Workers at Wildberries distribution points across Russia staged a massive strike

Some Wildberries dispensing points in various cities of Russia have stopped issuing orders to customers. Their workers went on strike because of the new penalty system.

The protest has begun March 14: employees of several self-service outlets in Yekaterinburg closed them and went home, E1 wrote. Some even resigned right away. Workers in Barnaul and Blagoveshchensk also refused to work.

The next day, markets in the Far East and Eastern Siberia joined the strike. They refuse to issue orders to Wildberries outlets in the Irkutsk region, Krasnoyarsk Territory and Kuzbas, writes Taiga.info.

Wildberries outlets in Buryatia also joined the protest: on the doors of some of them they put the inscriptions “Closed for technical reasons” and QR codes, after scanning which you can get acquainted with the problem or call technical assistance.

Wildberries workers are demanding the abolition of the new penalty system, which has been in force since March 3. According to it, if the buyer returns a defective or replaced item, the employee of the self-service point is deducted 100% of its value.

The protest was started by employees of Wildberries’ own distribution points. About 10,000 people joined him. The day before, they organized a videoconference where they planned the action – writes Forbes. Employees agreed to work on a limited basis: to accept goods from warehouses, but not to issue parcels to customers, the publication explains.

The new penalty system “has shocked us (distribution point employees – approx. TMT),” he told one of them. According to the employees, the goods may be stolen or exchanged in the warehouse, at the carrier’s, in the sorting office, sometimes the supplier may not report something to the shipment. They do not understand why employees of distribution points should be punished for all this. After March 3, some employees were fined up to 500,000 rubles.

The protesters are demanding that all debts for marriages and substitutions be written off and that the old system of penalties be reinstated. In addition, they want the right to challenge the blockade.

In total, Wildberries had 33,000 outlets as of January 2023, of which 19,200 were their own. The remaining 13,800 points belong to the company’s partners. They can join the strike, but so far they have protested in a different way. On March 13, the owners of the distribution points came to the Wildberries headquarters and demanded a transparent scheme for the distribution of earnings and penalties, one of them told RBC. About 50 people came to the office but failed to get in.

The company itself denied the information about the strike. A Wildberries representative told Kommersant that pick-up points are still operating as usual. The company is also not sure that the protesters who came to the office were actually Wildberries accomplices.