In Germany, a Union Culture Clashes With Amazon’s Labor Practices

But across the Atlantic — nein, non, no.

Even as President Obama spoke about middle-class jobs last week at an Amazon warehouse in Tennessee, Amazon was facing strikes at warehouses in Germany, its second-biggest market. Unions there say the company has imported American-style business practices — in particular, an antipathy to organized labor — that stand at odds with European norms.

“In Germany, the idea that warehouse workers are going to be getting opposition from an employer when it comes to the right to organize, that’s virtually unheard-of,” said Marcus Courtney, a technology and communications department head at Uni Global Union, a federation of trade unions based in Nyon, Switzerland. “It puts Amazon out in left field.”

Amazon is hardly out there alone, however. Large American technology companies are increasingly running into obstacles as they expand in Europe. For Facebook and Google, the running issue is privacy. Google was fined this year by German authorities for illegally collecting personal data while creating its Street View mapping service, after facing minimal sanctions over Street View at home. Meanwhile, European privacy regulators are considering tough regulations to protect consumers on the Internet, a direct challenge to Google, Facebook and other online companies that mine personal data.

Antitrust officials in Europe are scrutinizing Apple’s relationships with wireless carriers, as well as Google’s competitive practices. And Google, Apple and Amazon have all been criticized by European lawmakers for tactics that help them minimize their tax bills.

Amazon has been criticized for its working conditions in the United States — but not nearly to the same extent as in Europe. On the surface, Amazon’s labor problems in Germany revolve around wages.

The union says workers in warehouses in two small German cities are properly classified as retail employees, and should be paid at the higher rate required for people who work in department stores and other retail outlets. Amazon says they are more properly classified as warehouse workers, and paid at a lower rate.

The subtext, though, is Amazon’s opposition to unions in its warehouses as a general principle, because the company fears unions will slow down the kind of behind-the-scenes innovation that has propelled its growth.

Dave Clark, the company’s vice president of worldwide operations and customer service, says Amazon views unions as intermediaries that will want to have a say on everything from employee scheduling to changes in processes for handling and packaging orders. Amazon prizes its ability to quickly introduce changes like these into its warehouses to improve the experience of its customers, he said.

Last year, the company spent $775 million to buy a manufacturer of robots that it plans to eventually deploy in its warehouses, though it has not said when they would come to Germany. The last thing it wants is to have to get approval from unions for such changes.

“This really isn’t about higher wages,” Mr. Clark said. “It isn’t a cost question for us. It’s about what our relationship is with our people.”

“We’re still a developing industry,” he added — despite the fact that Amazon posted revenue of $15.7 billion in the last quarter and the company is enjoying a buoyant stock price.

In the United States, Amazon successfully thwarted efforts to unionize. Over a decade ago, Mr. Courtney of Uni Global led an unsuccessful effort in the company’s home state of Washington to organize Amazon’s customer service representatives.

Two years ago, an investigative article by The Morning Call newspaper in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley chronicled poor working conditions in an Amazon warehouse in the state, including instances where it stationed paramedics outside to take heat-stressed workers to the emergency room. Amazon says it has addressed the problem by installing air-conditioning in all of its facilities.

More recently, a firm that provides temporary employees for Amazon warehouses is defending itself in a class-action suit that claims the firm shortchanged workers on pay as they waited in security lines to exit warehouses.

Jonathan Barnes, a spokesman for the staffing firm named in the suit, Integrity Staffing Solutions, declined to comment.

But it is a different story in Germany, where the powerful labor movement behind the Amazon strikes traces its roots back more than two centuries.

Mr. Courtney, the Swiss-based head of the federation of trade unions, said other American tech giants, including I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard, have been more tolerant than Amazon of unions in their European operations.

And the strikes in Germany raise especially knotty problems for the company, which has ambitious expansion plans there.

Labor Rights Group Accuses iPhone Maker of Abuses

The rights group, China Labor Watch, based in New York, said it had found violations of the law and of Apple’s pledges about working conditions at factories operated by the Taiwanese company, Pegatron.

Conditions in Chinese factories that produce iPhones and other popular Apple products have been under scrutiny after complaints about labor and environmental violations by another Taiwanese supplier, Foxconn.

