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Andreas Gangl joined Amazon in 2009 aged 36, to work at one of the companyâs cavernous fulfilment centres in Bad Hersfeld, a small spa town in central Germany. At first the job was pretty good: pay was comparable to other manual roles, and a dayâs workload, printed out on paper, consisted mostly of packaging books and CDs.
In 2013 Bad Hersfeld became the first Amazon fulfilment centre in Germany to unionise. Two years later, led by Ganglâs coworker Christian Krähling, it was the founding place of Amazon Workers International (AWI), an organisation that has members in 175 fulfilment centres worldwide.