional power here, no
matter how bad those jobs are. In Poland, for example, Amazon is heavily subsidized by the
Polish government and makes use of Special Economic Zones (Boewe and Schulten 2017: 30).
This shows the extent of Amazon’s institutional power, but it also reveals a potential weakness.
Relying on subsidies and SEZ leaves Amazon’s business model vulnerable to scandals and
sufficient public outcry could reverse the institutional power the company relies on.

While Amazon organizers were able to sell the David and Goliath narrative to the international
media near the end of their struggle, the preceding escalation campaign and actions went largely
unnoted. As a key advertiser, Amazon wields significant media influence (Boewe and Schulten
2017: 60). This too is a form of institutional power.

Societal Power

Societal power is a another key component of campaigns against Amazon. We see this in the
U.S., where Long Island City rejected Amazon’s new headquarters through a community
campaign. In Italy, where Amazon recognized its first union, organizers had a lot of support
from local Social Centers and COBAS, which are grassroots organizing hubs (Curcio 2018:
260). Community support was important, but it could also backfire. As Boewe and Schulten
(2017) noted, one community blockade in Italy was called off by the Amazon workers—they
had nothing to do with planning the blockade and needed to earn their living that week.

As Amazon sets up fulfillment centers in underdeveloped regions, they earn a degree of

appreciation from the local populations. While wages and conditions are paltry, they are often
the best in the surrounding area. Amazon has gained a degree of loyalty from its workers and
in the communities where it sets up fulfillment centers for this reason (Boewe and Schulten
2017).

Besides the union recognition in Italy, societal power has proven effective elsewhere in Europe.
In Chrisafis’s (2019) article in the Guardian, “How the French Rose up against a Huge Amazon
Logistics Centre” the author outlines how the Yellow Vest protest took action against Amazon
fulfillment centers in 2019. The French blockaded Amazon construction sites and logistics
hubs. Their main complaints focused on the environmental damage caused by the hubs and by
the tax incentives offered to Amazon.

The Yellow Vests were even successful in turning institutional power against Amazon. Their
societal power pressured the government to initiate a new tax on tech firms. Whereas the
victories won by associational power and structural power failed to directly impact Amazon’s
profit center, the victories of the Yellow Vests threaten the Amazon Model itself by closing tax
loopholes and criticizing the import-export model. The new tax would affect all of Amazon’s
segments instead of just the unprofitable e-commerce segment.

Lessons Learned

• While Amazon was able to ignore national strike actions in the past, even moving
production abroad, they conceded to international solidarity strikes by finally
recognizing a union.
• Political connections played little or no role in securing collective bargaining
 • Societal power is highly effective when it can build institutional power, as it did in
France, but the results may be underwhelming where it leads only to associational
power, as in Italy.
• Works councils were not particularly useful in securing concessions or improving
employee relations at German Amazon plants.
• Amazon is an adept counter organizer and manipulates worker psychology deftly.
• Rank and file organizing works were unions commit resources.
• The David and Goliath narrative finally got the media interested in the Amazon worker
struggles.
• Due to the increasingly diversified nature of Amazon’s business, the economic costs of
a strike or traditional union enforcement mechanisms may be irrelevant for the
company’s bottom-line. Indeed, recognition of the Italian union may be purely formal
(Cattero and D’Onofrio 2018: 160).

References and Further Reading

Boewe, J. and J. Schulten (2017) The Long Struggle of the Amazon

Employees. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Brussels Office.

• UNI commissioned this report to summarize the organizing efforts of ver.di

in the German campaigns of 2017 and 2018. It goes into some depth about
Amazon’s tactics and ver.di’s, and is about 70 pages long.

Burns, R. (2018) How European Workers Coordinated this month’s massive

Amazon strike – and what comes next. In These Times, July 25, 2018.

• This article is available for free. Besides describing Amazon’s European

operations and the opposed organizing drives, this source goes into detail
about Associational Power. The source details the different unions involved,
especially in Poland, and how different their tactics were.

Cattero, B. and M. D’Onofrio (2018) Organizing and Collective Bargaining in the

Digitized “Tertiary Factories” of Amazon: A Comparison Between Germany and
Italy. In Working in Digital and Smart Organizations Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
(pp. 141-164)

• Abstract: “This chapter questions how digitalization impacted on work

organization and industrial relations, taking into account the case study of
Amazon, the leading company in the e-commerce industry. With specific
regard to the logistics area of the company, represented by its fulfillment
centers, we can observe the disruptive nature of the process of digitalization
at the workplace by means of algorithms, innovative warehouse systems and
data gathering. Nevertheless, the same process led to the impoverishment of
the working conditions because of productive potential triggered by
digitalization. The struggle for representing Amazon workers is analyzed by
considering two different institutional contexts—Germany and Italy—in
 order to provide insights regarding how union movements react to the
current transformation of both jobs and workers.”

Chrisafis, A. (2019) How the French Rose up against a Huge Amazon Logistics
Centre. The Guardian. April 07, 2019. Accessed May 13, 2019.

• This article details the anti-Amazon actions of the Yellow Vest protestors in
2018 and 2019

Curcio, A. (2018) Italy: The Revolution in Logistics. In Azzellini, D., & Kraft, M.,
eds. The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organized Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-
First Century. Brill. (pp. 259-275)

• This is a chapter on the wider logistics organizing in Italy. It is all relevant

to Amazon, but it is not all about Amazon either. It is a good academic
source looking and societal and structural power in the Italian logistics
sector.

UNI (2018) First ever agreement between Amazon and unions halts inhumane
work hours in Italy.