Apple said in a statement that it was “committed to providing safe and fair working conditions” and would investigate the claims about Pegatron.

In a separate statement, Pegatron’s chief executive, Jason Cheng, also promised to investigate. China Labor Watch said its investigation covered two factories in Shanghai and one in nearby Suzhou that employ a total of 70,000 people. It found violations including discrimination against ethnic minorities and women, excessive work hours, poor living conditions, health and safety problems and pollution.

Pegatron assembles products including the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 for Apple, according to the report.

Apple said it had confirmed one accusation by China Labor Watch — that the identity cards of some workers were being held by management — and had told Pegatron to stop.

Apple has published a code of conduct for its suppliers and joined the Fair Labor Association, a worker rights monitoring group.

The association inspected Foxconn factories early last year and said in August that improvements it had recommended were being carried out ahead of schedule.

Conditions in factories in China are a sensitive issue for foreign companies that outsource the production of shoes, consumer electronics and other goods to contractors.

In its report Monday, China Labor Watch said the majority of Pegatron production employees worked 66 to 69 hours a week, far above China’s legal limit of 49 hours. It said pregnant women were sometimes required to work 11-hour days, more than the eight-hour legal limit, and employees were under pressure to falsify time cards to conceal the violations.

The group accused Pegatron of “discriminatory hiring practices” including refusing to hire those older than 35 or members of the Hui, Tibetan or Uighur ethnic minorities.

The group said production line workers sometimes dumped water laced with hazardous chemicals from cutting tools into sewers.

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, said it would send auditors to three Pegatron facilities this week to investigate the report’s claims.

The company said it had conducted 15 comprehensive audits of Pegatron facilities since 2007, including surprise audits in the past 18 months. It said the audits had covered more than 130,000 employees.

“Apple is committed to providing safe and fair working conditions throughout our supply chain,” the company statement said. “If our audits find that workers have been underpaid or denied compensation for any time they’ve worked, we will require that Pegatron reimburse them in full.”

The company said its own audit had found that Pegatron employees making Apple products worked 46 hours per week on average.

Pegatron, founded in 2008, also manufactures desktop and notebook personal computers, LCD televisions, broadband and wireless systems and other products.

“We take these allegations very seriously,” Mr. Cheng, the Pegatron chief, said in a statement. “We will investigate them fully and take immediate actions to correct any violations to Chinese labor laws and our own code of conduct.”

Foxconn Riot Underscores Labor Rift in China

The online postings were from a disturbance late Sunday that shut down a manufacturing facility in Taiyuan in north China, where 79,000 workers were employed.

State-run news media said 5,000 police officers had to be called in to quell a riot that began as a dispute involving a group of workers and security guards at a factory dormitory.

The unrest was noteworthy because the factory site is managed by Foxconn Technology, one of the world’s biggest electronics manufacturers and an important supplier to companies like Apple, Dell, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

A spokesman for Foxconn said the company was investigating the cause of the incident. But analysts say worker unrest in China has grown more common because workers are more aware of their rights, and yet have few outlets to challenge or negotiate with their employers.

When they do, though, the results can be ugly and, because of social media and the Web, almost instantly transmitted to the world in their rawest and most unfiltered form.

“At first it was a conflict between the security guards and some workers,” said a man who was reached by telephone after he posted images online. The man said he was a Foxconn employee. “But I think the real reason is they were frustrated with life.”

The company said that as many as 2,000 workers were involved in the incident but that it was confined to an employee dormitory and “no production facilities or equipment have been affected.”

Nonetheless, the plant was closed, the company said.

Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan and employs more than 1.1 million workers in China, declined to say whether the Taiyuan plant made products for the Apple iPhone 5, which went on sale last week. A spokesman said the factory supplied goods to many consumer electronics brands. An employee at the Taiyuan plant said iPhone components were made there.

Supply-chain experts say most Apple-related production takes place in other parts of China, particularly in the provinces of Sichuan, Guangdong and Henan.

Apple referred questions to Foxconn.

Labor unrest in Taiyuan, in northern China’s Shanxi Province, comes as strikes and other worker protests appear to be increasing in frequency this year compared with last year, said Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China.

