Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkor | Hacker News Reader

> After a week or so we started getting our deliveries again, usually with an extra day of delay because it was being fulfilled from Germany.

In some other industries (shipping) you have to be really careful to do that. There's various laws against breaking up (the effectiveness of) a strike. That's currently often only applied within one country. If Amazon does something similar more often enough they'll probably get hit with an EU-wide law instead.

It's always weird that internet based companies aren't treated like any other company. Unfair competition IMO.

View on HN

This was less a strike than a forced government shutdown due to COVID-19. amazon couldn’t satisfy the French government that the French warehouses and fulfillment centers were going to be safe for workers, so they were shutdown. I assume that the German ones satisfied the German government to German standards, and so were kept open.

> so they were shutdown

They weren't shut down, that was Amazons decision. The court only told them to reduce operations to specific categories of its store site - the idea was to somehow reduce operations to a safe amount as Amazon had repeatedly failed to so by itself. Amazon then made up the nebulous "essential products" category and made sure to complain loudly about the supposed nonsense the court required while it shut down french warehouses completely.

French goverment was trying to apply rules which had a lot of grey area. Amazon decided it was too risky so shut down.

The court provided a list of Amazon(TM) categories from the Amazon (TM) website and told Amazon to restrict its operations to those. You wont find any of the "essential products" nonsense outside of Amazons own court documents and press releases.

I don't understand. The goverment created an a product list of items to sell, which amazon then tried to create an essential product list which contained these items?

I don't understand whats the problem with that?

According to Amazon they found it difficult to workout what was and wasn't an essential item according to the rules. I would imagine with a catalog as big amazon that's probably true. They decided to shutdown instead which is perfectly rational given the amount fines placed upon them if they did accidentally ship an item. The goverment got what they requested, no non essential items shipped.

I would imagine amazon would have preferred to keep operating, so I believe them.

That the "essential products list" does not exist, which is the key complaint in any discussion about this. Amazon invented a requirement that does not exist to claim that the requirements are to vague to implement. The list the court provided is explicit in the court documents, meanwhile the "essential products" is subject to the imagination of every armchair free market capitalist. You wont find it googling, you wont find it going through court documents, you will only find an unending sea of discussion how stupid it is for a court to require something as vague as selling only "essential products" and how Amazon shutting down its french warehouses was the only sane response to this requirement.

> I would imagine amazon would have preferred to keep operating, so I believe them.

This was an union driven lawsuit. Shutting down operations to stamp out union activity is rather common with companies large enough to cover the short term costs of it.

What requirements did they place on amazon then?

The French government placed on Amazon, AND every other online sellers, restrictions on what type of product could be sold: only first necessity items. The only one refusing to comply, and loudly at that, was Amazon.

Put itself above the law to gain a competitive advantage is unacceptable to me. And now they are making a lot of publicity on tv to remend the damage. A little too late, I'm boycotting them personally.

It didn't put itself above the law, because it closed down instead. That's complying with the law. Considering the amount fines they we're threatned with, I agree it was too risky operate. They would have only had to made a few mistakes and they would risk a massive fine.

Amazon has a huge catalog compared to other retailers, and trying to categorise that without mistakes would be difficult and prone to errors.

And why do you think they were threaten ? Because they were found not operating within the bound of pandemic related decrees. They willing did not respect them. Maybe in the USA they would have automatically been fined, but the French negotiated with them and gave them delays. The French Amazon CEO willfully claimed they would never comply. They knew what they were doing and in practice quite literally put themselves above the law.

And no, Amazon has the same catalog as other French retailer, at least in France. Amazon just chose to play dumb with both catalog filtering demands AND physical distances in warehouses.

The fines were enormous for every violation, and EU courts have been doing billion dollar fines of these companies - why in the world would you operate one warehouse doing 10% volume (90% shutdown already) facing huge fines?

They complied with the law and shut down. This further limited covid risks for their workers.

No, they were caught not complying with the law and were threaten with fines. At which point they decided to finally comply with the law by shutting down. BIG difference.

Got it. I'm in the US - there have been boycotts every year of Amazon but they have grown to be pretty large here. How are they doing in france? It seems their model may be less successful there especially if there is more willingness to boycot.

Given that Amazon had failed two safety inspections beforehand the main requirement was: Work with union representatives and safety inspectors to draw up and enforce appropriate safety measures for covid, instead of ignoring them as they did after the previous incidents. The court considered a month as appropriate for this.

During this month they were to keep operations artificially low. As far as I could find the court cut down the categories they could sell to around 10% of what they normally sold to ensure reduced activity. They were also reminded to enforce the existing social distancing rules, avoid large meetings, etc. . I currently regret not keeping a link to the list of categories around when I found it shortly after the court case, now Google only seems to return a flood of news pages all repeating the same source free articles.

And they decided those close down because the strain on them by those requirements.

Whats the problem with that?

People seem resentful they closed because they calculated it wasn't worth operating. What do people expect? increase the difficulty of doing business and you won't have business operating.

I also suspect they felt they would be dealt with unfairly compared to native retailers, as the goverment has called Amazon a threat the French way of life and other rhetoric.

As others have pointed out, this wasn't a strike. The government imposed some rules with steep penalties in case of failure to comply. Amazon figured they would rather stop operations altogether while figuring how to set this up.

One notable difference with a strike is that employees kept receiving their pay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com