8. Organizing and Collective Bargaining in the Digitized “Tertiary Factories” of Amazon: A Comparison Between Germany and Italy

Generally speaking, this is true for the European context. The situation is different in North America, where a stronger automation has been implemented, especially for managing the fulfillment of orders with large-sized goods.

There are three shifts: morning shift, afternoon shift and night shift. Each one last for seven hours, plus meal breaks of 30 minutes. The night shift is not always available, only during periods when sales grow.

There are some cases in which job rotation is applied, but it is not used extensively for every worker.

The period of training lasts three days: the first two days are managed by work agencies, which inform workers about safety at work and contractual procedures. During the last day, workers are trained inside of Amazon fulfillment center and the main tasks are explained by workers who function as trainers.

There are three cut-offs, one per shift, at 1 a.m., 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.

These include the transformation into a European company (SE) before exceeding the threshold of 2,000 employees, the adoption of a foreign legal form (typically British or Dutch) or that of the headquarter (Aldi and Lidl), the corporate fragmentation in one multitude of minor businesses or the collage of formally independent operative units. Another strategy is not to comply with the law (this is the case of Rossmann, one of the three major German grocery chains, 29,000 employees): the strategy is effective because a possible legal procedure initiated by the trade union is basically useless for the possibility of the company to choose in the meantime one of the legal “escape routes” listed above.

Only in Bad Hersfeld, since 2014, and only after an application submitted by ver.di. to the provincial court of Frankfurt. The same union is part of it with two representatives. For Amazon, the paradoxical situation has thus arisen to deal with the supervisory board with that “third stranger” whom the company counterpart does not intend to recognize as an interlocutor.

Amazon’s economic accounts are characterized by a continuous and exponential growth in turnover, which has been reflected in many loss-making in the past years. Profits that has been registered since 2015, in a percentage still little more than insignificant, are mainly attributable to Amazon Web Service (AWS), whose economic data were included, before that year, in the residual item “Other”. Despite representing only about 10% of total income, the AWS segment stands out for the highest growth rates both in terms of sales volume (over 40% in 2016 and 2017) and, above all, in operating profit ($1.2 million in the third quarter of 2017). The last data is even more significant if compared with the rest of the Amazon conglomerate, which in the same period recorded a total of $ 824 million in loss. In summary, AWS is currently the division that allows Amazon not to get in debt and “to keep investing in the core business” (Kim 2017).