Just to present the full picture. In the end, either there will be a price found. But I'd say good for Italian workers for making the labour market more of a market
> And so will either increase prices or slow down delivery.
Not really. Germany is small enough that it doesn't really matter if you get it from a German or a Polish warehouse (that sits directly behind the border). (Amazon Prime deliveries and similar stuff excluded - but that's a very small percentage)
> Also, I don't know wether Italy has sane strike laws or not, but in Germany amazon would not be allowed to just fire the strikers, and there is and was non-negligible PR fallout from the strikes.
You don't fire anyone. You just don't invest there any more to keep up with your xx% growth every year. You just do that behind the border.
I hope I didn't come off as aggressive. While I am very much on the sides of the workers here as a self identified socialist (since I run a company I don't really get much cred from most socialist in-groups though), I try not to be blind to market realities and alternative view points
>Not really. Germany is small enough that it doesn't really matter if you get it from a German or a Polish warehouse (that sits directly behind the border). (Amazon Prime deliveries and similar stuff excluded - but that's a very small percentage)
Margins matter at that scale, otherwise amazon would have never opened warehouses in Germany (they never did in switzerland AFAIK). Same thing with the "small percentage" of prime: anecdotaly, if I can't buy it with prime, I don't bother with amazon, because then I can just support some independent store. It won't affect people too much, but it is definetely not a no brainer.
>You don't fire anyone. You just don't invest there any more to keep up with your xx% growth every year. You just do that behind the border.
True. But then you also have politics to think about...without investing, you don't have as much indirect political clout.
If anything ,while the most likely outcome is what you describe, there will be the next time the question of an "amazon tax" comes up and without being an employer, amazon will have to invest more into lobbying, which might work but fuel resentment...nothing ever stays still, unless people just accept the status quo
Incidentally, that's not exactly true. It's about a 6-8 hour drive from Berlin to the southwest by car, that would be around 10 hours or more by track, and only if you're not stuck in traffic and the place is right on the autobahn. Distance to the polish border adds an extra hour or two. This does not include any delay for handling packages in a distribution center. Next-day delivery would be very hard to achieve consistently from any location in the border-regions of Germany. There's a reason why one of the largest of Amazons German distribution centers is located in Bad Hersfeld, right here https://www.google.de/maps/place/Amazon+Logistik+GmbH+-+FRA1...
It's very much THE central point when it comes to traffic in Germany: Intersection of the A4, A7, A5/A6 giving you excellent routes into each part of Germany and close vicinity to the population centers in the Rhine and Ruhr valley
You're constructing a straw man here or maybe you're misinformed: A strike is a structured process that requires a prior vote by the union members. And people don't get paid during strike.
So what they are doing is entirely within their employment contracts.