In Achim, near Bremen in Lower Saxony, the online mail order company Amazon opened its new location in north-west Germany in May 2021. With 2000 new jobs, Amazon became one of the largest employers in the Bremen region. Business is particularly booming at Christmas, which led to Amazon hiring an additional 800 employees in the run-up to Christmas. On 23 December - one day before Christmas - it was then announced that a large number of these workers would have to leave again for the new year. According to estimates by the trade union Verdi, 600 of them will have to leave.

While Amazon claims to have told the workers in advance that they would only be employed over the Christmas period, the workers were mostly unaware of this. The company is also known in its country of origin, the USA, for being a particularly bad employer. Here in Germany, and thus also at the Achim site, migrants and refugees often work, and if they are allowed to work at all, they are put into shitty jobs. Amazon and others like to take advantage of the fact that the workers often do not speak good German to enforce measures that often even violate labour law. Such chauvinistic practices are commonplace.

Economically, of course, Amazon's approach makes sense for the company. If there is a lot of work to be done and a lot of money to be made, then you will be employed - but if you are no longer needed, you will be kicked out again in no time. Corporations like Amazon try to maintain their flexibility this way, because the longer the workers are in the company, the more "rights" they get in the company. In order to prevent this and to return to normal operations after Christmas, hundreds of Amazon colleagues are now losing their jobs.