Administrative Court Hannover and Federal Labour Court

The BigBrotherAward in the Workplace category 2025 goes to

the Administrative Court Hannover and the Federal Labour Court

for two drastic miscarriages of justice in cases against Amazon.

This award is a novelty: It is the first time in the 25-year history of the BigBrotherAwards that an award is given to courts. For the first time, the targets are not the data leeches themselves but those granting these leeches free rein, who unnecessarily make themselves accomplices of the US-based company Amazon.

Truth be told, we would rather be singing the courts’ praises here. Currently courts often are – as can be seen in the US – the last stronghold of democratic resistance against arbitrary government decisions and autocratic machinations. Data protection, too, in so many cases, owes to the courts. In the 1980s the German Federal Constitutional Court declared data protection to be a basic right; many instances, up to the European Court of Justice, have defended it vigorously until the current day.

It is all the more alarming then, when courts suddenly turn into the mouthpiece of a US enterprise such as Amazon. When they start arguing against data protection and the right to participation of employees, in rulings that read as if they had been written by Amazon’s own PR department.

What is this about, then?

The first case leads us to Lower Saxony, to the city of Winsen (Luhe). Here, Amazon operates one of their 23 infamous logistics centres tasked with processing online orders. These “Fulfillment Centers” make negative headlines with some regularity. Surveillance pressure is part of everyday work life.¹ Cameras and handheld scanners document and record every move. Amazon measures the time it takes each worker to process an order, how many pieces they carry each hour, and what their speed and performance is in comparison to others. Employees have reported an “atmosphere of fear and mistrust.”² In 2017 the works council filed a complaint about this practice with the responsible data protection authority in the state of Lower Saxony.

After some back and forth over several years, in 2020 the data protection officer of Lower Saxony ruled against Amazon. It found that with this “uninterrupted collection and use of employee data”, Amazon “gravely violated the right to informational self-determination” of its employees. The continuous control was found to be unnecessary and disproportionate. This applied in particular to the long-term retention of performance data of so-called “pickers”, the persons picking up items to be shipped from the high-rack storage. Amazon is using this data regularly for personnel management. The rule for fixed-term employees is: those working not fast enough will not have their contract extended. Internally this is known as “Release Day”.³ All other affected employees have to defend themselves during tightly scheduled feedback interviews.

The US company went to court against the decision of the regulatory authority at the administrative court of Hannover, whose 10th Chamber took up the case. The hearing, however, did not take place in a court room, as you would expect, but on Amazon’s business premises. At the scene of the crime. It did not seem to matter to the court that witnesses could hardly be expected to give impartial testimony there. Imagine the trial against a tormentor were to take place in the perpetrator’s own living room …

On 2 February 2023 the court ruled in favour of Amazon. On 20 pages of fine print it agreed with every, really, every single argument of the US-based company: all the detailed data on the pickers were “reasonably required by Amazon, e. g. to balance performance deficits of individual employees, or an increased inflow of goods, in real time.” Additionally, retention of the data was said to be “required for continuous training of the employees” and therefore in the employees’ “own interest.” The court also found that the pressure to conform and perform through the constant data collection was not “permanent”. It said that in addition, because of the large number of open positions in the logistics industry, there were enough alternative employers other than Amazon.⁴

The data protection commissioner appealed this blatant misjudgement.

The second case is no less severe. It concerns a court case against Amazon Logistik GmbH in Bad Hersfeld. As a side note, this is a BigBrotherAward winner from 2015.

In this recent case, the works council refused to approve the introduction of a new software for personnel management with the descriptive name of “People Engine / New HCM [Human Capital Management]”. Amazon headquarters mandate the use of this software globally. The data processing is mainly performed at the company in the USA. The works council protested against that, with the justified argument that neither it nor any other German entity have any control over this data processing in the USA. Which is why it would not be permissible.

A Kafkaesque path through the courts followed.

First, a mediation council was established. This rejected all concerns of the works council, with the votes of the chairperson and of employer representatives. The works council then filed a complaint with the labour court at the city of Fulda, and failed again. The Fulda judges stated that works agreements would not generally concern compliance with data protection.⁵ Therefore it would not be possible to prevent the introduction of the “People Engine” with arguments about data protection.

On appeal, the State Labour Court of Hesse supported the argument of the Fulda judges.⁶ It also ruled that moving the case on to the Federal Labour Court would not be permissible. The works council took legal recourse against this. And thus the case ended up before the 1st Senate of the Federal Labour Court after all.

Here the story could have come to a happy ending. The 1st Senate could have considered the precedent of the European Court of Justice from 1 December 2024, which stated that “in matters of personnel data processing requiring works council participation, the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation must be fully observed.”⁷ The works council had not sought for anything else.

And normally the legal guidelines of the European Court of Justice are binding for German courts. But the 1st Senate of the Federal Labour Court took a different point of view. This August it told the Amazon works council by resolution that their legal complaint was not permissible because it did not meet the required standards. Quote: “We will refrain from any further justification.”

Here, perhaps, we could also refrain from any further justification for the BigBrotherAward. But it is worth it to take a closer look at the wider consequences of this decision. it has the following implications:

• Employers can simply remain stubborn in court proceedings about data protection violations even when a works council clearly has the right of co-determination.
• Labour courts can turn more than one blind eye when it comes to data protection.
• Courts can curtail rights of co-determination.

Why these courts ruled in the way they did we can only speculate.

The very fact that employees are subject to the arbitrary rulings of judges is partially a result of political inaction: for years the legislator has refused to create binding rules for the protection of employee data. This also holds for the current “black-red” (Christian Democrat and Social Democrat) coalition government. The current regulations about co-determination are from 1972, when there was no basic right to data protection in Germany.

But all of this cannot excuse the fact that the Hannover administrative court has made itself into Amazon’s accomplice, so that in the future only those employees who submit to the daily tread mill will be given permanent contracts.

Works councils, on the other hand, are an important democratic institution in our liberal economic order. They serve to create a balance between the interests of employers and employees. Whoever undertakes to cut this right of co-determination, as the Federal Labour Court did in the Amazon case, questions one of the very foundations of our social economic order.

This cannot be!

Congratulations to the 1st Senate of the Federal Labour Court, and the 10th Chamber of the Administrative Court of Hannover. You have earned the BigBrotherAward 2025 in the Workplace category.

Press release from the Administrative Court of Hanover (german only; dated October 13, 2025) (web archive link)