[ver.di campaign] Not a minute goes unpaid: No more unpaid minutes on Amazon!

Amazon: Polnische Leiharbeiter/innen von Manpower forden ihre Löhne! “Unpaid time is a problem at Amazon. Threshold, changing and travel times are not paid. Every Amazon employee loses 10 to 35 minutes of working time every day. Example: Because of 10 minutes of unpaid time per day, an L1 associate in Berlin works for Amazon for free for 4.5 days a year and has lost €618 in gross wages. This is a conscious decision by Amazon to make money off the backs of its employees…”The multilingual campaign page from ver.di postal services, shipping companies and logistics externer Link started in connection with the 2026 works council elections at Amazon. See more about this:

Amazon workers in four delivery and sorting centers in Germany are organizing to get paid for every minute
“Amazon workers in four delivery and sorting centers in Germany are organizing themselves to make the most of every minute. They are demanding that Amazon pay them for every minute they work, declaring in a petition that the company is stealing their time.
Even if you count just 10 unpaid minutes per day, workers say, that adds up to 4.5 days of unpaid work per year - the equivalent of about $712 (€618) in stolen wages. In extreme cases, the stolen time can be up to 45 minutes per day.
The petition identifies three methods Amazon uses to steal employees' time:
1) The “threshold time”: If an employee clocks in up to 15 minutes early for a shift or clocks out up to 15 minutes late, the company rounds the time down to the planned working time.
2) The time to put on safety equipment and work shoes
3) The walking time to pick up and return work equipment (…)
Amazon has long subjected its workers to a regime of algorithmic surveillance, tracking their every move to squeeze out even more productivity. This was a major impetus for unionization, as workers are penalized for “absence from work” or missing productivity targets – a form of algorithmic management. This is old-fashioned 20th century Taylorism. Amazon has taken it from the era of stopwatches and clipboards to today's algorithms by giving workers simple instructions to follow and monitoring them along the way.
CORPORATE CONTROL
High-tech wage theft is the latest battlefield. Christian Harenberg, foreman, member of the Verdi union and deputy chairman of the works council at an Amazon delivery station in Berlin, is committed to returning to a time recording system that records the exact times an employee clocks in and clocks out. The petition is the start of revitalizing the institutional structures of the works councils at his location.
Works councils, a creation of German law, are elected representative bodies of employees who meet with management to clarify everyday work issues. As a Verdi member and deputy chairman, Harenberg is the spokesman and advocate for the employees; He and his works council colleagues convene a general meeting four times a year. (In Germany, supervisors belong to unions.) Harenberg explains the "threshold time" system as follows: "Let's say your shift lasts from 7:00 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. and you clock out at 1:40 a.m. - then the time automatically jumps back to 1:30 a.m. even if you have worked those additional 10 minutes, and this applies to up to 15 minutes before and after the shift."
It feels particularly unfair, says Harenberg, that "when your manager asks you to stay a little longer, the company says that if you have 10 minutes of extra work, the manager is responsible for recording it manually, but you have no way of influencing it." (…)
Verdi divides its organizational areas into a logistics area, which includes the delivery and sorting centers, and a trading area, which includes the fulfillment centers. Fulfillment centers employ thousands of people in each warehouse. The employees there have repeatedly organized strikes since 2013. Amazon has had fulfillment centers in Germany for over 20 years. However, the sorting and distribution centers are more recent - they were built in the last nine years and are run by migrants from Latin America and Africa. They are significantly smaller than fulfillment centers and only employ a few hundred people.
The interaction of these factors - a workforce consisting predominantly of migrants, as in the USA, and newer locations without strike experience - meant that Verdi had difficulty gaining a foothold there, including on the works council, let alone establishing union representation. …
The consequence of this institutional weakness, according to Verdi organizer Boris Bojilov, is that works councils can be dominated by employees who tend to conform to management. This danger exists in all Amazon locations, but especially in newer and smaller locations where it is more difficult to hold works council elections. This has created an opportunity for Amazon to exploit union vulnerabilities in the logistics sector.
