>Amazon.com Inc. threatened to stop activity at its fulfillment centers in France after a court order banned the sale of non-essential goods, concluding the retailer isn’t doing enough to protect staff from the Covid-19 pandemic.
And 24 hours to implement improved health procedures? Without being told which ones specifically to implement?
There's basically no limit to improving health procedures. They could go as far as hourly temperature checks, glove changes after every package, no more then 10 people in the entire warehouse, etc etc. And if they don't go far enough (according to the courts, in 2 years when all the appeals are finally figured out), then they could be fined 1.1 million a day since tomorrow.
I should have written: "They were free to ship whatever they want ...".
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
https://www.lesechos.fr/economie-france/social/coronavirus-l...
>But the American e-commerce giant was condemned to "restrict the activities of [its] warehouses to receiving goods, preparing and shipping orders for food, hygiene and medical products", "until the company has carried out, with the participation of employee representatives, an assessment of the occupational risks inherent in the Covid-19 epidemic in all of its distribution centres and the resulting measures".
Has anyone actually done a fair comparison of Amazon warehouse working conditions with those of other warehouses? Other than the presence of robots to help our their workers, nothing I've seen and read about strikes me as being out of line with any other warehouse. Or are they just the ones getting the flack because they are the largest and most visible?
Similar to folks on HN every time someone discovers that the Facebook SDK exists in <random app> while generally ignoring every other tracker and app that is possibly much more nefarious... Bobs Tracking App™ doesn't make headlines like "Facebook is stealing your data"
Being large and visible might be a part of it, but their system being unnecessary cruel in the first place is reason enough.
However, many people want Amazon to unilaterally change its labour practices. It’s not fair that they do this, while competing with Walmart the largest company in the world, if Walmart doesn’t need to change merely because they have better PR.
My cynical mind suspects Walmart has better PR merely because it’s part of an establish oligarchy who knows which hands to grease, and owns the media companies.
That's not limited to one country - but leads a bit far away from this specific french court decision. On the other hand, all of these contexts play into conflicts like this one.
Don't underestimate just how many jobs countries have to maintain our standards of living.
Is this is what is happening?
1. Yes, in a way. Articles about Amazon warehouses regularly describe that people can work there only for a while before either burning out our simply trying to find something better. High fluctuation was a common theme.
2. Despite the issues Amazon has with unnecessary cruelty, quotes suggest that there is a higher and a steady pay, compared to shadier alternatives. Working there during the holiday season to make more than with alternatives was a regular motive in articles.
3. In anarcho capitalist countries like the US people risk dying or falling into utter poverty when not accepting work conditions like this. Not everyone can fall back into a programmer job (and now even less so), and most can't be sure that an alternative will turn up if they stop working and start searching. That bad jobs get taken does not show that they are acceptable in a system providing a basic standard. Same is true for countries like Germany, where not accepting bad jobs can mean not getting state support anymore (and yes, people died because of being sanctioned like that and then starving, that's not hyperbole).