Here is the key point Amazon claims he was exposed to the worker on March 11th. Over the weekened he said he is organizing a strike, so over the weekend they order him and only him into quarantine. A full 18 days after his 5 min exposure. From my reading of it, this almost certainly looks like retaliatory action due to the strike, and a company using the excuse of quarantine to cover it up.
Key excerpts from a much clearer article. And yet again, why you never 100% believe a company's PR response when they're trying to cover themselves. They tell just enough truth, but use it to intentionally mislead.
> According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March. Had Smalls been exposed that day, a 14-day mandatory quarantine would have made him eligible to return as soon as 25 March.
> Smalls said Amazon did not send him home until 28 March, three weeks after the exposure.
> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said, even as the infected person worked alongside “associates for 10-plus hours a week”.
> “You put me on quarantine for coming into contact with somebody, but I was around [that person] for less than five minutes,” he told Vice.
> According to Amazon, no one else was fired. Smalls said he was considering legal action, calling it “a no-brainer”.
We should apply rigor to both sides. Each has incentive to cherry pick and mislead.
> key point Amazon claims he was exposed to the worker on March 11th
Did they claim that? I'm looking for a source on this. "According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March", but when you look at their linked source[1] it says: "Amazon confirmed an associate, who reported for work on 11 March, has since been diagnosed with Covid-19".
> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said
Is this confirmed? You can't just assume this to be true. Pretty damning if so, though.
> “You put me on quarantine for coming into contact with somebody, but I was around [that person] for less than five minutes,” he told Vice.
Viral transmission has no minimum timeline and often occurs at first point of contact (e.g., handshake) or cough/sneeze at any time. Kind of irresponsible to even print that quote without correcting the argument.
It may be that Amazon retaliated, but stuff like this doesn't prove it. We need the hard facts. At this point it's unclear and sounds fishy on both sides.
I really hate it when people use he said/she said type arguments to pretend that they are being objective and 'rigorous'.
There is a reason that the courts have something called 'burden of proof'.
When an individual worker does something a large company doesn't like and they fire him, the burden of proof in my mind is on the company. Because HR has professionals and if they can't tell a better story than what we are seeing, then retaliation is the reason 90% of the time.
It isn't unclear. It is perfectly normal for companies to get rid of the whistle blowers. That's why there are (weakly enforced) laws against it.
It's weird that you mention courts and then in the next sentence say this:
>the burden of proof in my mind is on the company
Because that is not how the courts operate. It is up to the person making the accusation (which in this case is the employee accusing Amazon of an unjust firing) to provide proof.
If you want to start dismissing all "he said/she said" arguments, then we might as well shut down this entire thread. We are never going to get any further than "he said/she said" unless someone in this thread has insider knowledge of this situation and is willing to break privacy agreements.
> Because that is not how the courts operate. It is up to the person making the accusation (which in this case is the employee accusing Amazon of an unjust firing) to provide proof.
While sort of true, using the word "proof" there is too strong. In a civil context, the burden of proof for a retaliatory firing is a preponderance of the evidence. That means, the plaintiff has to demonstrate with evidence to the court (in a bench trial) or the jury that it is more-likely-than-not (e.g. 51%) that the firing was retaliatory.
If you start with the evidence that Amazon learned that the worker was organizing a strike, and then very shortly thereafter fired the worker that evidence _alone_ (which seems to be undisputed) probably gets you near that burden.
Amazon, then, might present the lack of quarantine defense as an alternative scenario, but then some of the burden will be on Amazon to effectively make this case.
Exactly. When taken to court the plaintiff would have an easy time acquiring records of quarantine counts. In that case the "burden of proof" could somewhat be seen as being on Amazon, but really it's the court allowing the accusor to get such proof. (that is, some guy doesn't have to go around and ask everyone he worked with if they were quarantined, Amazon has to give him the information).
> It is up to the person making the accusation (which in this case is the employee accusing Amazon of an unjust firing) to provide proof.
It's not necessarily either. It may very well simply be the preponderance of the evidence. Nevertheless, such a suit will be undertaken with the benefit of the discovery process.
Preponderance of evidence is the bar that must be met. But the plaintiff must provide the evidence to the courts. The discovery process makes some of the defendant's records available to the plaintiff, in case there is relevant evidence.
