Solidarity letter from Poland to the workers on strike at the Amazon warehouse in Spain
Dear friends from MAD4!
We are impressed by your mobilization and your determination in the fight to maintain and improve your working conditions and wages. We want to express our solidarity and wish you good luck and stamina for the struggle against Amazon!
In 2016, here in Poland, 2,000 Amazon workers took part in a strike ballot and voted „yes” for strike. Despite that we could not organize it due to restrictive Polish labor law.
Your struggle inspires us, because you have the courage to fight for what you deserve!
In Amazon warehouses in Spain, Germany, France, Poland, and other countries we organize and fight for the same thing. We reject the exploitation by a few bosses who get rich thanks to our work and spend money on their toys. It is at the cost of hundreds of thousands of workers at Amazon worldwide and at the expense of our families. We refuse to be cheap labor!
We have many similar problems: permanent control by managers, low wages, high pressure to increase productivity. Every week managers give us negative feedbacks, even when we make 99 percent of the expected rate, and they say they can fire us if we get four feedbacks.
Therefore, when Jeff Bezos comes to Europe soon – to Berlin on April 24 – we are going to meet him there so we can give him hundreds of negative feedbacks – this time from us!
We will collect feedbacks from warehouse workers in Poland in the next few weeks, and we invite you to do the same – let’s show Bezos together that we reject the treatment we get!
We also invite you to join the Cross-Border Meeting of Amazon Workers which has taken place regularly for three years. The next meeting will be in Germany near Frankfurt (in Bad Hersfeld, Amazon’s FRA) in September 2018. Through this exchange, we have first-hand information which helps us to effectively organize in our warehouses. (For more on the meetings, please, see www.amworkers.wordpress.com).
In your current struggle, we wish you strength so you can resist the pressure!
We, the workers, work hard and Amazon doesn’t give us anything for free while it is us who make its giant profits. Therefore we deserve to be treated with dignity, not like robots, all over the world!
One day before your strike we are going to distribute leaflets among workers at Amazon’s POZ1 in Poland to present your demands. We will also explain that there is no point to work under bigger pressure in case Amazon wants us to send out those parcels that cannot be sent from your warehouse due to the strike. We don’t want to be used as scabs!
We support the strikers at Amazon in Spain!
Without a fight you cannot count on a better life!
OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza at Amazon Fulfillment Poland
Poznan, March 19, 2018
amazing workers 