Gig Economy & Retail Stores

Online retail behemoth Amazon actively lobbies European political institutions to help increase its profits. However, the company twice refused to testify on labor concerns in the last two years and denied official delegations access to warehouses. After Members of the European Parliament and NGOs complained, the company’s access to European Parliament buildings was revoked in February 2024. Read More

Erik Adolph, an UberEats food delivery driver in California, sued Uber in 2019 for failing to pay work-related expenses. The company argued that drivers aren’t employees and so they aren’t eligible for expenses. Uber also argued that the drivers signed contracts agreeing not to sue. The California Supreme Court ruled that such contracts violated the worker’s legal rights. Read More

“Signing up to work at Amazon is strangely easy, it really isn’t much of a hiring process. Liam*, a 34-year old worker in the city of Edmonton in the Canadian province of Alberta, told CorpWatch. “You just have to put your name and SIN number [Social Insurance Number] on the internet and you’re hired.” Read More

Protests over working conditions are mounting against Coupang, the biggest e-commerce website in South Korea. In July, workers took an air conditioner on a 50 kilometer march from the company headquarters to a Hwaseong warehouse to bring attention to their demands for respite from record high temperatures this summer. Read More

On May Day, food delivery couriers at Deliveroo in the United Arab Emirates, went on a rare strike against pay cuts. A short video of hundreds of workers milling around in their turquoise-colored work uniforms went viral, encouraging workers at Talabat, a rival food delivery platform, to follow suit. Read More

Workers have been organizing to form unions at: Read More

“The living conditions – catastrophe: Mice running around the kitchen. When I tried opening the fridge, the door came off. You’d get a better sleep on the floor than on the beds provided,” Maria*, a Polish worker in the Netherlands employed by T&S Flexwerk, told CorpWatch. Read More

In late March 2022, workers at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, voted on whether or not to unionize. On April 1st, the election results were announced and the final vote count was 2654 “yes" and 2131 “no". This marks the first time US workers have successfully voted to form a union in Amazon's 27-year history. Read More

Indigenous communities in South Africa have taken to the streets in Cape Town, South Africa, to protest retail behemoth Amazon’s plans to build a sprawling new headquarters at the foot of Table Mountain, at the confluence of Liesbeek and Black Rivers. Read More

Six major investment firms announced that they will not buy shares of Deliveroo – a UK online food delivery company that operates in 12 countries around the world – in a major victory for employee rights activists who have campaigned against the company’s poor working conditions. Read More