But if the plaintiff produces no evidence, Amazon does not need to make a defense. Thus OP is correct.
> But the plaintiff must provide the evidence to the courts
Sure, but any evidence which makes an accusation more likely than in the absence of that evidence suffices to meet preponderance of the evidence in the absence of any contrary evidence. The fact of the labor organizing, the fact of the firing, and their temporal relationship are, together, evidence for retaliation.
Yes, exactly. If the only evidence presented demonstrates that the plaintiff was organizing, that Amazon learned that he was organizing, and after that point Amazon fired the plaintiff they would very likely have met a preponderance of evidence burden. It sounds like none of those facts are even in dispute.
So, Amazon will very likely need to make the case (and Amazon will need to present the evidence to support it), that he was actually fired for violating the company mandated quarantine.
The actual evidentiary fight will probably be over whether that quarantine was a bona fide quarantine, or a pretextual one. But who has the burden to present that evidence will very much depend on who feels like they're losing the case. Probably both of them will need to present evidence to support their position.
Fallacious. A headache is evidence of a brain tumor, but there's not a 51% chance you have a brain tumor. You've satisfied some necessary conditions for retaliatory action, but haven't converted that into a probability.
You have a reasonable indication, but no preponderance of evidence. You probably have enough for discovery.
Preponderance of the evidence is only used in arbitration, if he's suing then this is litigation. In reality, if he has a contract requiring arbitration or mediation instead of litigation then he has absolutely no power and no chance of winning because arbitratators/mediators are always hired by the company.
Even discounting all of that, the judge/jury/arbitrator/litigator would have to agree that sending him into quarantine and not others constitutes retaliation. To be completely honest, this kind of job is a huge joke. If you take too many bathroom breaks you won't hit your quota and they cN fire you for that.
The only way to win isn't to prove he was treated inconsistently, that can be ignored so long as the reason they stated for letting him go is true.
A quick google search says preponderance of the evidence is the standard of proof for most civil cases, so your assertion that it is only used in arbitration seems to be incorrect.
And arbitrators are always required to be agreed on by both parties.
Firing someone isn't asking a court to do something. Companies can fire you for all sorts of silly reasons and most of them aren't illegal. The employee is accusing the company of firing them for one of the illegal reasons.
> There is a reason that the courts have something called 'burden of proof'.
Definitely.
> When an individual worker does something a large company doesn't like and they fire him, the burden of proof in my mind is on the company. Because HR has professionals and if they can't tell a better story than what we are seeing, then retaliation is the reason 90% of the time.
You don't appear to understand why courts have "something called burden of proof". In court, the burden of proof is on the person who was fired. They must show that they were fired illegally. You can't just randomly assign "burden of proof" based on your ideological bias.
> I really hate it when people use he said/she said type arguments to pretend that they are being objective and 'rigorous'.
Sounds like you "really hate it" when people express a preference for finding out what really happened.
I have no strong opinion about this specific case.
>You don't appear to understand why courts have "something called burden of proof". In court, the burden of proof is on the person who was fired. They must show that they were fired illegally. You can't just randomly assign "burden of proof" based on your ideological bias.
You don't appear to understand that there is clearly visible causality here. A random person claiming they were unjustly fired is different than someone who was fired after organizing a strike.
Yes, but it is a sliding scale. Firing someone after organizing a strike would suggest sufficient prima facie to pursue the case in court. A claim without the appearance of supporting evidence would be thrown out.
That doesn't really work. If it did then anyone who knows they're about to get fired could just start organizing a strike. Or start organizing a strike as cover before purposely causing mischief.
This isn't a criminal proceeding. The people who "investigate" a civil case are the plaintiffs, who don't need to be motivated by evidence in order to start investigating.
The point of contention is to what extent someone starting to organize a strike should be evidence that they weren't fired for some other reason. But it's extraordinarily weak evidence because it's completely under the control of the party it's supposed to be evidence in favor of.
Anybody who knows they're about to get fired for some other reason, or who wants to be able to do something obnoxious without getting fired, could just start making noises about a strike and then claim that's why when it happens. But since anybody can do that, it doesn't prove anything.
