
Amazon fires warehouse worker who led strike for more coronavirus protection - bigpumpkin
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/amazon-fires-staten-island-coronavirus-strike-leader-chris-smalls.html
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treyfitty
Not surprising. I don’t know when Americans will stop accepting this corporate
behavior. If there’s something this virus should teach us is that we, as
individuals, are not impervious to anything. Including terrible working
conditions. It’s as if we all have Stockholm syndrome and don’t go beyond
worshipping corporations, despite the exploitations everywhere. Hell, the
system is fundamentally reliant on exploitation.

~~~
sunnydayddr
The worker was in close contact with someone who tested positive for the
virus. He was told to self-quarantine at home with pay, and yet he instead
still decided to lead the strike and directly put all of his colleagues at
risk.

That kind of sounds like sensible corporate behavior to me. What is it exactly
that you have against this decision?

~~~
neumann
It does sound like sensible corporate behaviour. It is also not a fact, but a
claim by Amazon which it can use as a convenient and possibly somewhat hard to
verify excuse to fire a employee it finds troublesome.

Until there is more information, I can totally picture a scenario where Amazon
uses the excuse that they can remove a troublesome employee from leading a
walk-out by (falsely) suggesting they have been in contact and need to self-
isolate (the pay is nothing for them). When the employee disputes that and
come in they get to fire the individual under the pretext that he was not
behaving appropriately and endangering other workers.

~~~
ukj
As an ex-Amazonian (having been surrounded by thousands of exceptional people
whose second nature is risk management) I can tell you that coming to work
with a cold was frowned upon.

It was not "corporate policy" \- it was culture.

Coming to work sick and potentially infecting others is the opposite of
failure isolation.

~~~
neumann
Right - and that's fine. But the article didn't state he was sick. In fact,
only a spokesperson for Amazon said he was to self-isolate after coming into
close contact with an associate - which is a very convenient accusation (if it
was in fact not true) to keep someone from coming in to organise a walk out,
and then getting to fire them under the pretext of risk management.

~~~
ukj
>which is a very convenient accusation (if it was in fact not true)

The key here is that you don't know if the accusation was true or false, but
you arguing as if you do.

Which, in the language of Information Theory, is called a bias.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_maximum_entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_maximum_entropy)

~~~
neumann
Apologies, I wasn't trying to argue that I do know. I was arguing the same as
you imply here.

That because we don't know, you have to view the statement from the Amazon
spokesperson as another unverified fact. Which, if you read your original
response, you didn't. In this case, the information bias came from you. I was
(possibly not clearly) trying to point out that lack of verification of the
claim he was sick and/or in contact with somebody who was is important,
specifically because it is advantageous for Amazon that everyone believe it to
be true. I am not saying it isn't. We just don't know. Hope that makes it
clearer.

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someonehere
Where’s Bezos hiding during all this? New Zealand or space?

