French authorities on Tuesday ordered Amazon to pay a fine of 32 million euros over its “excessively intrusive system for monitoring employee activity and productivity,” AFP and Reuters reported, citing Agerpres.

The National Commission for Informatics and Liberties (CNIL) in Paris imposed a fine on Amazon’s logistics unit Amazon France Logistique (AFL).

The CNIL statement said the data collection practiced by a subsidiary of the US online shopping giant through scanners used by employees to process parcels was an “excessive activity and performance tracking system”.

According to the CNIL, the scanners register a downtime of more than ten minutes or a parcel processing speed of “almost a second”, which has sanctioned the AFL under the General Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) and imposed a fine equivalent to approximately 3% of turnover. branches

How the employee monitoring system works in Amazon warehouses

CNIL’s particular attention was drawn to three indicators recorded by scanners and transmitted to managers. First, the so-called “automatic machine”, which signals when an item is scanned “too fast” in less than 1.25 seconds, and “idle time”, which signals a period of inactivity of more than 10 minutes.

Another indicator measures the time that passed “between the moment when the employee scanned his ID when entering the warehouse” and the time when he scanned the first package, the CNIL also explained to AFP.

The commission believes that this system forces employees to justify any interruption, even “for 3-4 minutes”, of the scanner, which “puts constant pressure on them.”

“We strongly disagree with the findings of the CNIL, which are factually incorrect, and we reserve the right to appeal,” an Amazon representative responded in a statement.

Several thousand workers were affected by these figures, according to the CNIL, which opened the procedure in 2019 after some press articles and complaints from some employees.

Jeff Bezos believes that workers are inherently lazy

The CNIL also sanctioned the AFL for failing to inform staff about the CCTV system and said it “reserves the right to carry out further inspections”.

Amazon’s warehouse management system has been repeatedly criticized over the years for employee oversight. David Niekerk, a former vice president of the e-commerce giant, said in a 2021 interview with the NYT that the system was designed in line with Jeff Bezos’ belief that workers should not “indulge their natural laziness.”

“What he (Bezos) meant was that it’s our human nature to make the least effort to get what we want or need,” said Niekerk, who helped develop Amazon’s warehouse management system.

On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, the company he founded, to focus on other projects such as his space company Blue Origin, but is believed to still have significant influence over e-commerce decisions. giant.