A petition signed by nearly 100,000 people calling for Amazon to pay more corporation tax in the U.K. is about to be given to the Prime Minister and has the support of the member of parliament who conducted hearings on avoidance of taxes by multinational companies last November, the Bookseller reported.Bookseller Frances Smith, one of the organizers of the petition, told the Bookseller: "Amazon may be obeying the letter of the law--but they're certainly not being fair. Last year Starbucks announced that they would look at their tax affairs in the U.K. It's time that Amazon did the same."
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In the aftermath of ARD's report on Amazon's treatment of temporary immigrant labor and use of a neo-Nazi security firm in at least one of its warehouses in Germany, the company's labor practices remain an issue. The New York Times today surveyed the "escalating battle between ver.di, one of Germany's largest unions, and Amazon," which has 8,000 permanent workers and last year had 10,000 temporary workers.
The paper wrote: "The continuing furor raises the question of whether Amazon will be the latest big American company to run afoul of German labor laws, which provide much broader worker rights than in the United States." The matter of Amazon not negotiating with the union is becoming an issue in the runup to national elections this fall.
Amazon v-p for worldwide operations Dave Clark said the company has learned the lesson of not "delegating to a third party" such things as "the accommodations of those folks"--the temporary workers. He also said that many of Amazon's permanent German workers began as temporary workers and that the company sought out foreign workers because it couldn't find enough local workers.
photo: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
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