Amazon workers in Europe strike during Prime promotion event
Amazon workers from Spain, Germany and Poland have walked out on strike over demands for better working conditions, choosing to do so on the same date as the retail giant’s big promotional push.
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Workers demand a fairer conditions and an increase in salary of 1.5% from Amazon, whose founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' net worth was calculated this week to top $150bn after the company's market valuation hit $888bn.
"The message is clear - while the online giant gets rich, it is saving money on the health of its workers," Germany's Verdi services union said in a statement, following five years in which Amazon has refused to enter into collective wage negotiations over the 16,000 workers employed in the country.
The strikers have decided to take industrial action on Amazon’s Prime Day which launched in 2015 and by 2017 it was its second biggest shopping day. Some shoppers vowed on social media to boycott the shop to support the strike.
In Poland, workers staged a work to rule, while in Spain unions said nearly four fifths of workers left their positions at Amazon's largest packing and distributing centre in the country. Amazon rebuffed this, claiming the majority of employees did not take part in the strike.
Protests have been building up for years after newspaper exposés on working for Amazon, with the New York Times calling it a “bruising workplace” but the company insisting workers were paid fairly.
Late on Monday , customers experienced crashes in the site as they tried to purchase products on Prime Day with a message popping up on the screen that read “sorry, something went wrong on our end”.