COLOMBIER-SAUGNIEU, France (Reuters) – In his veterinary practice near the French city of Lyon, one morning in June, Gilles Renevier was ready to castrate to a poodle. When it comes to animals, it turns to its other role: to seek to neutralize Amazon.com Inc.’s expansion ambitions.
Renevier runs an organization of local volunteers who have controlled to suspend the structure of a site that, according to activists and a senior local official, is intended for a logistics center for the online retailer. Construction on the site is pending, while a legal challenge that the vet helped release makes its way through the courts.
In France, disparate anti-Amazon forces, joining local activists, environmentalists, industry unions and members of parliament, combine to fight the world’s largest online retailer. In some cases, they have earned the investment of some of the world’s richest philanthropists. The goal: to prevent the e-commerce giant from expanding its presence by arguing that the U.S.-based company. It is destroying retail jobs, exploiting staff and damaging the environment, arguments rejected through Amazon.
Amazon’s wart parties won a high-profile victory in April when, following a separate legal challenge through subsidized union staff through environmental organization Friends of the Earth, a French court ruled that the company failed to adequately protect its COVID-19 staff. Amazon, which challenged the court’s findings, responded through its French warehouses and distribution centers for 35 days. Since then, the company has reached an agreement with the unions and reopened the centers, however, the resolution has encouraged the company’s complaints elsewhere, adding in the United States.
Renevier, 59, with silver hair, is the unpaid leader of a local activist organization called Fracture that, along with some other local organization, and friends of the Earth, seeks to prevent Amazon from spreading its footprint in the south of France. Is. Before processing his surgical list this June morning, he stopped at the empty structure site.
The vet, who lives 14 kilometers from the site, said he was involved with the traffic and pollutants that an Amazon logistics center would cause and believed that Amazon was selling a customer life form that was destructive to society.
“How are we going to reduce pollutants when you have a big operation like this, with so many cars driving?” He said. He added that he had not bought in Amazon.com and that he was seeking, until now without good fortune, convincing his adult son not to do so.
Amazon representatives declined to tell whether the company connected to the Lyon site or about the activities of the company’s conflicting parties.
Representatives stated that the company was smart for the environment because its distribution style was more effective than the classic retailer and therefore referred to fewer miles traveled and less pollution. They claimed that the entire business style, which destroys, the retail of bricks and mortar and that it works strongly with small French corporations that use Amazon’s logistics network. They also claimed that the corporate was creating thousands of jobs, directly and indirectly.
France is a particularly fertile soil for Amazonian skeptics. It is a country that traditionally feels uncomfortable with American-style capitalism, which has strong unions and an attachment to the kind of retail outlets of the mom-pop community that, in some cases, feel threatened through Amazon.
In addition to legal action, Amazon’s war-held parties in France are participating in a variety of tactics ranging from direct action that has been linked to storming the company’s sites and pressuring that the law imposes a two-year moratorium on scale distribution sites operated by the online store. . France’s new environment minister Barbara Pompili said last week that she supported a moratorium, specifying the duration.
It’s not the only country where Amazon faces opposition. In Germany, the company’s largest market after the United States, Six-site Amazon staff initiated a short-term protection attack by the COVID-19 outbreak. In the United States, Amazon staff in Michigan, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota organized strikes to call for safer race situations in the epidemic.
Amazon staff filed a complaint in June against the online store in the U.S. District Court. For the Eastern District of New York, claiming that the company did not adequately protect COVID-19 personnel at a facility on Staten Island, New York. Three of the French unions involved in the case in France also asked the US court if they could participate in the New York case, which is ongoing.
The French resolution “sends a message to Amazon staff in the United States and around the world,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Departmental Stores Union, who asked the court in the New York case to participate alongside Amazon. Personal.
Amazon said its distribution centers in France, the United States and were safe.
Regarding the U.S. case, Amazon spokeswoman Lisa Levandowski said, “Amazon has a long-standing practice of not commenting on ongoing litigation.” In a June 30 filing, Amazon’s lawyers stated that the plaintiffs’ claims would be dismissed because they were “not supported by credible claims,” among other reasons.
The company has followers in France. Christian Poiret, mayor of a community in northern France where Amazon has a distribution center, said he struggled to lure the online store to create jobs in the region. He added that he became involved with the movements of anti-Amazonian activists for “the symbol we sent to foreign investors.”
