As companies grow unwieldy in America, they often do so relatively quickly, and with such ferocity that it is almost impossible to sustain all of the goodwill of the founders – sometimes as that person changes with fame and fortune and no longer sees employees as anything but shaded areas of charts and graphs.
And, when this threshold is crossed, things have a way of getting a wee bit turbulent – especially in the United States, where taking guff from anyone is more suspicious than being abrasive.
On Black Friday, one of the world’s most powerful companies began to feel that they were upon the precipice of such trouble.
Thousands of Amazon warehouse workers are today staging a mass Black Friday strike across 40 countries including the US and Germany in a row over pay and working conditions.
The global strike action on one of the biggest shopping days of the year was called for by campaign group Make Amazon Pay. It has titled the protests ‘Make Amazon Pay Day’.
The initiative, promoted by groups on Twitter under #MakeAmazonPay listed the industrial action planned in the 40 countries across the globe.
The movement had gone nationwide as well.
Employees at a company workhouse in St Peters, Missouri, will today stop work as part of the protests and Whole Foods stores owned by Amazon will also take labor actions. Strike action will also take place in Bessemer, Alabama; Columbia, Maryland; Detroit, Michigan; Durham, North Carolina; Garner ; Joliet, Illinois; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, D.C.
Black Friday is the symbolic start to the Christmas consumerism season, and the key time in the national economic recovery.