It's like claiming your boss promised you a bonus, and using as evidence some fully-refundable travel tickets you claim to have bought expecting to have the money. You would do that if you really thought you had the money coming, but you would also do it if you're just trying to manufacture evidence. You have reason to do it either way, so you doing it proves nothing because it lacks any correlation with the result.
> This isn't a criminal proceeding. The people who "investigate" a civil case are the plaintiffs, who don't need to be motivated by evidence in order to start investigating.
You're not really addressing the point. No one is saying anything about proof or guilt. To carry out any sort of effective investigation discovery is required. The act of firing someone after organizing is prima facie evidence for carrying out discovery. That's all they were saying.
Sure you are. Discovery is really expensive. The point of throwing out cases prior to it is to keep the court system from being used as a mechanism for harassment or extortion. Otherwise if you don't like somebody you could file a frivolous case against them and require them to spend thousands of dollars on discovery even though you'll never win, or use that expense to extract a settlement from them because it's cheaper to pay you off than win the case on the merits.
So the question is whether something the plaintiff does should be considered as evidence against the defendant. But the plaintiff could do it even if the defendant is totally innocent, and has an incentive to do it if it would allow them to bring their frivolous case, so it has no evidentiary value. It conveys zero bits of information because you could reasonably expect it to happen with equivalent probability regardless of the defendant's liability.
The reason this really messes people up is that it's one of those "this statement is false" things. If it can't be used as evidence and it still happens then it's much better evidence, because the plaintiff in that situation wouldn't have a motive to do it just to manufacture evidence. But as soon as you do allow it to be used as meaningful evidence, that motive reappears and destroys the evidentiary value.
Discovery is also the only way for a case of this nature to move forward. If it worked as you say it did, companies would be impervious to these sorts of lawsuits.
> you could reasonably expect it to happen with equivalent probability regardless of the defendant's liability.
Your premise is also flawed, because that is not a reasonable claim. False rape accusations approach nowhere near 50% despite the possibility of similar incentives.
> So the question is whether something the plaintiff does should be considered as evidence against the defendant.
No, this is something that the plaintiff has carried out in response to the defendants actions. A smart company wishing to dismiss a low-performer will have a paper trail that can corroborate their actions and get these sorts of frivolous cases thrown out.
> Discovery is also the only way for a case of this nature to move forward. If it worked as you say it did, companies would be impervious to these sorts of lawsuits.
No they wouldn't, you would just need some actual evidence of the defendant's behavior instead of trying to use the plaintiff's behavior against the defendant.
> Your premise is also flawed, because that is not a reasonable claim. False rape accusations approach nowhere near 50% despite the possibility of similar incentives.
Rape accusations where the accuser has no corroborating evidence whatsoever tend to lose (or have the prosecutor decline to take the case), so that incentive doesn't really exist there unless you start to believe accusers without any additional evidence, at which point the rate of false accusations would skyrocket because they would be successful.
Also, how do you know what percentage of accusations without corroborating evidence are false? (That's legitimately very hard to measure.)
> No, this is something that the plaintiff has carried out in response to the defendants actions.
This is essentially meaningless. Many decisions are trade offs where reasonable people can disagree about what to do, so no matter what an employer does, someone can claim they disagree and would have done the other thing and use it as a pretext to organize a strike.
> A smart company wishing to dismiss a low-performer will have a paper trail that can corroborate their actions and get these sorts of frivolous cases thrown out.
That's assuming the employee was a low-performer or that there was a past pattern of misbehavior. Some people follow procedures right up until the point when they decide to stop.
That also rewards the most nefarious bureaucrats who keep the best records on every little thing anybody has ever done wrong so that they have a pretext to justify firing anybody. So then you're losing any connection to meritorious behavior -- a well-lawyered corporation has the paper trail to fire a real labor organizer while an honest company that isn't so distrustful of their employees gets into trouble when a bad employee starts lobbing false accusations at them.
> Because HR has professionals and if they can't tell a better story than what we are seeing, then retaliation is the reason 90% of the time.
There are regulatory / liability reasons which may prevent HR from telling their side of the story. The employee is not under the same rules and can say whatever they want without HR being able to refute it.
And I really hate it when people distort well-defined ideas like "burden of proof" to mean whatever they want it to mean, especially whatever is most advantageous to their worldview.
