- By Sam Gruet
- Business Reporter, BBC News
January 23, 2024, 11:01 GMT
Updated 2 minutes ago
Image source: Getty Images
Amazon has been fined €32m (£27m) in France for “excessive” surveillance of its employees, including measures the data watchdog found illegal.
According to CNIL, Amazon France Logistique, which manages warehouses, recorded data captured by workers' handheld scanners.
It turned out that Amazon tracked activity so closely that employees might have to justify every break.
Amazon said it strongly disagreed with the CNIL's findings, calling them “factually incorrect.”
France's data protection agency investigated Amazon warehouses following complaints from employees and media coverage of conditions.
It outlined several areas where Amazon was found to have violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This included a three-alert system to monitor employee activity, which the CNIL declared illegal.
An alert was triggered if an item was scanned too quickly or less than 1.25 seconds after scanning a previous item, increasing the risk of errors.
Another reported breaks of 10 minutes or more, while a third tracked breaks between one and 10 minutes.
The CNIL also questioned why Amazon needed to keep workers' data for 31 days.
In response to the findings, an Amazon spokesperson said: “We strongly disagree with the CNIL's conclusions, which are factually incorrect, and reserve the right to appeal.”
“Inventory management systems are industry standard and necessary to ensure the safety, quality and efficiency of operations and to track the storage of inventory and the processing of packages on time and in line with customer expectations.”
“Micromanagement”
A similar system for Amazon warehouses in the UK has already been mentioned.
Brian Palmer, Amazon's head of European policy, told a parliamentary select committee in November 2022 that an employee could be fired if they had three productivity indicators in the system. The online giant later said they were not “entirely right”.
The subsequent report published by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee raised concerns about the use of monitoring technology to set performance targets and monitor performance.
The report said there was evidence that Amazon's surveillance practices “lead to distrust, micromanagement and, in some cases, disciplinary action against its employees.”
The committee said it had written to Amazon expressing concern that the technology would “unduly burden the workforce.”
Amazon declined to comment on its warehouses in the UK.
The CNIL said Amazon already had access to a lot of data to ensure quality and safety in its warehouses, calling the system “overly intrusive.” It was also noted that monitoring employees so closely could result in them having to justify even a brief pause in the scanning process.
Amazon also used the data collected by the scanner to plan work in its warehouses, evaluate employees on a weekly basis and train them. The regulator decided that this did not require Amazon to have access to the smallest details of the data collected by the scanners.
The online shopping giant was fined for failing to properly inform its employees and external visitors about the surveillance. The regulator also found that the security of its video surveillance was inadequate.
Reacting to the ruling, the GMB union, which represents Amazon warehouse workers in the UK, said the company's employees were subject to “harsh levels of control and surveillance”.