Many of the protests this year appear to be related to the country’s economic slowdown, as employees demand the payment of overdue wages from financially struggling companies, or insist on compensation when money-losing factories in coastal provinces are closed and moved to lower-cost cities in the interior.

But the level of labor unrest in China this year has not yet matched 2010, when a surge in inflation sparked a wave of worker demands for higher pay, Mr. Crothall said.

The Taiyuan protest comes at a politically delicate time in China, with a Communist Party Congress expected in the coming weeks to anoint a new general secretary and a new slate of members for the country’s most powerful body, the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

The government has been tightening security ahead of the conclave through measures like restricting the issuance of visas and devoting considerable resources to watching and containing disturbances like the recent anti-Japanese demonstrations.

But the calendar may also be on Foxconn’s side. A weeklong public holiday starts this weekend to mark the country’s national day on Oct. 1. Factories across the country will close to allow workers to go home — and in the case of Foxconn’s Taiyuan factory, the dispersal of workers to hometowns could allow tempers to cool.

Mr. Crothall said that while the cause of the latest dispute in Taiyuan remained unclear, his group had found an online video of the police there using a megaphone to address “workers from Henan” — the adjacent province to the south of Shanxi. The police officer said that the workers’ concerns would be addressed.

Disputes involving large groups of migrant workers are common in China. In some cases, workers protest after believing that they have been promised a certain pay package and traveled a long distance to claim it, only to find on arrival that the details were different from what they expected. In other cases, workers from different provinces with different cultural traditions coming together in a single factory have clashed over social issues or perceived slights.

The disturbance is the latest problem to hit Foxconn.

Foxconn, which is part of Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, has been struggling to improve labor conditions at its China factories after reports about labor abuse and work safety violations.

Apple and Foxconn have worked together to improve conditions, raise pay and improve labor standards, particularly since March when the Fair Labor Association, a monitoring group invited by Apple to investigate conditions, found widespread problems.

Mr. Crothall said workers in China had become emboldened.

“They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice,” he said, adding that damage to factory buildings and equipment still appeared to be unusual, occurring in fewer than 1 in 20 protests.

The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay dispute last March, the Hong Kong news media reported then.

Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.

David Barboza reported from Shanghai, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.

Foxconn Said to Use Forced Student Labor to Make iPhones

Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time. But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.

Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.

“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, one of the advocacy organizations and a frequent critic of Foxconn’s labor policies, said in an interview on Monday. Mr. Li said his staff had spoken with multiple workers and students who, as recently as Sunday, said that 10 of 87 workers on an iPhone assembly line were students.

“They don’t want to work there — they want to learn,” said Mr. Li. “But if they don’t work, they are told they will not graduate, because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”

Foxconn, in a statement, said that students made up just 2.7 percent of its 1.2 million-person work force in China — about 32,000 workers — and that schools “recruit the students under the supervision of the local government, and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship.”

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on the recent cases, but he said Apple’s code of conduct tells suppliers to follow local labor laws when dealing with interns and other workers.

Foxconn has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over working conditions inside factories that manufacture smartphones, tablet computers and other electronic devices for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other technology giants. Investigations by newspapers, outside groups and companies like Apple itself have revealed illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers, improper disposal of hazardous waste and, in some cases, industrial accidents that have killed four people and injured more than 100 at Foxconn and other Chinese factories that supply Apple.

Earlier this year, following highly publicized reports of such problems, Apple asked an outside organization to audit working conditions inside the plants where the bulk of iPhones, iPads and other Apple products are built. In the wake of that audit, Foxconn announced it would significantly raise wages for many of its employees and reduce overtime hours to come into compliance with Chinese law.

In August, the Fair Labor Association — the group hired by Apple to audit Foxconn — said Foxconn had made progress at cutting employees’ hours and improving working conditions, but that those shifts would require Foxconn to recruit “tens of thousands of extra workers.” The group also said that Foxconn and Apple had adopted policies to make sure that student interns knew they could resign from Foxconn and still graduate, and to link the jobs they performed inside Foxconn with their studies.

“I am concerned about these recent reports, and we’re following up,” said Auret van Heerden, president and chief executive of the Fair Labor Association, in an interview. “If there have been any breakdowns in policies, we expect changes to be made.”

