No death
Several weeks ago, RTL has shown a report where one of its reporters went undercover as a Zalando employee in its Erfurt distribution centre. It has now come to light several parts of that report are not true, which meant the judge decided RTL can no longer integrally broadcast the report.
RTL reported a death in the logistics centre and no such thing has taken place. There has also been quite a quarrel about the walking distances, with the report measuring the steps through a pedometer without the mention of what the distance of one particular step represents. “These measurements are not reliable and our company physicians have sampled walking distances between 15 and 20 kilometers in the Pick department”, Zalando says. The report mentioned distances up to 27 kilometers.
Steps taken
Zalando has dealt with several items brought up in the report, to improve working situations in the Erfurt logistics centre. Additional seating areas have been provided, the break schedule has been improved, theft tips are no longer rewarded and the management will get more communication training. Zalando has created a new task force to implement the improvements.
“For our company and our employees, we believe it important the company’s reputation was not smirched with false accusations. We will however not ignore the criticism and that is why we will keep working to implement the announced improvements and we will collaborate with our employees to create further improvements,” Zalando states.
