New setback for Amazon. The National Commission for Information Technology and Freedoms (CNIL)France’s data protection authority has imposed a fine of 32 million euros Amazon France Logistics (AFL) for the establishment of one system”overly intrusive» to monitor activity and employee performance as reported by the French regulator. The sanction was agreed on December 27th after several checks.
The CNIL has reported that AFL camp staff, as part of their duties,… Scanner to document the completion of certain tasks in real time that are assigned to them and whose data is stored and used to calculate key figures Quality, productivity and downtime of every employee.
Complaints from workers and the publication of some press articles in which “certain practices that the company uses in its warehouses» led to an investigation, after which the French regulator looked into it The employee activity and performance monitoring system was “excessive and illegal«.
In particular, the CNIL has argued that indicators have been implemented that track the downtime of employees’ scanners. At that point he decided it It was illegal to set up a system that measures work stoppages so preciselywhich could force employees to justify every break or interruption.
Furthermore, the authority has decided this The system for measuring the speed at which items were scanned was too fast. More generally, the CNIL It was considered excessive to retain all data collected by the systemas well as the resulting statistical key figures for all employees and temporary workers over a period of 31 days.
The CNIL has stated that it does not question the fact that the enormous constraints weighing on Amazon’s business and the high performance targets that the company has set for itself can justify the scanner system set up to manage its business. However, he was of the opinion that “The retention of all this data and the resulting statistical indicators were generally disproportionate«.
In order to determine the amount of the penalty, the Commission took into account the mechanism for comprehensive control of workers’ activities, which is different from the traditional ones; The “Continuous pressure» Impact on the thousands of workers and the economic benefits that Amazon achieved thanks to this oversight and its competitive advantage over other companies in the e-commerce sector.
Amazon shows its “complete disagreement”
According to the Europa Press news agency, a spokesman responded to the French authority’s decision Amazon reported this «total disagreement» with the conclusions of the CNIL which, as he repeated, “are”objectively wrong«.
«We reserve the right to appealsaid the speaker as he explained this.Warehouse management systems are an industry standard and are 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«.