Bojilov believes that Amazon's strategy for building worker power must be based on leveraging existing works council structures to create a culture of unionization. “Amazon will not give in easily from a legal standpoint,” he said. “They say this quite openly in the negotiations with the works councils – if you are successful here and we have to give you, for example, five minutes of changing time, two minutes of travel time or two minutes of threshold time, then they have to introduce this at all locations.”
As for organizing work, "we're trying to create as many rebellious works councils as possible," he said. "We're trying to coordinate them so that they all go to the arbitration boards, which causes chaos and costs for Amazon. And at some point they will say: 10 works councils go to the arbitration board, one day costs €12,000 [or $13,842]. That's about 10 days of negotiations per year, multiplied by 10 locations." (…)
Another fight is just beginning. Harenberg explained that shifts at the delivery station typically last eight hours, but Amazon is now pushing for 10-hour shifts during peak season. The legal maximum is 48 hours per week. And the employees at the Berlin delivery station rely on these working hours. “We have tried to reduce working hours for health reasons, especially in high season,” said Harenberg. But the employees rejected this. "They want those hours. They want the money."
According to German labor law, the working week lasts eight hours, Monday to Saturday. On average, Amazon employees work 48 hours per week.
“Night shifts will be extended to 10 hours in high season,” said de Palma. "Of course it's not good for your health to work 10-hour night shifts from 11:10 p.m. to 9:30 a.m. "In the long term," she said, "I think we need to work towards getting a collective bargaining agreement so that we can earn better wages and people don't have to rely on that overtime. And we also need to find a better solution for the peak season so that people don't end up in a position where they feel like they have to do that overtime.”“ EnglishArticle by Luis Feliz Leon from September 28, 2026 in LaborNotes (“German Amazon Workers Organize to Get Paid for Every Minute”, machine translated) – nothing current found at ver.di…
Not a minute goes unpaid! ver.di activists are preparing works council elections at Amazon
“Many colleagues at Amazon know this from their everyday work: the shift officially starts at a certain time - but in order to start on time, they have to be there significantly earlier. Move, check in, get equipment, prepare. This often takes 10 minutes. This time is necessary for work. Still, she doesn't get paid. When you enter the company, you will be stamped digitally. But exactly at the official start of the shift, the clock is simply reset to zero. Day after day, 10 to 35 minutes of working time disappear. Even short overtime hours of less than 15 minutes simply fall by the wayside. In the end, at least 15 minutes of pay are missing every day - sometimes more. For a billion-dollar company like Amazon, this is not an oversight or an isolated case. It has a system and is a conscious decision – at the expense of the employees. (…)That's why around 80 ver.di activists and works council members from all over Germany met in Berlin on November 8, 2025. At the Amazon Active Conference they exchanged ideas, learned from each other and discussed together how the situation could be changed. Because one thing is clear: Without union strength, nothing moves at Amazon. The company does a lot to keep unions out of the company. This makes it all the more important that we join forces.
Our roadmap for the future: What’s important now
A concrete roadmap emerged from the discussions. The common motto is: Not a minute goes unpaid on Amazon! The next steps:
1) Even before the official works council election campaign, ver.di activists are launching a petition in the areas of Amazon Logistics and Transportation. The aim is to mobilize colleagues and make it visible how many are fed up with this unpaid time. The message is clear: we will no longer allow our time to be stolen!
2) The unpaid threshold and set-up times and every ignored minute of overtime become the central issue of the works council elections. ver.di wants strong majorities in the committees – with a clear mandate from the workforce.
3) After the election, the decisive phase begins: The newly elected works councils fight for a binding works agreement that ensures that every minute of working time counts and is paid for. So that no more life is wasted. So that even the last second counts…”Report from February 2nd, 2026 from ver.di postal services, shipping companies and logistics to:
[Campaign] Not a single minute goes unpaid. No more unpaid minutes on Amazon!
The multilingual campaign page from ver.di postal services, shipping companies and logistics

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