Industrial Relations at the Crossroads: Regulatory Challenges at Amazon and MercadoLibre’s Logistics Services

Abstract

E-commerce retail sales accelerated during the pandemic as more consumers shopped online. Companies such as Amazon and MercadoLibre have become global leaders. In this context, logistics activity became a fundamental pillar for the development of its business models and its labour relations have been under deep discussion. The objective of the article is to explore in comparative perspective, labour relations through the role of trade unions, collective bargaining, wages and benefits for workers in the logistics activity of Amazon and MercadoLibre. The article adopts the notion of "regulation model" as the presence of institutional characteristics that distinguish the normative order and labour institutions between countries, although the scope of the concept may be supranational. In particular, the cases of Germany, the United States, and Argentina are analyzed. The results show that labour relation’s dynamics of these companies responds to the particularities of the current regulation model in each country, as well as to the possibilities of organization and correlation of forces of the intervening actors.