
Amazon's Anti-Union Training Video [video] - danielinoa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQeGBHxIyHw
======
Animats
Similar info from "unionproof.org"[1]:

 _Managers may notice a change in the language of employees because it becomes
more formal and legal in nature. Employees may start using union words like
“grievance,” “arbitration,” “job security,” “employee rights,” “prevailing
wage” and “unfair labor practices.” They may also start asking their immediate
supervisor or manager questions around these topics, so be sure you have a
system in place for your front-line managers to report a change in employee
behavior that could be an indication of organizing activity._

"Union Proof Certification" is a thing.

The Communications Workers of America describes typical employer tactics from
the labor side.[2]

Historically, neither side is very creative, so once you know what the
standard moves are, you know what to expect.

[1] [https://blog.unionproof.com/are-you-missing-
these-10-signs-o...](https://blog.unionproof.com/are-you-missing-
these-10-signs-of-union-organizing-activity/)

[2] [https://unionbustingplaybook.com](https://unionbustingplaybook.com)

------
icxa
Absurdity of this video aside, but I just wish there was room in today's
political environment to discuss pros and cons to unions and non-unions. There
are some pretty good examples of unions being corrupt, there are examples
where unions work. There are examples where like Amazon says, having a direct
relationship with your employer is the best. Nuance is gone which is the
biggest loss.

~~~
mc32
Definitely. Unions brought progress in terms of worker rights, up to a point.
They helped transform the landscape for all workers.

But, like all big and complex organizations they become corrupted and rather
than having the interest of workers and society as foremost goals, self
perpetuation and preservation become the goals.

Except for Bernie no other candidate explicitly and implicitly supports
unions. All the others support policies which would undermine unions, except
for where it’s politically expedient.

But this is natural. Even in the proletarian era of Mao, unions/workers
suffered descent too. Often a most favored group would be pitted against
another when necessary, for example the Hong Wei Bings [紅衛兵]

~~~
ken
> Unions brought progress in terms of worker rights, up to a point.

What does "up to a point" mean? Like these videos, this makes it sound as if
the progress of workers' rights is over, and we've got all we'll ever need.

What about, say, "a living wage", which the government's minimum wage law is
unable to provide? This isn't done. It will probably never be done.

~~~
tathougies
The thing is not all jobs need pay a living wage. Not everyone works to live.
Some people work for extra income and their spouse works for a living. Others
work to save for splurge purposes while being supported by parents. Others
work for socialization after retirement. Forcing companies to pay living wages
for every job means they are more reticent to create jobs which could help
take families out of poverty or keep seniors from falling into hard times,
etc.

Governments need to pursue policies to ensure there are a surplus of jobs
paying living wages for the number of workers that need to live off work. This
is not the same as pursuing policies to ensure every job pays a minimum wage.

~~~
mc32
Even Bernie came against this reality: his workers demanded $15/hr, you know
in line with his stated policy platform. So, he did concede the raise but cut
back on their hours.

Now, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think shipping jobs overseas has had a
catastrophic impact on wages and jobs (unions can’t protect against this in
any meaningful way). Also unions will milk a company dry regardless of
consequences. But they occasionally protect against some abuse. On the other
hand they stifle innovation in very counterproductive ways.

~~~
icxa
> I think shipping jobs overseas has had a catastrophic impact on wages and
> jobs

On the flip side this is also what has contributed so much to global progress
in terms of increased wages globally, increased standard of living, life
expectancy, literacy levels, and every other measurable positive progress
indicator. I'm conflicted as well.

------
jasonhansel
The best/worst parts:

\- Valuing innovation while saying that nothing should ever change in their
relationships with employees

\- Using the words "vulnerability to organizing" and "dangers of organizing"
as if it's a terrible disease

\- Saying that unionizing employees aren't displaying "normal behavior"

\- Calling the phrase "living wage" a warning sign

\- Refusing to explain why it is that employees might want to unionize

~~~
vore
I like how they claim they're not "anti-union" but also not "neutral": sounds
like following a very within the letter of the law way to union bust without
actually falling afoul of labor laws.

------
toofy
There was a Home Depot anti-union video floating around yesterday. [1]

What really struck me is how much they remind me of the cringey anti-drug
videos we used to watch in like middle school, “If you see a suspicious person
smoking something that looks like a cigarette but smells funny, cross the
street to get away. They may offer you a joint for free to get you hooked. If
you smoke that joint, before you know it they’ll be giving you free crack.
Cool kids just say no.”

I mean, obviously, just like everything, unions have pros and cons, but does
this kind of cheesy fear mongering actually work? If we could see through it
and make fun of it as children, surely a grown adult would find it as off
putting as kids do?

[1] [https://youtu.be/QrmNojOCiak](https://youtu.be/QrmNojOCiak)

~~~
ken
Even if I didn't know anything about unions before, the mere fact that all
these mega-corps are spending the money to make anti-union videos would seem
awfully suspicious. Why would companies have anything to fear, if unions were
really so terrible for workers?

These anti-union videos are indeed reminiscent of the anti-drug videos. Drugs
are unhealthy, expensive, and illegal -- so DARE should be shooting fish in a
barrel, and yet they still have zero demonstrated effectiveness. Hearing an
adult in a position of power tell you not to do something only makes it seem
more attractive.