Just to be clear, I think this probably was retaliation, and there seems to be almost enough to prove it. If it can be proven that Amazon put no one else in quarantine under similar circumstances (minus leading a strike) before this case, yes, most reasonable people would view this as retaliation.
The standard for evidence for a corporation is indeed higher in court. That does not apply to the court of public opinion and social media.
We should not expect that a corporation prove its case to US. ...we are not judges. We have no right to cast judgement or determine who's right, and have no rights to the evidence.
This will all be fleshed out IN COURT - where it belongs.
I wouldn't be surprised if the guy who posted it above is actually working for amazon to manipulate the situation. Introducing controversy is an actual technique used to discredit people.
Everybody is pretty clear about amazons reputation towards their employees, including software engineers.
> Even if they did quarantine others, putting someone on a 14 day quarantine 17 days after contact is hard to explain.
Not that hard. If everyone in the office had contact with someone infected then the best thing to do would have been to quarantine them all right away. Because without that, you now have the possibility that one of them had an asymptomatic case which they could have still had and given to any of the others less than a week ago, which means the others are still inside the window for being infected but not having either recovered or showed symptoms. Which means they still need to be quarantined.
Why are they quarantining people because they may have been in contact with the virus but did not quarantine people they know were in contact with the virus?
Could be the usual bureaucratic reasons. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Or the left hand is correct and they should all be quarantined and the mistake wasn't sending this guy home, it was not sending the others home too.
If these reasons exist, the company put lives at risk for weeks and then fired someone for doing the same thing for one day. Many members of management should have been fired before Monday for this to seem legitimate.
Not necessarily. Choosing whether to quarantine people is a judgement call, but going into work after being ordered not to is insubordination and trespass.
>Choosing whether to quarantine people is a judgement call,
This judgment call changed. If bureaucratic ineptitude was to blame, those people ignored proper procedure, making them insubordinate, and risked lives. And if they found the issue confusing enough to take eighteen days to issue the quarantine notice, they should understand why this employee might think they are being targeted for their labor practices.
The available information changed. This very quickly went from something many people weren't sure wasn't going to be maybe a nasty flu to something that has half the world staying home from work and hospitals getting overrun. Changing your procedures in response to new information is what managers should be doing.
This is just wrong, this disease was not some mystery three weeks ago and implying that the Amazon managers just learned of the dangers last weekend is absurd.
Three weeks ago there were less than 5000 known cases in the US, now there are about a quarter of a million and the most in the world. The idea that what we know now is equivalent to what we knew then is absurd. Three weeks ago there was some hope it could be contained using ordinary measures.
They'd have been smarter to respond to it sooner, but better late than never.
The US declared a national emergency on the thirteenth. Every day past that in which they did not quarantine the employee is a far greater risk than the day he came in. And the idea that they didn't understand the risks until the 28th is ridiculous.
You're trying to spin it both ways. If Amazon was just idiotic about their response to the outbreak, why did they pick that moment to suddenly take things super serious and fire the employee?
They did not follow health guidelines until the person complained and then they still don't follow them but instead claim to follow them. Why just claim? After the 14 day phase the guidelines don't suggest any quarantines unless people show symptoms.
over and over in this thread you have been repeatedly told that amazon waited well over 2 weeks to "quarantine" him (and only him, nobody else that was exposed) despite knowing he was exposed (and also did not tell him).
Yet in every post you make, you continue to misrepresent the situation.
So what's your solution then, companies can just tell employees to stay home for no valid when they try to plan a strike or organize, and then fire them if they still try to do so?
It's unclear whether there was "no valid reason" or not in this case. But if they're paying the employee to stay home (like Amazon was in this case) it's hard for me to see a huge problem.
To me, this seems like retaliation, but he offered Amazon plausible deniability by not complying with job instructions. If you're told to work from home but you refuse, it seems within reason that you might be let go.
I don't know that he can work from home, as a fulfillment center employee. It seems to me that Amazon was just trying to find a way to keep him away from other workers in order to collapse strike efforts. And I don't know that it's reasonable for a company to bar you from the office if you're trying to get the company unionized.
> You realize why he wanted to organize a strike right? Amazon knew that one of his co-workers was infected, and said and did nothing.
