No, but they are on the borderline of what is acceptable in German society.
> One of the articles you linked to states that Amazon is already paying higher than average wages.
I have not read them, as I was just trying to fetch some English related information for the HN audience.
The information I have, from memory, is from German newspapers.
The whole situation worked as follows:
- offer a job to people at the job center (quite nice)
- since they are at job center, the job cannot be refused unless for special reasons
- pay them the bare minimum, almost lower than the unemployment fund after taxes
- have them work extra-hours without compensation
- let them go, re-hire from the endless pool at job center
Also the guys doing deliveries, are at multiple levels of sub-contractors. Have a wage that barely pays the fuel and monthly expenses, with a variable bonus attached to the amount of successful deliveries per day.
Since they are not to blame for people not being at home, they try to deliver the packages to just about anyone in the neighbourhood, thus leaving a information to collect at place X, not always the post office.
There was an undercover story about this a couple of years ago, done by a famous German reporter, Günter Wallraff.
Maybe this situation today is different and has improved a lot, but this was how it used to be from the newspapers info.