Strikes are erupting over Amazon’s attitude towards unions (Wall Street Journal subscription):

For the 16 years the online retailer has done business in Germany, it has shunned the nation’s consensus-driven labor model. It ignores trade unions and largely dictates contract terms at its nine German distribution centers, where it employs about 9,000.Germany’s Verdi labor union has been trying to change that, signing up Amazon employees and this week launching the latest in a series of strikes in an effort to get management’s ear. It hasn’t gotten far. Currently, the union has no say at Amazon.

“From my point of view, Verdi and Amazon don’t go together,” says Robert Marhan, Amazon’s general manager at a warehouse in the central German town of Bad Hersfeld, which has become a logistics hub.

As in the U.S., where Amazon has resisted unions, the company in Germany deals directly with its staff, talking with employees and on-site councils of employee representatives. “What we have is a culture that we see as foreign,” says Verdi President Frank Bsirske, who calls Amazon’s approach unilateral and arbitrary.

This is perhaps the most jarring point, even if the reporter didn’t quite explain it:

The conflict is emblematic of the trans-Atlantic tension between U.S. business practices and Europe’s more labor-friendly traditions. As globalized commerce expands in Europe, unions are digging to avoid losing more influence.

What the sentence should have said was: Amazon is trying to export the viciously anti-union, pro-business practices allowed by U.S. law–thanks to a right-wing U.S. Supreme Court and bi-partisan support–to Germany and other countries which have followed a labor-business model that encourages discussion and sharing of prosperity.And, basically, Amazon is doing its best to exploit people and play on fear in its 2nd biggest market, though again the article tries to neutralize the meaning of the company’s behavior:

Amazon has opened German warehouses in areas of high unemployment where people may be more concerned about jobs than about joining the union. It also ships from around Europe. New sites that open this month in Eastern Europe, where unions are weaker, have the potential to reduce the need to add German staff.

This is nothing new:

Amazon, founded in 1994 as a fledgling online book retailer in the earliest days of the Internet, has only in the past few years become the target of labor-abuse allegations, most recently this year with several U.S.-based lawsuits in five states, including one brought by Heimbach in Pennsylvania. Chief among the complaints, which could soon be consolidated into a nationwide class action lawsuit, is the allegation that Amazon.com fails to compensate hourly workers for time spent waiting in airport-like security lines each time they exit the warehouse. Aimed at combatting product theft, this process can take up to 20 minutes.The suits also contend that while employees get a strictly regimented 30-minute unpaid lunch break, much of that time can be taken up walking from one end of the warehouse to the other. The lawsuits also claim the company is so radically fastidious with workers’ time that it requires employees to count the start and end of their two paid 15-minute breaks per shift from their work stations.

“If it takes three minutes from the moment the bell rings to get to the break room, now you’ve only got 12 minutes left to rest. But then you have to use three minutes to get back to your work area before the next bell rings, so your break is really nine minutes,” Heimbach told International Business Times. “And they constantly monitor you with supervisors that look at computer screens.”

Which is, by the way, one reason many people were just aghast that, of all places, the president recently chose an Amazon distribution center to talk about middle-class jobs.