Interview with a worker at the Emag.ro. group, the Romanian "clone" of
Amazon - July 26, 2025 ---- eMAG, the Romanian Amazon, has a turnover ofapproximately two billion, offering millions of products in Romania,
Hungary, and Bulgaria. We discussed labor organization and its history
with a worker who asked for guarantees regarding the protection of his
anonymity. ---- Bad money drives out good: it's a law of economics that
can also be applied to labor. Amazon's labor organization, for example,
has led to the birth of a series of clone companies around the world,
which have slavishly copied the American giant's labor organization and
occupied the e-commerce market where the latter has decided not to
establish its own distribution network. These include Mercado Libre in
Latin America and, since 2001, the Romanian group Emag, which offers
millions of products on its platform to residents of Romania, Hungary,
and Bulgaria. Since 2019, thanks to a partnership with Extreme Digital,
it has been selling electronic devices manufactured in Romania, Austria,
Croatia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. For several years, the
marketplace that allows third-party companies to sell through the Emag
platform, which generated revenues of nearly €2 billion in 2021, has
also been attracting the attention of Italian companies: Barilla,
Campari, Moretti, Mutti, and Rummo are some of the food brands featured
in the virtual store.
In Romania, Emag has taken advantage of the void left by Amazon, which
is not present with an e-commerce service, but since 2005 it has opened
development centers in Iași, Bucharest, and Timișoara, hiring
approximately 4,000 employees for research and development. Romania, in
fact, is a reservoir of qualified, low-cost labor, particularly in IT.
However, last year, news spread about the possible closure of Amazon's
machine learning services, potentially resulting in the layoff of 400
employees. Fear among workers is so strong that an employee at the Iași
office, who initially agreed to a written interview to protect his
identity, withdrew when the time came for the interview, fearing
retaliation from the company. We fared better with a technician from a
company in the Emag Group, a supplier of telephone equipment, who also
granted us a written interview. It's difficult to delve into the details
in a written interview, but one interesting aspect that seems to emerge
from the responses is that low wages allow the Emag Group to avoid
significant investments in technology to maximize the efficiency of the
downstream value chain, and that, nevertheless, some steps toward
efficiency are already underway.
What is Emag.ro? Is it correct to say it's a sort of Amazon clone?
Yes, its ambitions, which are rapidly coming to fruition, are to conquer
the e-commerce market in Eastern and Southern Europe.
Okay, now tell us about your job.
I work as a technician for Flip.ro, a company affiliated with the group
in which Emag is the majority shareholder. Our business model involves
purchasing used and broken mobile phones, primarily iPhones, and
repairing them with parts purchased in bulk from the Shenzhen China
group, then reselling them as refurbished finished products in Greece,
Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.
What are the working conditions and wages like?
Working conditions were better than I'd experienced in the industry when
I joined the company last year, but they quickly began to deteriorate
when the Emag group began increasing the level of exploitation by trying
to cut costs, using cheaper components or eliminating some entirely from
assembly, and offering incentives for overtime and higher bonuses to
increase production. Salaries are slightly above average, but most of my
experienced colleagues receive about 20-25% of their salary in bonuses,
some months even 50%.
In general, are working conditions better than other companies?
My previous work experience was at a medium-sized company where we
worked with Chinese suppliers to procure original parts and equipment,
but we were often forced to resort to improvised solutions to complete
repairs and sometimes faced significant delays in delivering the
necessary parts. As mentioned before, conditions were better at first,
but over time they have deteriorated and are now at an all-time low, an
assessment all my colleagues agree with, regardless of seniority.
What type of workers choose to work at the Emag.ro group: young people,
immigrants, women?
In my company, the entire workforce—let's say 99%—is made up of young
men in their 20s and 30s, from a variety of backgrounds, both in terms
of social class and education. Other departments, particularly the
"Front" department, which cleans and sanitizes phones after they've been
repaired, making them presentable for sale—which is also the lowest-paid
department in the company—are mostly young, including women. More
recently, the company has begun hiring Nepalese workers, but they're
generally ostracized by my colleagues.
Can you tell me something about the work organization in your company?
We're starting to implement the kaizen philosophy, which translates into
intensified exploitation. Our conditions are more like those of a
factory, which receives an unfinished product and, through our labor,
creates a finished one ready for sale. Unlike a standard customer
service desk, where a customer arrives with a problem phone, it's
repaired and returned to its owner. Here, we're creating a full-fledged
phone catalog, so orders for those specific models arrive, and we can
prepare and sell them. Furthermore, holidays and times of year when
people typically give gifts are very stressful, because we have to
produce much more to meet demand.
What are the main problems in your workplace?
The main problem in general is obviously the low wages. People realize
that the skills they're acquiring here are better rewarded elsewhere,
but there hasn't yet been a mass exodus of colleagues who quit and left,
as happened where I worked previously. In my department, which is the
technical department where we physically repair phones, the main problem
is the poor organization of the warehouse and the lack of tools,
consumables, and other items that make our lives more difficult. The
intensification of work has also taken its toll: we each have to repair
about 30 phones every day, and this is truly stressful for many of my
colleagues.
Are you unionized, or have you ever discussed the idea of joining one?
I've discussed forming a union with a colleague from another department
and invited him to speak with me and other workers and activists, but so
far nothing has happened, so I'm still trying to arrange this meeting
and lay the groundwork for a union in our workplace.
Interview from the PuntoCritico.info newsletter, July 25, 2025.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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