Worker advocates say Foxconn is under intense pressure at critical moments — like leading up to the release of a new product, like the iPhone 5 — to fill huge orders quickly.

Charles Duhigg reported from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 13, 2012

An article on Tuesday about new labor issues at Foxconn, a Chinese factory that makes Apple products, misstated the number of explosions that have occurred at the company’s plants. Only one explosion has occurred at a Foxconn plant, not “several.” (There have been several explosions at other companies that make Apple products in China.)

Foxconn Said to Use Forced Student Labor to Make iPhones

Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time. But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.

Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.

“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, one of the advocacy organizations and a frequent critic of Foxconn’s labor policies, said in an interview on Monday. Mr. Li said his staff had spoken with multiple workers and students who, as recently as Sunday, said that 10 of 87 workers on an iPhone assembly line were students.

“They don’t want to work there — they want to learn,” said Mr. Li. “But if they don’t work, they are told they will not graduate, because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”

Foxconn, in a statement, said that students made up just 2.7 percent of its 1.2 million-person work force in China — about 32,000 workers — and that schools “recruit the students under the supervision of the local government, and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship.”

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on the recent cases, but he said Apple’s code of conduct tells suppliers to follow local labor laws when dealing with interns and other workers.

Foxconn has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over working conditions inside factories that manufacture smartphones, tablet computers and other electronic devices for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other technology giants. Investigations by newspapers, outside groups and companies like Apple itself have revealed illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers, improper disposal of hazardous waste and, in some cases, industrial accidents that have killed four people and injured more than 100 at Foxconn and other Chinese factories that supply Apple.

Earlier this year, following highly publicized reports of such problems, Apple asked an outside organization to audit working conditions inside the plants where the bulk of iPhones, iPads and other Apple products are built. In the wake of that audit, Foxconn announced it would significantly raise wages for many of its employees and reduce overtime hours to come into compliance with Chinese law.

In August, the Fair Labor Association — the group hired by Apple to audit Foxconn — said Foxconn had made progress at cutting employees’ hours and improving working conditions, but that those shifts would require Foxconn to recruit “tens of thousands of extra workers.” The group also said that Foxconn and Apple had adopted policies to make sure that student interns knew they could resign from Foxconn and still graduate, and to link the jobs they performed inside Foxconn with their studies.

“I am concerned about these recent reports, and we’re following up,” said Auret van Heerden, president and chief executive of the Fair Labor Association, in an interview. “If there have been any breakdowns in policies, we expect changes to be made.”

Worker advocates say Foxconn is under intense pressure at critical moments — like leading up to the release of a new product, like the iPhone 5 — to fill huge orders quickly.

Charles Duhigg reported from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 13, 2012

An article on Tuesday about new labor issues at Foxconn, a Chinese factory that makes Apple products, misstated the number of explosions that have occurred at the company’s plants. Only one explosion has occurred at a Foxconn plant, not “several.” (There have been several explosions at other companies that make Apple products in China.)

Labor Dept. Tightens Security for Market-Sensitive Data

Until that moment, the market-sensitive data was guarded with launch-code secrecy, a precaution against anyone who might try to take advantage of an accidental or a surreptitious leak to gain an insider’s edge in the financial markets, turning milliseconds into millions.

Yet for all the rituals of high security, government officials have become increasingly nervous that their process is vulnerable, and are now overhauling it.

After a yearlong review that included scrutiny by anti-hacking specialists from Sandia National Laboratories, officials at the Labor Department revoked the credentials of a few little-known news organizations that appeared to serve financial clients rather than the public at large.

The government has also ordered other media groups to replace their computers in the lockup room with new computers under tighter controls.

The efforts stem from the newfound importance of high-speed trading, which began to grow significantly in the middle of the last decade and is now a central part of some hedge funds’ investment strategies. By gaining information seconds or minutes before others, high-speed traders — sometimes known as high-frequency or algorithmic traders — can use the computerized nature of modern finance to make quick profits or, if a bet goes wrong, take large losses.

In addition to the inflation numbers, the lockup process, in use at several agencies, covers releases on economic growth, home sales, gas prices, corn yields and the unemployment rate, among other things.

