The world’s largest online mail order company Amazon has announced the closure of a large logistics center in Germany for the first time. The US group wants to close the logistics center in Brieselang near Berlin, as a company spokesman confirmed on Tuesday on request. This was communicated to the employees. The Correctiv research team had previously reported on this. Appropriate talks and negotiations on the closure of the plant have been started with the local works council.
At the same time, Amazon announced that it would open two new logistics centers in Germany “which should create around 2,000 attractive new jobs over the next three years”. With employees in Brieselang, possibilities are to be explored to switch to other Amazon locations in Germany. Berlin-Brandenburg remains an important region for Amazon, in which investments will continue.
According to the information provided, the Brieselang logistics center was opened in 2013. Around 600 people work there. The closure is justified with the “relatively old building” that cannot be brought up to date. This building offers no possibility for further development.
Deficit equipment division
At the beginning of the year, Amazon announced the elimination of more than 18,000 jobs worldwide. It is the largest job cuts in the history of the US Internet company founded in 1994. Amazon recently employed around 1.5 million people, most of them in the delivery and warehousing infrastructure.
The US group had already started to cut jobs on a large scale in November. Amazon had previously hired numerous employees because of the order boom in the pandemic. In hindsight, that turned out to be an exaggeration. The wave of terminations should initially primarily affect the loss-making device division around Echo smart speakers and the Alexa language assistant program. But the job cuts also include other sectors.
According to Amazon, it currently operates 20 logistics locations in Germany. In the German logistics network alone, there are “significantly more than 20,000 permanent” employees.
