France fines Amazon 32 million for ‘excessive’ and ‘illegal’ employee monitoring system | Economy

France’s National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL, the body that oversees the use of personal data) has imposed a $32 million fine on Amazon’s subsidiary in the country for the “excessive” system it uses to monitor the activities of its employees in its warehouses. The French regulator said on its website on Tuesday that the sanction was agreed on December 27 after several checks.

The CNIL points out that the investigation began with some press articles describing “certain practices applied by the company in its warehouses” and after receiving “several complaints from workers.” During its “monitoring missions,” the watchdog was able to check how the system works, through which Amazon France Logistique (the logistics division of the American multinational corporation) provides each of its employees with a scanner that tracks numerous activities.

Using this scanner, a company can record in real time the execution of certain tasks, such as storing and packaging goods. But this data is also stored and linked to each employee’s profile, which “allows for the calculation of a range of metrics that report on the quality, productivity and periods of inactivity of each employee individually.” And this is precisely what caused Amazon to be fined: “CNIL considered the system for monitoring the activity and productivity of workers to be excessive,” the organization justifies itself.

This decision is mainly due to three reasons. First, the French supervisory authority considers it “unlawful” to implement a system that “measures interruptions in activity so precisely and forces the worker to potentially justify every pause or interruption.”

The second issue that CNIL was concerned about was measuring the speed of scanner use during warehouse work. As the statement explains, “Based on the principle that scanning items too quickly increases the risk of error, the indicator measured whether an item was scanned less than 1.25 seconds after the previous one.” And the regulator’s verdict is this: this procedure is “excessive.”

An analysis of Amazon France’s decision to “store all data collected by a device, as well as the statistics that flow from it, for all employees and contractors” came to the same conclusion (which is “excessive”). , storing them for 31 days.”

CNIL also notes that it recognizes that there are conditions in Amazon’s operations that “may justify the use of a scanning device to manage its activities.” But he backs up his conclusion that “the retention of all these data and statistics is globally disproportionate” and that the system “kept employees under close surveillance in all the tasks they performed using the scanners and put constant pressure on them.” Hence the €32 million fine, which took into account both the number of employees (“several thousand”) subject to the controversial system and the “competitive advantage” that Amazon gained from it over other companies, resulting in “economic benefit” . »

Amazon France Logistique is 100% owned by the American multinational through another company, Amazon EU, based in Luxembourg. The French subsidiary of the online trading giant had a turnover of 1.135 million euros in 2021, and this year it made a profit of close to 59 million, according to data that the CNIL includes in the case file.

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