Amazon workers went on strike this year during Prime Day. On Monday, almost 1,800 workers in Spain went on strike during the shopping holiday. That’s not all, thousands more are expected to walk off the job today in Germany, too. Prime Day, Amazon’s biggest sales day of the year, is actually a few days long. It began at 3 p.m. EST on Monday and goes for 36 hours into Tuesday, July 17.
The Comisiones Obreras and Verdi services union, which are the ones that represent the warehouse workers, want better working conditions, pay, and health benefits for the workers. “The message is clear — while the online giant gets rich, it is saving money on the health of its workers,” Verdi spokeswoman Stefanie Nutzenberger said in a statement on the German union’s website according to the Washington Post . A spokeswoman, Melanie Etches, for the shopping empire stated in an email that “Amazon is a fair and responsible employer and as such we are committed to dialogue, which is an inseparable part of our culture.”
Thousands of workers striking isn’t the only issue Amazon had this year for Prime Day. A computer glitch also caused the website to crash momentarily. According to DownDetector , a website that monitors web traffic on sites, at 3:04 p.m. just four minutes into the Prime Day extravaganza, the website crashed for certain users. Many could not access the website, receiving a “Sorry something went wrong on our end” message.
Users tried contacting and tweeting to Amazon but the company did not respond until 5 p.m. EST, saying, “Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime Day in the U.S., customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour of last year. There are hundreds of thousands of deals to come and more than 34 hours to shop Prime Day.”
— Amazon (@amazon) July 16, 2018
There is still time, however, for Amazon to save Prime Day. “I’m sure they are working furiously and many heads are rolling,” Sucharita Kodali, an analyst for market research company Forrester, told Time . “Even Sears has managed to salvage Black Friday crashes with much smaller teams.”
As for the strike, it looks like that may not have that quick of a resolution. Many shopping boycotts will begin against Amazon this week because they sell Nazi, Confederate, and white nationalist merchandise.
“People are demanding change, not just from politicians but also businesses. The goal of #PrimeDayofAction is to raise awareness about the harmful practices of the nation’s largest online retailer and to ask: is there anything Amazon won’t do for a dollar?” the Action Center on Race and the Economy said in a statement promoting the protests according to the Washington Post .
