As of today, the 21st of March 2020, more and more amazon workers are STILL on strike!!!!
https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-amazon-employees-rage/
“This is crazy,“ said Gianpaolo Meloni, a worker at a fulfilment center in Castel San Giovanni, in northern Italy. "I can’t walk in the streets because the police will stop me if I don’t have a proper reason. Why do I have to go into the fulfilment center and work surrounded by thousands of people?”
“People are afraid,” said Agnieszka Mróz, a packer in Amazon’s warehouse in Poznań in western Poland and an activist at Inicjatywa Pracownicza (the Workers’ Initiative), a trade union. “This company is using our health to make a big fortune.”
The growing outrage in Europe underscores a paradox for Amazon, whose share price has so far held up better than other Silicon Valley giants during the crisis: The virus is a direct risk to the health of thousands of warehouse workers, but demand is off the charts.
To keep up with the surge, the company has said it would hire 100,000 additional workers in the U.S., and will no longer take in non-essential goods from third-party sellers, who account for about a third of the total offerings on the site.
But for the workers and unions in Europe, bringing in more people will only compound the risk of transmission, and put them at greater risk. The very nature of the job, they argue — criss-crossing other workers in a race to grab and stack packages and meet numerical productivity targets — goes against the principle of social distancing.
“If we have to wash our hands additionally, workers will be afraid to do it in fear that they will not meet their targets,” said Mróz.
So far, the company has avoided stricter regulation in the European Union while sticking by its policy of not negotiating with unions on work conditions. But as the tide of union outrage, protests and strikes grows higher, the firm could be pushed into a corner.
“Amazon workers are on the front lines of this crisis,” Christy Hoffmann, the general secretary of Switzerland-based UNI Global Union, said in a statement that also demanded that Amazon provide protective gear to its workers. “Amazon needs to negotiate with unions to ensure worker safety and smoothly functioning supply chains.“
In France, where the loudest protests have broken out, the government has signalled it wants Amazon to change its practices. The pressure Amazon puts on its employees is “unacceptable and we’ll let Amazon know,” Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told France Inter.