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Comment by docdeek | Hacker News Reader

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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> 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...

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

Liberty, equality and fraternity yes. For humans, for their safety. Who the fuck cares about Amazon's margins?

I keep saying this in real life: the point of economies and companies is to serve people. We have absolutely lost sight of why we have these things.

Economies don't serve anything. The economy is the way we measure productivity. People really must stop thinking of it like some kind of mysterious beast from another dimension that we must tame into subservience

> Economies don't serve anything.

Oh really? Considering that an economy is a system of consumption and distribution of goods and services, how exactly do you arrive at the conclusion that consuming and distributing goods and services don't serve anything?

> The economy is the way we measure productivity.

Wrong. The economy is a system of exchange and consumption of resources. Productivity is a secondary attribute and a side-effect, and one that is secondary to the whole reason of having an economy.

> People really must stop thinking of it like some kind of mysterious beast from another dimension that we must tame into subservience

I would refrain from judging other people on their ignorance if you show so little understanding of the subjects you're discussing.

If you live in any kind of city then your everyday life is made possible by economies running to feed every single person on a given day. You should realise that.

They were never ordered to close, they were ordered to only ship first necessity goods and _they_ decided to close themselves.

I'm not going to cry for Bezos, especially after they had the audacity to ask the government to pay for their employees unemployment benefits. Fuck them and fuck them good, at least it's happening in France and not in the US, these employees are 100% covered and won't end up bankrupt.

PS: It all started when amazon union said that "employees risking their lives and their family lives to ship and deliver video game consoles to strangers is non sense", amazon was found guilty of not following basic health regulations, after which it was ordered to limit their business to essentials items.

The funny thing is that it's exactly what's happening in the US right now but their law doesn't protect employees and puts businesses before people: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/retail-workers...

So please explain why Amazon can still operate in Germany at the very same time.

Germany and France are separate countries with different laws, isn't that obvious ?

which part of `liberte egalite fraternite` does worker exploitation come from?

Amazon is free to do business in France, and they are free not to (as they threatened)

They are not free to exploit people. That is equality and fraternity at it's best.

Always surprised when neocons come out the woodwork with their hetero economic view about some God-given-right to exploit the poor and desperate because they are rich.

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.

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.

Ah, thanks for that - I didn’t realize that was the case.

"chômage partiel" was denied by the gouvernement, Amazon is paying for their salary.

Thanks for that - I missed that and assumed where I shouldn’t have.

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