~~~
vinay_ys
These videos have definitely made a lot of people curious about unions.

~~~
majewsky
The cynicist in me says these videos are not going to change anyone's minds.
Either you think highly of unions, in which case this will make it even more
clear to you that Amazon workers need to unionize. Or you don't like what
unions do, in which case the video provides you with arguments.

------
AndyMcConachie
I love how they list "living wage" as a warning word.

~~~
ethbro
Among pretty much every other activity. "Showing interest in benefits or
plans"

I'd tend towards it being a fake, if it didn't seem reasonable these are the
kinds of ends Amazon HR goes to in order to keep their labor pools un-
unionized.

~~~
Thorrez
It wasn't simply "showing interest in benefits or plans", it was showing
"unusual interest" in them.

Amazon commented on the video saying Gizmodo "“cherry-picked soundbites” from
the video". If it was fake, Amazon wouldn't say something like that, Amazon
would say it's fake.

[https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-
re...](https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-revealed-in-
leake-1829305201)

------
lr4444lr
YouTube comments are usually a cesspool, but sometimes a real gem makes it
through, like this:

    
    
      > notices another worker says "grievance"
      > i was trained for this
      > i run to the hrm 
      > i twist my ankle jumping over my piss bottles
      > i struggle to limp through the warehouse as the other 
      workers have to push me over so the make their times.
      > i fall over from heat exhaustion because the hvac has 
      never worked
      > finally at the hrm 
      > i get fired before i can report the red scourge

~~~
gigama
Or this one from Garmen Lin:

Why did Jeff Bezos get divorced? Because his marriage... was a union!!

------
jdkee
Given the wage stagnation in the U.S. since the mid-1970s, it is fairly clear
in 2019 that capital won and labor lost.

~~~
pasquinelli
The conflict between labor and capital comes from the nature of labor and the
nature of capital. It won't ever be won or lost; the conflict will carry on or
labor and capital will no longer describe how our productive capacity is
organized.

1970 to 2020 is 50 years. Consider how long feudalism lasted before it was
discarded.

------
sehugg
Target made one back in the day: [https://archive.org/details/TargetAnti-
unionPropagandaVideo](https://archive.org/details/TargetAnti-
unionPropagandaVideo)

------
andrepd
I love how they say "associates" instead of "employees". Indeed the sheen of
the coat of paint is different and shinier, but the tactics and morals are as
scummy as 100 years ago.

------
Schnitz
There's only one company whose recruiting emails ALWAYS get deleted sight
unseen: Amazon. Who in their right mind would want to work for a company that
encourages union busting?

~~~
OJFord
If you're not and don't want to be a member of a union it's unimportant trivia
really.

~~~
archagon
Let them eat cake?

~~~
OJFord
Unclear to me how that applies; it's more like: 'I do not eat cake, therefore
I do not care for whether the canteen serves cake.'

------
gigama
Per their own words, worker unions impede "speed, innovation, and customer
obsession."

Yeah, gotta feed that customer obsession at all costs.

~~~
hannasanarion
It's also a very strange way to spell "shareholder"

------
bibinou
full 29 minutes version:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRpwVwFxyk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRpwVwFxyk4)

------
lrg
It's funny how they couldn't get an amazon warehouse employee to stand in
front of a camera and read this script.

~~~
dvdbloc
I’ve got imagine this is to make it appear friendlier. I think it’d be a bit
more intimidating to have a person on camera telling me not to use the words
“living wage”

------
sneak
“We’re not anti-union, we’re just anti-everything-a-union-does.”

------
seibelj
What company wishes their employees were unionized? I’ve yet to find an
example of management demanding unionization of their free workforce.

Unions, by definition, are strictly about the collective over the individual.
You must acquiesce that you have no individual value and qualities that raise
you above the minimal employee in order to benefit.

Decisions like Janus are supremely on-point: let unions justify their
existence to their own members. Forcing one to join the union as a
prerequisite for employment is undeniably immoral and robs employees of free
choice.

------
black_puppydog
I would have thought this was parody if it hadn't recently featured in John
Oliver's Last Week Tonight...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9m7d07k22A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9m7d07k22A)

------
wrong_variable
Organized labor was extremely problematic for capital since WW2.

The new dealers ( FDR, Truman ) gave organized labor tremendous power because
without it the USA would probably have had a big communist party.

They also knew the deflationary period of the 1930s lead to the rise of
fascism and nationalism in Europe. So the petty greed of capital was scarified
at the altar to maintain peace. They were also willing to sacrifice growth to
maintain peace.

We are going through a similar period of deflationary shock, so it's going to
be interesting to see how it plays out and ends.

