You must have heard about the Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries who is known to be doing very well in the countries that it operates in. It is similar to Amazon in the West as it has one of the biggest reach in the country and has a reputation similar to it as well. However, things are not going to plan at Wildberries right now as the company announced a new policy few days back which has led to its employees striking all over the company and disrupting the workflow.
In a new policy that was announced by Wildberries, they announced that their employees will be blamed for damaged returns and goods that were dispatched to the wrong buyer. Wildberries says that employees are to blame 98% of the time for wrong dispatches or damaged returns. However, this obviously did not go down well for their employees who launched a strike inside the company. Due to this reason, Wildberries has now been forced to delay this new policy for three days. Not only does the new rule from Wildberries make employees responsible but they will be financially liable as well.
It is worth noting that Wildberries is also one of those companies that is doing a lot of business after the war with Ukraine because of the fact that they do a lot of “gray imports” to circumvent sanctions enforced on Russia. Last year, Ikea employees as well as Delivery Club couriers negotiated a deal by staging countrywide strikes. A Wildberries representative said “Thanks to the dialogue and feedback mechanism with [owners of] pickup points and entrepreneurs, more than 10,000 incorrect fines … were canceled,”
Several owners of pickup points across the country even said that Wildberries refunded the fines they were made to pay. On the other hand, Russia’s biggest marketplace defended its new policy for making the employees and owners of its pickup points financially liable so as to protects the brands and suppliers selling goods on their platform. Soon after the new rules were announced, however, the employees of Wildberries along with their union launched nationwide strikes which prompted the company to close some of its pickup points claiming “uncivilized form of dialogue” from their employees.
