France Fines Amazon $35M for Monitoring Employees Too Intrusively

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Facts

  • The French Data Protection Authority (‘CNIL’) Tuesday fined Amazon’s warehouse business $35M for using an ‘excessively intrusive system’ to monitor employee performance.1
  • The Authority said the fine, at about 3% of Amazon France Logistique’s annual (2021) revenue of €1.1B ($1.19B), was ‘nearly unprecedented.’ It said several thousand employees were affected by the systems.2
  • The privacy watchdog found that Amazon France Logistique’s policies — including tracking ‘inactivity’ of over 10 minutes — put workers under pressure and breached EU privacy rules.2
  • The Authority described Amazon’s system of measuring every work interruption with such precision as illegal and ‘excessively intrusive.’ It also called out the firm’s policy of storing such employee data for 31 days.3
  • The Authority also fined Amazon for having insufficient security on its video surveillance. The e-commerce giant, however, defended itself by saying the French watchdog’s findings were wrong.4
  • Amazon previously faced similar issues at its UK warehouses . A British parliamentary panel report later viewed the company’s surveillance practices as ‘micromanagement’ and as causing distrust.5

Sources: 1ABC News, 2France 24, 3CNIL, 4Bloomberg and 5BBC News.

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by TechCrunch. France is absurdly singling out Amazon for simply having a super-efficient warehouse management system. The logistics sector is peppered with similar measures and systems in place across the world. The scale at which Amazon functions requires an intricate system to keep the company’s operations flexible and adaptive. Some tweaks can be made according to local needs and laws, but this massive fine defies logic.
  • Narrative B, as provided by ABC News. Measuring employee productivity to this extent reduces workers to robots that don’t get breaks or social time at work. Companies should not be allowed to forget the humans at the heart of their operations. Signaling there’s a problem if an item is scanned too quickly is just one example of poor work standards at Amazon.

Predictions