Amazon: Amazon European Works Council agreement

After nearly four years of negotiations, on 11 May 2022, the management of e-commerce giant Amazon (238.000 employees), signed a European Works Council agreement. The EWC comprises 30 members, including representatives of the United Kingdom, and the agreement is governed by Irish law, following what the European trade union federations ETF and UNI Europa describe as the “sudden decision” of Amazon management to move the jurisdiction from Luxembourg to Ireland (see joint press release).
“We see this agreement as the first step to ensure workers’ participation, provided the management lives up to the commitments and obligations of the agreement”, explains Livia Spera, who is ETF’s General Secretary. For his part, Mathias Bolton, Head of UNI Global Commerce, is now calling on Amazon’s management “to engage in proper collective bargaining with trade unions”.
Clearly, this is a major event in the GAFA world, where negotiations to set up European Works Councils are all either bogged down or simply non-existent. It is remarkable too, that Amazon management, which adopts a strongly anti-union position in the USA, is opening up to social dialogue in Europe, with the signing of a national agreement for Italian workers in September 2021 (see ETF press release) and now the signing of a EWC agreement that will open the door to a European social dialogue.
Although management originally adopted the typical position of letting the negotiations drag on for as long as possible (three years), it changed its position at the end of 2021, when the negotiations that had been interrupted during the Covid-19 crisis, resumed. The agreement provides for two annual EWC meetings and four Select Committee meetings (two of which are held away from the annual meetings), with simultaneous interpreting.
The EWC has a number of resources at its disposal, such as 24 paid hours per year for members of the European committee and 72 paid hours for Select Committee members, plus an entitlement to 15 days of support per year from an expert and 5 days of training per member over their four year term of office. The EWC has to choose a single expert, which therefore means opting either for a consultant or a trade-union expert.
The weaknesses of the agreement include the high threshold set for employee representation (1,000 in a country), and the threshold set for organising an extraordinary meeting of the Select Committee: a proposal must concern 5% of the workforce (i.e. 12,000 employees in the EU) and at least 7% of the workforce in at least two countries over a period of no more than 90 days. These percentages are also used to determine whether a transnational issue is sufficiently important to warrant initiating an information and consultation process.
The agreement’s scope of application has been the subject of intense discussions: the EWC is staffed by employees of Amazon’s ‘Operations’ division in the EU, which excludes a (minority) proportion of group employees who do not work directly in warehouses or logistics. This point is legally debatable, as the EWC must represent a group’s entire workforce in Europe.
Sebastian Schulze-Marmeling, the (Syndex-wmp consult) external consultant who accompanied the special negotiating body, explains: “The compromise is that the EWC covers all European employees, but will be informed and consulted only within the scope of ‘Amazon Operations’ and merely informed regarding other activities.” Also worthy of note is a conciliation clause that applies in the event of a dispute, with recourse to two conciliators appointed by each party.
(Article published in IR Notes 186 – 18 May 2022)