Group 3 Monitoring at Lidl PDF

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Monitoring Scandal at Lidl

The year 2008 was very turbulent at the German discounter Lidl. After the first rumors became known, Lidl finally had to admit that employees were systematically spied on. Several hundred pages of internal Lidl protocols are available to various newspapers, each with a note of the day and time, and how often employees go to the toilet, who may have a love affair with whom, who the supervisors consider incapable or simply "introverted and naive". The surveillance system always followed the same pattern: on Monday morning, detectives commissioned by Lidl installed between five and ten miniature cameras in the respective branch stores. The store manager was told that the aim was to track down shoplifters. In fact, the detectives also noted down their precise observations of the Lidl employees. Achim Neumann, trade expert of the trade union Verdi, said that he had never heard of such systematic employee monitoring. "This dimension is completely new to me. The Hamburg labor law expert Klaus Müller-Knapp, who was shown the protocols in advance, considers them "highly scandalous" because they are not about labor control but about behavior control. "This represents a clear violation of Article Two of the constitution law, which protects the free development of personality.

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Because of the spying on employees, . A spokeswoman for the Ministry of the Interior said that data protection law was examining whether employees in numerous branches had been systematically monitored. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the data protectors for the non-public sector will take a close look at the case. "The facts of the case must be clarified", stressed the ministry spokeswoman. Based on these investigations, the discounter Lidl was fined to pay a total of 1.462 million Euro for spying on its employees. The total amount results from the individual penalties that the data protection authorities of twelve affected federal states have determined. The trade union Verdi is satisfied with the fine. "One million Euro is not a trifle for such a company," said deputy Verdi president Margret Mönig-Raane. Lidl had already announced that it would accept the penalty "with great probability without contradiction". After all, they had "actively contributed to the clarification over a period of several weeks", the company management asserted in a statement. In the aftermath of this scandal, food discounter Lidl apologized to its customers for the surveillance scandal in its stores. The impression that Lidl is systematically "spying on" its employees does not correspond to the company's management principles, Lidl explained on his website on Friday. In addition, a "holistic data protection and security concept" had been developed in order to "avoid such errors in the future," says von Lidl. The incidents had triggered a "broad debate about the way in which we deal with the management and behavioral principles of our company". The company still refers to the months of systematic spying as "misconduct by individual managers". 1

But according to the union Verdi, Lidl is far from being an exemplary employer. The discounter continues to intimidate employees, making it difficult to set up works councils throughout the country. "This shows that the management's attitude towards its employees is not in order," said deputy Verdi president Margret Mönig-Raane. "Most employees are still not protected against their superiors. The atmosphere at Lidl remains closed and distrustful."

Source: https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/ueberwachungsskandal-lidl-gibt-bespitzelung-zu3084860.html https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/ueberwachungsskandal-lidl-muss-millionen-strafe-zahlen3762026.html https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/ueberwachungsskandal-bei-discounter-lidl-entschuldigtsich-bei-den-kunden-1.288892

Questions: a) Describe the situation that is depicted in the case study. What is the main problem that Verdi and the Ministry of Interior point out? What did Lidl do wrong? b) c) What can you say about the Organizational Culture at Lidl? d) After the scandal became public and Lidl was fined, they apologized to their customers. What do you think about their strategy of dealing with this scandal? e) What should Lidl do in the future to avoid future problems?

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