Amazon Poland: Over 2000 people want to go on strike but restrictive Polish labor laws prohibit it

2,100 votes for strike – too little in Poland

The strike ballot was carried out jointly for all workers in the Polish Amazon centers – not only for about 5,700 permanent workers in Poznań and Wrocław combined, but also for about 4,000 temporary workers whose numbers vary greatly depending on the sales season.
Under Polish labor dispute law, unions may only call a strike if more than fifty per cent of the entire workforce participate in a strike ballot and if a majority votes in favor of strike action.

For that reason, the road to a legal strike in Poland is even more difficult than in Germany where a strike ballot is not legally prescribed. If a trade union decides to hold a strike ballot in accordance with its statutes the ballot is carried out exclusively among the union members in the company. 75 per cent of them must then vote in favor of strike in order to win the ballot.
According to figures published by IP on June 23 1,605 permanent workers and 496 temporary workers voted “Yes” in Poznań and Wrocław while 39 permanent workers and ten temporary workers voted “No”. [9] Not counting nine invalid votes, the proportion of “Yes” votes totaled 97.3 per cent. The number of “Yes” votes might have been enough for a strike even under Polish law if a majority of workers had participated in the strike ballot.

However, in the run-up to the ballot, Amazon management had held department meetings and warned workers in no uncertain terms not to participate in the strike ballot. Successfully it seems, as hardly thirty per cent of Amazon workers in Poznań and Wrocław ended up participating. Just for comparison: during the successful ballot at Amazon in Leipzig in March 2013 there were also 97 per cent “Yes” votes for strike. However, the ballot took place among only approximately 520 Ver.di members – not among the entire workforce of 1,900.

English translation of the German article: http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/48/48638/1.html by Ralf Ruckus and Jan Podróżny, June 26, 2016