Amazon has been fined 32 million euros in France for its “excessively intrusive” system for monitoring workers. The decision of the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL) represents 3% of the company’s turnover, which amounts to approximately 1,135 million in 2021.
After four years of investigation and legal analysis, the agency understands that the company has implemented “an excessively intrusive system to control the activity and performance of employees” if data protection is taken into account.
Amazon has rejected the decision and states that it “reserves the right to appeal”, for which it has two months. The e-commerce giant employs 20,000 people in the country, where it has eight distribution centers. The company uses these management and monitoring instruments to process orders effectively, a company executive told the AFP agency last week.
Hundreds of employees responsible for receiving, identifying, storing, packaging, controlling and shipping merchandise work in its warehouses. At the center of all this logistics is a key tool: the scanner. The company would collect productivity data through these devices, contrary to data protection law. They would warn about scans that are too fast – without guaranteeing that the product is inspected, defends Amazon -, inactivity times greater than ten minutes or the period that elapses between the worker arriving at work and scanning their first package.
The CNIL considers that this system can lead to employees having to justify any interruption, even “of three or four minutes”, of their scanner activity, thereby exerting “continuous pressure.” He also criticizes that they differ from the traditional ones due to the scale at which they have been implemented, both for their exhaustiveness and permanence – the data were saved for 31 days, something “excessive” -.
Amazon assures that the mechanisms “are an industry standard” and that “they are necessary to guarantee the safety, quality and efficiency of operations and to guarantee the tracking of stocks and the processing of packages,” according to AFP. The group is open to extending downtime to 30 minutes, which it attributes more to identifying a continuous and abnormal failure (missing supplies, defective machines…) than to controlling the worker.
Amazon sources stated this morning that “we totally disagree with the CNIL’s conclusions, which are objectively incorrect, and we reserve the right to file an appeal.”