The Labor Department’s overhaul was ignited by inquiries starting in 2007 from the F.B.I., the Securities and Exchange Commission and the department’s own inspector general. Officials did not cite any specific major breach of security, but they had grown concerned that one was possible. Two instances in 2008, when Reuters accidentally released data a few seconds too early, heightened concerns.

The clampdown has strained the Labor Department’s relations with some of the world’s biggest news agencies, including Reuters and Bloomberg News. In negotiations with the department and at a fractious Congressional hearing, the companies suggested the government was taking extreme measures against an imagined threat.

At the center of the Labor Department’s effort was a so-called Red Team from Sandia Labs, a federally financed research group operated by a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, which has half a century of experience in computer security, including work on the military’s command and control networks.

The “root cause” for the review, the team noted, was the possibility of traders or their agents working inside the lockup.

Acting on the team’s recommendations, Labor Department officials sought a wholesale replacement of the computer equipment in the lockup room. The replacement is scheduled to happen by September, although further steps to shield against surreptitious transmissions are possible later.

At a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last month, the former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Keith Hall explained the main worry, which is that the growing reliance on high-speed trading had created the potential for participants in the media lockup to give an unfair advantage to traders.

“Lockup participants may now have access to specialized computer equipment and software that links them directly to automated trading models,” he noted. “This effectively allows financial market transactions to be driven from inside lockups.”

Carl Fillichio, the Labor Department official in charge of the overhaul, described a series of malfunctions and violations over the last few years, including the installation of fiber optic cables in the lockup room without permission or the use of BlackBerrys or mobile phone cameras. Media companies themselves have complained about competitors who “may have gained unfair advantage in speed of transmission or have surreptitiously broken embargoes,” Mr. Fillichio added in his testimony.

Some members of the media, however, say the crackdown is unnecessary. (The New York Times does not participate in the Labor Department lockup.)

“What is the problem you think, you imagine that this will prevent?” asked Daniel Moss, an executive editor at Bloomberg News, in an April conference call between Mr. Fillichio and news organizations. Mr. Moss, plainly exasperated, repeated the question several times but got no clear answer.

Government officials consider the potential security problems to be real. After a five-member team from Sandia Labs visited the lockup room last July, it identified “verified vulnerabilities in processes, procedures and systems used to protect” embargoed data, according to the summary of its report.

The team warned about methods of sneaking information out, such as by hidden transmitters, or bypassing the black boxes and master switches that keep the lockup room under electronic quarantine through other means, like wireless Internet. The team noted that “likely adversaries” had the technical and financial resources and possibly the willingness “to bend and potentially violate rules and laws.”

But it said any culprits were unlikely to “employ violent means to meet their goal of exfiltrating embargoed data prior to the official release time.”

At the oversight hearing, Mr. Moss of Bloomberg News argued that traditional media outlets were not the problem and suggested that the Labor Department instead expel those groups connected to algorithmic traders from the lockup.

Ultimately, the Labor Department did pull the credentials of a few organizations — including Need to Know News, a small enterprise owned by the German exchange. Its data goes directly from the lockups to specialized trading programs. Mr. Fillichio explained that they were not “primarily journalistic” and did not “disseminate their information to a wide audience.”

Chris Rhea, chief executive of Need to Know News, referred questions to a spokesman, who did not respond.

In the initial stages of the crackdown, Mr. Fillichio ordered lockup participants to use government computers, transmission lines and even pens and pencils and paper while inside the lockup. Media groups objected.

“This proposal threatens the First Amendment,” Mr. Moss said at the oversight hearing, adding that it would give the government “access to a reporters’ thoughts, drafts or notes as a condition for covering the news.”

After another round of negotiations, the government backed off a bit. For now, some equipment owned by media companies is expected to stay. But over the next few months they will have to deliver new, shrink-wrapped terminals, which will be subject to inspection and maintenance by Labor Department technicians.

One question that is still unresolved is how many seats each organization will be allowed.

Space is tight in the lockup. And paradoxically, all the attention to this obscure room on a drab corridor has brought newcomers knocking, as if at the door of a speakeasy.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 16, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated Mr. Moss’s title at Bloomberg News as executive director.