
Amazon’s Showdown in France Tests Its Ability to Sidestep Labor - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/technology/amazon-unions-france-coronavirus.html
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d3nj4l
> The company shut down in the country after a court ordered it to cease
> delivering “nonessential” items during the pandemic.

Here in India, Amazon has been required by law to sell and ship only essential
items, nationwide from 25 March until 3 May, and in all "Red Zones" (which
include nearly all urban centers) through today. They've happily complied, and
in fact stopped taking orders on non-essential items _before_ the legal
requirement kicked in. That just shows the only reason they've refused to do
that in France is because they don't want to give a win to labour
organisations. What an awful company.

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tinus_hn
Did the Indian government also levy fines of around $100000 per item if only 1
item was categorized as essential but later turned out not to be?

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josefx
The French court explicitly used Amazons own product categories for its
whitelist. Amazon would have held the full definition of whitelisted items in
its hands the whole time if it decided to comply.

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wlesieutre
Amazon’s product categorization is not particularly reliable.

For example, if you go to Electronics -> Headphones -> Earbuds and sort by
price, this book comes up: [https://www.amazon.com/Wentworth-Letter-Joseph-
Smith-ebook/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Wentworth-Letter-Joseph-Smith-
ebook/dp/B0084A76P0/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1589724266&s=electronics&sr=1-1)

Although visiting it by that link then shows it as a book, so I’m a bit lost.

~~~
Red_Leaves_Flyy
Amazon's categorization system is entirely broken. It's quite sad that on of
the largest companies in the world has one of the worst product filtering
systems I've seen. Hell, they even remove results when sorting by price low to
high, but not high to low. They're Also missing thousands of sub categories
and filters. Sellers even have the free reign to deliberately mislist their
items, what good that does I have no idea.

EBay suffers similar problems but is more consistent witha mostly functional
sorting system.

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docdeek
We've ordered a couple of things from Amazon France in the last two weeks and
they were getting shipped from Amazon warehouses in Germany.

Our conclusion at home (just a guess based on noticing where our Prime
deliveries were coming from...) is that Amazon shut down most/all of the
warehouse operations in France in line with court orders, put the staff on
'chômage partiel' so that most of the salary would be paid by the state, and
then continued fulfilling orders from their warehouses across the border in
Germany. Our Prime deliveries still arrived on time, Amazon still got my
money, but the workers were sent home and the state pays for them to be there
(mostly anyway).

Impressive and nimble by Amazon, and not sure that's a big win for labor here
in the longer term.

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lm28469
> put the staff on 'chômage partiel' so that most of the salary would be paid
> by the state

No, amazon requested it and the French government told them to fuck off, as
they should have.

[https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/05/04/coronavir...](https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/05/04/coronavirus-
la-demande-de-chomage-partiel-d-amazon-a-ete-refusee_6038609_3234.html)

~~~
ekianjo
So the court orders you to close your operations and on top of that you have
to pay for it? liberte egalite fraternite much.

~~~
josefx
The court ordered them to a) start following safety guidelines. b) as made
necessary by repeated failure to follow a) start to plan improvements and
correct issues with their current safety procedures. c) reduce operations to a
whitelisted subset of Amazon(TM) product categories until such time that b) is
finished and approved.

At no point did the court force Amazon to close its warehouses. That was pure,
spite on Amazons part. I even think we are already past the date the court
considered for the review and improvements, so if Amazon had complied its
warehouses would be running and serving the full product spread again.

~~~
ekianjo
Safety guidelines based on what evidence exactly? Because just back in
February the WHO guys were saying masks were useless before completely
reverting their position, so you hear everything and its opposite even from
experts.

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the-dude
I get a strange buzz from this piece, it feels like an Amazon 'whitewash'.

I am sad to see this style of employer-employee relationship creep into Europe
through globalization.

~~~
esotericn
Amazon should just be banned in Europe.

We don't need what is essentially a monopoly, or at least targeting becoming a
monopoly, controlling internet sales. It's not beneficial. It may have been in
the very short term, but now the effects of pushing out small businesses are
clear, we can just not have it.

The labour practices are almost besides the point, anti-trust should break
them up.

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bzb3
I'm happy with Amazon, if you don't like them then don't use them, but don't
punish us all with going back to the shitty local commerce.

~~~
esotericn
Not having Amazon =/= only using local commerce. The problem is their
centralization siphoning all of the money and attention out of the business,
vertically integrating delivery, etc.

It's not like online retailers don't exist. Well, for now. They _will_ go
under if we just let Amazon run everything unchecked.

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missedthecue
Protectionism is anti-consumer

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the-dude
Which is nice as long as you have work.

~~~
missedthecue
Protectionism creates less employment and opportunity than free trade. This is
like saying immigrants take jobs from Americans

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the-dude
[http://archive.is/QjzqW](http://archive.is/QjzqW)

