In Poland, Amazon Workers Are Organizing
Ever since Amazon arrived in Poland in 2014, the country has been a laboratory for the company's strategy of pitting workers of different nations against one another. We spoke with Polish shop-floor activists who are organizing Amazon workers for a global fightback.
Since opening its first fulfillment warehouse in Poznań in 2014, Amazon continues to expand its operations in Poland. (Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Although Amazon is based in the United States, its workforce now extends around the world. This has been used by the company to suppress wages and increase productivity through greater competition. But there are efforts to counter that strategy, with some workers across Europe building connections and the capacity to organize together. It is still an uphill battle as Amazon creates individual contracts for its locations, doing its best to pit workers against one another not only from country to country, but from warehouse to warehouse. Yet the efforts remain, pointing toward possibilities for the future of international organizing.
In a recent episode of Jacobin’s new podcast, Primer, Alex N. Press spoke with two workers from Poland who organize with Amazon Workers International (AWI): Magda Malinovska and Agnieszka Mroz. Unlike established, formal unions or union federations, AWI is a shop-floor organization, which is less formalized. Malinovska has worked at the fulfillment center in Poznań, Poland for five years, first as a picker and then alongside Agnieszka as a packer; Agnieszka started at Poznań, which was the first Amazon warehouse in Poland, when it opened in 2014. Amazon’s operations in the country have only expanded in the intervening years.
Agnieszka Mroz
In our warehouse, there are ten thousand workers, more or less. Amazon, of course, will not admit that; they will say there are three thousand workers with the blue badge [meaning permanent workers]. But there’s an additional amount of temp workers double that size, plus cleaners, who don’t have permanent contracts, plus workers in security. So that makes the workforce ten thousand workers — it’s a big warehouse.
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