Amazon has been fined €32m (£27m) for ‘excessively monitoring’ employees in its warehouses in France.
Amazon France Logistique, which employs around 20,000 people at the online retail giant’s French warehouses, was found to have operated an “excessively intrusive” system for monitoring work performance and breaks, according to the French data protection authority CNIL.
Each employee was given a scanner to document certain tasks, such as storing or removing an item from a shelf or packing and item. Scans were used to provide an indication of the quality of work, productivity, and periods of inactivity.
CNIL launched an investigation into how the data from the scanners was being used following complaints from employees.
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It said it was unlawful to set up a system measuring work performance with such accuracy, which it said would potentially require employees to justify every break or interruption.
The speed at which items were scanned was also measured, based on the principle that scanning items in quick succession, less than 1.25 seconds after the previous one, would increase the risk of error.
The regulator also considered it excessive for Amazon to keep the data collected by the system for all employees and temporary staff for 31 days.
Amazon said that it “strongly disagrees with the CNIL’s conclusions which are factually incorrect”, and said it reserved the right to appeal.
“Warehouse management systems are industry standard and are necessary for ensuring the safety, quality, and efficiency of operations and to track the storage of inventory and processing of packages on time and in line with customer expectations,” it said.
CNIL found the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was breached in several ways:
- failing to comply with the data minimisation principle – Amazon held every detail of the employee’s quality and productivity indicators over the previous month, which it used to decide whether an employee required coaching or reassignment to other tasks. CNIL argued that supervisors would have only needed real-time data to identify any difficulties an employee was experiencing, or a selection of aggregated data
- failing to ensure lawful processing of data – the processing of certain performance indicators meant employees were required to justify any time that they were interrupting the use of their scanner, which the watchdog said was intrusive
- failing to comply with the obligation to provide information and transparency – until April 2020, temporary workers were not properly informed that their personal data was collected using the scanners. Information about video surveillance was not properly passed on to employees or external visitors
- failing to ensure the security of personal data – the access password for video surveillance data was not strong enough and the account was shared between several users, which made it more difficult to trace access to video images.
The UK’s data protection legislation is being amended via a statutory instrument, The Data Protection (Fundamental Rights and Freedoms) (Amendment) Regulations 2023, to bring elements of EU regulations like the GDPR onto the UK statute book.
Paul Holcroft, managing director at HR, employment, health and safety service Croner, said employers will need to ensure that any personal data captured through monitoring is processed in accordance with data protection legislation and that it is kept safely, securely, and only retained for as long as there is a lawful reason for doing so.
“A failure to do so, could result in an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office and substantial fines, as we have seen here with the French division of Amazon,” he warned.
“There is also an implied duty of trust and confidence owed to each employee. If monitoring of employees breaches this implied duty, then an employee could resign and bring a constructive unfair dismissal claim.”
Holcroft said employers should carry out an impact assessment before they start any monitoring, and consider less invasive alternatives first.
He said: “How such monitoring may impact upon the culture of the organisation and employee morale will also need to be thought through. If, however, the decision is made to progress with employee monitoring, then employees should be given detailed information including when their information will be obtained, why, how it will be used, and who it will be disclosed to. Data protection policies should also be reviewed to ensure that they are up to date and capture details of any such monitoring to avoid breaking any GDPR measures.”
Last year Amazon’s policy chief for Europe Brian Palmer told MPs on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee that if an Amazon employee has three productivity flags on the system, they can be fired. Amazon later wrote to the committee to say that Palmer’s answer was not fully correct. While the algorithms from the system do not make the decision, they help identify issues with performance, it said.
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