The European Parliament’s employment committee has highlighted the need for regulating automated control of workers after visiting Amazon warehouses in Germany and Poland this week.

Seven of the committee MEPs visited Amazon warehouses employing some 5,000 workers on Monday and Tuesday (26-27 October) ahead of the Commission’s Quality Jobs Act proposal expected in December.

The trip follows the committee’s hearing on working conditions in Amazon in January, where workers raised concerns about efficiency goals, safety, and surveillance using AI tools, which may be regulated more rigorously as a part of the upcoming act.

According to a 2023 survey by UNI Europa, a labour union federation, about a half of Amazon’s employees said their work had a negative impact on their mental and physical health.

Workers’ progress throughout the day is usually watched through security cameras, but also the work badges scanned in check points in various locations in the warehouse, and scanning devices used to identify products. 

In the city of Sosnowiec, home to one of Amazon’s Polish warehouses, employees are overworked by “constant pressure of being judged, which is very hard to cope with mentally,” Agata Wypiór, recently-named vice secretary of Amazon’s European Works Council and Solidarność union leader told EUobserver.

Leaving worker management and performance monitoring to algorithms means “these processes become almost invisible,” Li Andersson, head of the delegation, told EUobserver.

“The way the workers describe it, it sounds like a digital panopticon: when you work faster you have to work even faster.“ 

Workers themselves often do not know what data is collected on them and how it is being used to set productivity targets, Anderssen highlighted. 

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• Fighting near Kostiantynivka through the eyes of a missing Ukrainian soldier: hunger, thirst, exhaustion and, ultimately, disappearance.
• Rubikon released a video of an attack on a Ukrainian position in southern Kostiantynivka — an area Moscow has claimed to have captured for months.
• Russians used ballistic missiles against Kyiv’s Pivdennyi Bridge, leaving a large hole in it and forcing its closure.
• Near Komar, Ukrainian soldiers reached the village of Vesele, cutting the distance to Velyka Novosilka by a third.
• Maps of the day: Kostiantynivka, Komar
• Videos of the day — the aftermath of the Russian attack on a Kyiv bridge; a drone attack on a Russian convoy, seen from both Ukrainian and Russian cameras.

Fighting near Kostiantynivka through the eyes of a missing Ukrainian soldier: hunger, thirst, exhaustion and, ultimately, disappearance. Despite Russian claims that it has captured the city, fighting continues for the first city in the belt of Donbas “fortresses”. Further details can be found in the second part of the Ukraine Battlefield update.

Little, however, is known about the people holding Ukraine’s defences despite Russia’s superiority and their immense hardship. Ukrainian newspaper Hromadske published a lengthy report on the fate of one of them.

His name is Hennadii Osadchyi. He is 42, has a wife, Nadya, and an 18-year-old daughter. They live in Kropyvnytskyi, in central Ukraine.

He was mobilised in autumn 2025 and, on 16 December that year, was sent to the front in Kostiantynivka as a member of the 100th Brigade. By the time he went silent, he had spent 230 days defending the city without rotation.

His wife decided to speak about what he experienced during those seven months. Her information comes from the messages they exchanged. When Hennadii enlisted, he weighed 96kg.

By the time he went silent, he weighed half as much. His messages to his wife explain this dramatic change.

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New research by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and LobbyControl shows that Big Tech lobbying is pushing the EU towards sweeping deregulation of data protection rules.

The new publication finds signs of an intensive lobbying campaign between Big Tech and Germany and Ireland which are helping to gut fundamental European data protection safeguards.

“The Big Tech campaign to kill data protection in Europe” documents how MEPs are meeting with Big Tech lobbyists under the guise of boosting AI tech innovation.

The report documents extensive contacts between Big Tech companies and European policymakers over the EU Commission’s proposed Digital Omnibus.

The aim is to change and influence how personal data are used to develop and operate AI systems, warns CEO.

“It is a really drastic change,” Bram Vraken researcher and campaigner at CEO told EUobserver.

Introduced by the commission last November, the Digital Omnibus forms part of the EU executive’s wider drive to simplify regulation and strengthen European competitiveness.

The commission has presented the proposal as a way to make Europe “simpler and faster” and to “adapt” its regulatory framework to a “more volatile world”.

The Digital Omnibus “provides a simple, innovation-friendly environment for our European AI ecosystem to grow,” said commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen.

But the proposed changes potentially create broad exemptions from existing data protection rules for AI companies.

“What we see is a creation [of] this huge backdoor, which in many cases will make the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) meaningless,” Vraken said.

If adopted by the European Parliament, the changes would allow companies to collect people’s personal data to train and operate AI systems without consent.

Google and Meta

Under the parliament’s rules, all MEPs and their assistants must publicly declare scheduled meetings with lobbyists and third-country representatives and access to these information is public.

From November 2025, CEO and LobbyControl identified 655 meetings with lobbyists in the parliament, the report says. This comes as Big Tech lobby budgets hit record levels.

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