An Elyseo official said french President Emmanuel Macron’s management had replaced his policy: “Amazon sites have been welcomed and welcome.”
For Amazon, France offers expansion potential. According to Forrester Research’s place market research, Amazon has an estimated 19% of the French e-commerce market place between companies and consumers, less than its 42% percentage in Germany.
Amazon reveals its French revenue, but says the country is a smaller market for businesses than the UK and Germany.
The company claims to have doubled the number of other people it employs directly in France in the last 3 years to 9,300 more people. This is a faster speed than it has reached in the UK and Germany during the same period. And Amazon plans to open some other primary distribution center in northern France in the coming months, a corporate representative said.
Amazon is also making plans to set up a giant distribution center in Metz, near the French-Luxembourg border, according to Jean-Luc Bohl, who until this month was mayor of the municipality of the city of Metz. Amazon representatives declined to comment.
The allocation that Renevier is trying to block arrives at a 160,000 square meter logistics center near Lyon Airport. Amazon is not mentioned in the request for plans, which was filed through the French branch of an Australian-based genuine real estate developer named Goodman Group, which specializes in the structure of logistics centers.
But Amazon would eventually blow up the site, says activists and David Kimelfeld, who until this month was head of the local government of the metropolitan domain of Lyon, a domain close to the site. Kimelfeld said she attended meetings with other local officials where Amazon’s involvement in the assignment was discussed. Reuters was unable to independently verify the discussion of Amazon’s participation in meetings.
Goodman France did not respond to a request for comment. Parent company Goodman Group said: “Given that there is a case in court, we are not in a position to comment at the moment, to say that there have been two rounds of previous litigation in which we have been successful on both occasions.
Renevier’s Fracture and the other local organization filed a complaint with the Administrative Court of Lyon in 2018 and 2019, alleging irregularities in the request for plans, adding that Goodman is not the center’s final operator. The court opposed the teams defeated last year, a resolution renevier and his allies appealed in January.
The lawyer representing the Renevier organization in the legal challenge now has the assistance of a lawyer attached through the national headquarters of Friends of the Earth in Paris. Friends of the Earth also campaigned in the May municipal elections opposing a mayor who supported the project.
It is a component of a broader organizational crusade that opposes Amazon, which says it has created an unsustainable business style that is destructive to the planet and humans. Some of the activities similar to the Amazon of Friends of the Earth are funded through the European Climate Foundation, which distributes grants on behalf of donors, adding a circle of Rockefeller relatives to the philanthropic background, Michael Bloomberg, the base family circle of pc tycoon William Hewlett and the foundation of IKEA’s founder.
ECF’s Executive Director of Strategic Communications Tom Brookes said the grant was intended to fund a number of activities through the environmental support group, but that the base knew at the time of the award that some of the cash would be used in his Amazon campaign. Brooke added that donors didn’t necessarily know where individual grants are going.
Alma Dufour, Amazon’s leading activist for the French bankruptcy of Friends of the Earth, said the maximum ECF grant is for larger weather projects and that the amount spent on Amazon is small. Brooke and Dufour declined to comment on the amount of the grant.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation said it was providing general information to the ECF for its extensive project on climate change, but not in particular for Amazon’s campaign. The IKEA Foundation said it had a joint environmental project with ECF, but did not address the express problems at Amazon. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies did not respond to requests for comment.
Open Society Foundations, founded and chaired by American billionaire George Soros, said it had provided 9,000 euros to the French bankruptcy of Friends of earth for its crusade to protect casual and low-wage staff and small investors in the pandemic.
Friends of Earth said the cash was particularly for Amazon’s campaign. Open Society referred questions about how cash was spent on the environmental group, however, the foundation’s communications manager, Laura Silber, said, “Like any other workplace, Amazon will have to be accountable to its employees.” Soros, contacted through the Open Society, did not answer questions about Amazon.
Reporting through Christian Lowe in Colombier-Saugnieu and Elizabeth Pineau and Mathieu Rosemain in Paris; Additional reports through Gwenaelle Barzic, Caroline Pailliez, Michel Rose, Leigh Thomas and Sarah White in Paris, Catherine Lagrange in Lyon, Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Joseph Nasr in Berlin; Edited through Cassell Bryan-Low
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