Amazon, Bracing for Strikes in Germany, Plans to Hire Engineers

Werner Vogels, the chief technology officer at Amazon, said the company chose Germany because it was the largest market in Europe and because Berlin was a good source of qualified software engineers and application developers.

Mr. Vogels said Amazon’s sales of cloud-computing were accelerating in Europe, as technology managers sought to cut costs and were increasingly reassured that sensitive corporate data could stay secure in remote data centers.

“All I can say is we are very happy with the development of cloud-computing sales in Europe,” Mr. Vogels said during an interview at the cloud-computing conference in Berlin, which was attended by 935 software developers.

The engineers would work with a team at Amazon’s European headquarters in Dublin but be based in Berlin and Dresden.

At the same time, the U.S. tech giant is girding for possible strikes by workers at two of its largest distribution centers in Europe.

Amazon employees in Bad Hersfeld who belong to ver.di, a German trade union, voted Monday to authorize a strike. Mechthild Middeke, a ver.di spokeswoman organizing workers at the Bad Hersfeld plant, said 97.6 percent of ver.di workers at the facility had voted to strike.

The employees want Amazon to sign a collective bargaining agreement used by some local employers, which ver.di says could increase the annual pay and benefits of Amazon workers as much as a third. Amazon has refused to sign the agreement, arguing that the U.S. company pays workers at levels comparable to other local online retailers, Ms. Middeke said.

Ver.di wants Amazon to pay the roughly 9,000 workers at its eight logistics centers in the country as “retailing” workers under German law, which would qualify them for the higher pay. Amazon says the workers are “logistics” employees, who on average earn €9.30, or $12.10, an hour in their first year of service and more than €10 an hour thereafter.

“We will do everything possible should there be strikes to make sure that our customers in Germany are served,” said Christine Höger, a spokeswoman for Amazon Germany in Munich. Ms. Höger said that Amazon paid its logistics employees more than comparable German businesses pay for logistics workers.

Ver.di members at Amazon’s distribution center in Leipzig voted last month to strike. Dates for the strikes have not been set, Ms. Middeke, the union representative, said. She declined to say if her union represented a majority of workers at either Amazon facility.

“A work stoppage will take place in the near future,” Ms. Middeke said.

Ms. Höger said Amazon had attempted to reach agreement with ver.di representatives, but had made little progress.

“We had several informal talks with ver.di over the past few weeks,” Ms. Höger said during an interview. “While we are willing to continue our conversation, we also see too little common ground for negotiations at the moment.”

Heribert Jöris, the managing director of Handelsverband Deutschland, the main association representing employers in the German retailing industry, said he estimated the chances of a strike at Amazon’s facilities as “very high.”

The employers’ association in January canceled a nationwide collective bargaining agreement covering workers at 100,000 retailing businesses, saying it wanted changes in compensation and work practices that date from the 1950s.

Employers and unions are expecting to begin negotiations on a new contract within weeks. Ver.di this year organized a strike by workers at Zara, the clothing retailer, and has threatened work stoppages at Globus, a discount chain, Mr. Jöris said. But in neither case have employers agreed to new wage pacts, he added.

“I’m pretty sure there will be strikes now,” Mr. Jöris said. “But that doesn’t mean the strikes will be successful.”

Mr. Vogels, a Dutchman who is based in Seattle, declined to comment on the labor situation at Amazon’s retailing operations in Germany.

The new engineers would be hired by a division of Amazon, Amazon Web Services, over the next 12 months. The developers would work for a new subsidiary, Amazon Development Center Germany, which would make applications and other software tools for customers of Amazon’s cloud-computing business.

Amazon offers its European business customers like Royal Dutch Shell; Kempinski Hotels, a chain based in Geneva; and Unilever the option of storing their data in computing centers that it runs inside the European Union to satisfy a law that requires business to handle the data of E.U. citizens within the 27-nation bloc.

Jeremy Ward, a senior vice president for information technology at the Kempinski chain, which is majority owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Thailand, is in the middle of a five-year project to shift its corporate computer functions to Amazon’s cloud.

Mr. Ward said Kempinski was on track to cut its annual I.T. costs by 40 percent as it moved functions like an internal employee telephone directory, training videos and corporate news, currently run by 143 Kempinski servers, into the cloud.

“I think increasingly businesses are dropping their preconceived notions and are beginning to take advantage of the savings in the cloud,” Mr. Ward said in an interview at the conference.

Microsoft Sends Engineers to Schools to Encourage the Next Generation

“My teacher said there’s a lot of money to be made in computer science,” Leandre said. “It could be really helpful in the future.”

That teacher, Steven Edouard, knows a few things about the subject. When he is not volunteering as a computer science instructor four days a week, Mr. Edouard works at Microsoft. He is one of 110 engineers from high-tech companies who are part of a Microsoft program aimed at getting high school students hooked on computer science, so they go on to pursue careers in the field.

In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a shortage of computer science graduates — one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation’s economy.

There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers. But despite the hoopla around start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, fewer than 14,000 American students received undergraduate degrees in computer science last year, the Computing Research Association estimates. And the wider job market remains weak.

“People can’t get jobs, and we have jobs that can’t be filled,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel who oversees its philanthropic efforts, said in a recent interview.

Big technology companies have complained for years about a dearth of technical talent, a problem they have tried to solve by lobbying for looser immigration rules to accommodate more foreign engineers and sponsoring tech competitions to encourage student interest in the industry. Google, for one, holds a programming summer camp for incoming ninth graders and underwrites an effort called CS4HS, in which high school teachers sharpen their computer science skills in workshops at local universities.

But Microsoft is sending its employees to the front lines, encouraging them to commit to teaching a high school computer science class for a full school year. Its engineers, who earn a small stipend for their classroom time, are in at least two hourlong classes a week and sometimes as many as five. Schools arrange the classes for first thing in the day to avoid interfering with the schedules of the engineers, who often do not arrive at Microsoft until the late morning.

The program started as a grass-roots effort by Kevin Wang, a Microsoft engineer with a master’s degree in education from Harvard.

In 2009, he began volunteering as a computer science teacher at a Seattle public high school on his way to work. After executives at Microsoft caught wind of what he was doing, they put financial support behind the effort — which is known as Technology Education and Literacy in Schools, or Teals — and let Mr. Wang run it full time.

The program is now in 22 schools in the Seattle area and has expanded to more than a dozen other schools in Washington, Utah, North Dakota, California and other states this academic year. Microsoft wants other big technology companies to back the effort so it can broaden the number of outside engineers involved.

This year, only 19 of the 110 teachers in the program are not Microsoft employees. In some cases, the program has thrown together volunteers from companies that spend a lot of their time beating each other up in the marketplace.

“I think education and bringing more people into the field is something all technology companies agree on,” said Alyssa Caulley, a Google software engineer, who, along with a Microsoft volunteer, is teaching a computer science class at Woodside High School in Woodside, Calif.

While computer science can be an intimidating subject, Microsoft has sought to connect it to the technologies most students use in their everyday lives. At Rainier Beach High recently, Peli de Halleux, a Microsoft software engineer, taught a class on making software for mobile phones.

The students buried their faces in the phones, supplied by Microsoft. They were asked to create programs that performed simple functions, like playing a random song when the phones were shaken.