The CC.OO. union has called a nationwide strike for all Amazon centers on the key dates of Black Friday, November 27 and 28. If a year ago there was some public tension around the loss of purchasing power of workers, whose wages had risen well below the CPI, this year the strike has been called over a mix of demands.
First of all, the “insufficient protection of staff health”, by which they refer in their demands to the “countless complaints about the company’s failure to recognize the ‘presumption of labor-relatedness’ of various damages to our health possibly caused by work”.
From payroll to the management of vacations or working hours
This first consideration, speaks of how the accident and incident management system implemented by the company hides possible failures in safety measures, always according to the CCOO union of Amazon in Madrid.
However, the statement issued by the union also speaks of problems in the management of payroll, with failures in the collection and preparation of the payroll itself, as well as lack of clarity in some of its concepts or the difficulty in managing leaves to which the staff is entitled, or directly the non-granting of these.
They also point to errors in the management of workers’ vacations and the management of the working day, as a result of the dwindling resources which, in the union’s opinion, are available to the Human Resources departments, as well as the outsourcing of some of their processes.
Finally, the union, as it did a year ago, calls for salary revisions. If in 2022 it pointed to the high inflation that more than ate up the increases obtained, this year the focus of the protest is for the fact that Amazon pays the minimum wages for the sector in each province. “Although the company gives us improvements, in no case does it compensate what it demands from us every day. […] Amazon demands that we give the maximum and not the minimum,” reads the statement.
Because of these complaints, they have decided to call a general strike on November 27 and 28 in all Amazon work centers in Spain, through a one-hour stoppage, something that would disrupt the company’s planning for its most stressful week of the year. On those days is when it would have to manage shipments of products purchased during Black Friday and also during Cyber Monday.
As we have been able to learn from Xataka, in other centers there are other measures underway on an individual basis. In the one in Alcalá de Henares several stoppages have been called for November 24 and 25, and in San Fernando de Henares a mobilization has been called due to “indiscriminate layoffs”. The latter comes from the Sindicato de Comisiones de Base (Co.bas).
In previous years, various protests and strikes were corrected by Amazon by diverting part of the work to other national and even French logistics centers.
We have contacted Amazon Spain, who has sent us the following statement regarding this call:
“Our teams across Spain already work in a modern and safe environment with competitive wages and benefits. Entry-level employees earn at least 1,400 euros per month and have opportunities to grow and develop their careers. On top of that, employees and their families have comprehensive benefits in which we invest thousands of euros more per year, including private health and life insurance, paid meals, extended paid paternity leave and employee discount, to name a few.”