Most likely the source of unrest may not be US but China.

~~~
H8crilA
Uhm, modern Germany? Many companies have labor representatives on board (for
example Volkswagen). The country is just fine.

> They were also willing to sacrifice growth to maintain peace.

Who would do such a thing! We should get back to my grandfather times, he was
happy because he was a child, and children did not only get a few potatoes to
eat per day, but also a little bit of oil with it. Also I suppose it's kind of
romantic to have sex with a stranger on the barricades before being shot to
death and having your body join the decomposing pile of bodies in the streets.

~~~
ars
European style unions are not the same as American ones, despite the same
name.

One huge difference is there can only be a single union at an American
company, while with the European style an employee can pick which to chose
from.

------
jewelry
Why is anti-union a bad thing? Couldn't resonate with the idea that union is
saving workers. They are not.

~~~
hannasanarion
Don't you find it at least a little bit suspicious that the big companies are
putting so much money and effort into preventing unions "for the benefit of
the workers"? Since when has Amazon done _anything_ for the benefit of the
workers?

------
CryptoPunk
If Amazon's work force unionizes, Amazon will cease to be a dynamic company
that sees rapid foreign expansion and growth in export revenue it earns for
the US.

The US will see yet another major driver of innovation and production growth,
this time the tech industry, succumb to social activists and their rent-
seeking-motivated ideological narratives.

A century of pro-union-monopoly advocacy will not change the fact that unions
as generally conceived are anti-market interventions and thus economically
unsound.

~~~
mirimir
A century of pro-corporation-monopoly advocacy will not change the fact that
corporations as generally conceived are anti-market interventions and thus
economically unsound.

~~~
CryptoPunk
Corporations as generally conceived are not anti-market interventions. A union
backed by the state imposing a rule that violates an employer's contracting
rights by 1. preventing them from negotiating with workers outside of the
union, 2. preventing them from firing workers who unionize or strike and
replacing them with new workers, is.

These are blatant anti-market interventions that give any group of workers
that unionize an effective state-backed monopoly over their employer's labor
force.

The conspiratorial narratives about opposition to such state-backed monopolies
being nothing more than Big Business trying to mislead and exploit the little
guy, and such monopolies being in the public interest, is nothing more than
economic quackery, on par with anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories about
vaccination being a harmful practice that is only widely promoted because of
the nefarious influence of Big Pharma.

The economic reality is that these rules create rent-seeking and reduce
economic efficiency. They will destroy Amazon's dynamism.

Giving a select group of workers a temporary wage boost at the expense of the
industry that sustains them is the same short-sighted policy implemented in
the post-war era, which saw workers see large wage gains, and then saw the
industries that employed them suffer massive bankruptcies and contractions.

~~~
mirimir
It's true that the legality of unions in the US depends on an exception in
antitrust law. But it's also true that corporations depend on state-backed
exceptions to common law. As such, corporations were generally illegal in the
US until the late 1800s.

There was an exception for corporations serving the public interest. Initially
for building canals and railroads. But in the late 1800s, a series of Supreme
Court opinions removed those limitations. Eventually, they got some protection
under the 1st, 5th and 14th Amendments. And recently, wider protection under
the 1st Amendment.

As long as we're going to allow collective action by business owners, it's
only fair that we allow collective action by workers.

~~~
zaroth
Any form of business larger than a sole proprietorship is a collective action.

The “corporate” form of a business (as supposed to a partnership or other
structure) is mostly a matter of taxes, legal liability, and the manner of
raising capital and distributing profits.

Powerful unions are typically larger than the workforce of any one single
company.

~~~
mirimir
Right. Sole proprietorships and individual workers have similar market power.
But without unions, workers have virtually no market power vs corporations
(and partnerships, for that matter).

I do agree that both corporations and unions ought to be regulated by
antitrust law.

~~~
CryptoPunk
Market power is irrevelant to workers being able to fetch the market rate for
their labor. Corporations compete with each other for a limited pool of labor.
There is no generalized class conflict between corporations and workers in a
free market. Competition happens just as much within classes as between them.

Ultimately that results in the wages offered being determined by the
underlying market forces of supply and demand that are far larger and more
powerful than the efforts of any single party. And it is in society's best
interest for wages to be determined by supply and demand and not some social
agenda.

The only policy which provide zero sum benefits to corporations at the expense
of workers is immigration. And that can be addressed by workers through
political coordination. The primary purpose of unions is to give select groups
of workers the ability to engage in rent-seeking at the expense of the wider
economy. We can get political coordination between workers without resorting
to unions and all the harm that comes along with them.

~~~
Supermancho
> Market power is irrevelant to workers being able to fetch the market rate
> for their labor.

If the market consists of few actors, you get collusion to depress wages and
opportunity (in tech you had [https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-
googles-wage...](https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-
fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/)) but
it exists across a number of industries. Your assertion assumes only good
actors, which is not commensurate with reality.

~~~
CryptoPunk
Collusion of this type has a very minor impact on market rates. The example
you cite is tech companies coming to an agreement to not cold call each
other's employees to head hunt them. And wages in Silicon Valley have exploded
over the last couple of decades so obviously there are much larger forces at
play in setting wages than these collusions.

This sort of collusion can also be addressed in a much more targeted way than
creating laws that give workers who unionize control over major hiring
decisions of their employer.