If he took health and safety so seriously then he wouldn't be breaking his quarantine after he claimed he had direct contact with someone carrying the virus to drive up to work potentially exposing all his co-workers to the virus.
Honestly, it's not a good look for them if they tried to order him into quarantine 18 days after his exposure. I can't defend that based on what I've read from the Amazon supporters here.
But a strike, right now, is not the answer. It's just pouring gasoline on the fire. Counterproductive at all levels. Labor organization is all about picking your battles, and this is the wrong fight in the wrong place at the wrong time. His beef with Amazon needs to be settled in a courtroom, not on a picket line.
The only worse thing he could have done would be to try to lead a strike during a world war.
Did you read the article you linked to? Employer-provided insurance had nothing to do with strikes or unions. It became popular as a way to improve competition in the job market in the presence of wartime wage controls.
And it's arguably a terrible system that we're still stuck with today, with the effect of handcuffing productive people to their desks in dead-end jobs. We'd be far better off with universal coverage that's not tied to employment... and yes, that means better-off economically.
Its a shame they didn't seek your approval to make sure it was the appropriate time to strike, when the least amount of people would be upset, after all strikes are definitely not about inconveniencing people.
Perhaps the workers should just continue to allow amazon to get away with exposing them to covid-19 with no notification, for the greater good.
No, of course not. The employee complains about not being quarantined for 14 days after exposure. That makes sense. The only way to fix that was to have made a better decision. Quarantining him 18 days later is entirely pointless and adresses nothing.
Statements like this sound so reasonable but they ignore the massive power imbalance. Amazon is the largest company in the world whose owner has literally bought news papers. Given that power I’m way more likely to believe the workers...
I think we should lean toward the workers, take them seriously and investigate. But it's unwise to go beyond the facts. If claims turn out to be false it'll damage the believability of victims in the future. Being prudent is necessary to have believability tilted in their direction over the long term.
By what measure is Amazon the largest company in the world? It’s not by market cap, employee count, revenue, earnings, or any other measure I can think of.
I'm guessing this was unintentional by GP, but it's probably true that amazon is the largest company in the world where the founder also owns a major newspaper.
One side has a long history of labour abuses however. It would be different if it was Patagonia or Columbia and they had a history of treating people great
Well there's a difference between asking questions with the actual intent to find the answers, and asking just in order to 'both sides' a discussion without contributing any new information. The latter is more akin to sealioning, really.
These here are the important details about this and it looks pretty egregious on Amazon's behalf. Imagine the sort of leverage they could wield over their employees if they are able to get away with this kind of behavior?
If it took them that long to discover the exposure and notify the worker that really proves the workers' case that they're being subjected to an unsafe work environment. They're striking for protective gear and Amazon's response is to go 'oops, we didn't notice you were exposed weeks ago'? Ouch. Suddenly it's all Personal Responsibility when the worker's exposure happens even though Amazon could have prevented it.
I think you can be contagious 18 days after exposure, isn't the incubation period around 2 weeks? And we know there are asymptomatic cases so a lack of symptoms after that period doesn't mean he isn't contagious. However if he was indeed the only employee asked to quarantine that is highly suspicious.
>there are reports of cases with an incubation period of up to 27 days.
There is only one report based on one case of a 70 year old man in Hubei province, based on contact testing, and did not rule out that he contacted it later.
And this would be a total reasonable defense if they quarantine any worker who has any contact with anyone who is infected for any amount of time for 27 days.
But that' isn't a policy the company follows. Also they let him work during the 2 weeks he was most likely to be contagious.
What do you think is more likely, that after more than 2 weeks of not giving a shit about quarantining an employee, suddenly Amazon was worried about a 0.01% outlier of 27 days before symptoms showed, or that this was a retaliatory action for the worker attempting to organize a strike.
I sure know what I'd be placing a large amount of money on if I was a betting man.
I was precisely stating the reasoning behind the number we see everywhere. I was not offering an opinion on whether that reasoning is sufficient to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
That said, in an emergency it makes sense to focus on people with symptoms and tell everyone else to act like they might be exposed. In which case people who have been exposed and have symptoms should act like you want everyone else to act. Which means that if they are working in a warehouse, you want them to have protective gear to prevent them from giving it to people.
Which is exactly one of the things that this strike was about.
While I personally am leaning towards retalation explanation, both statements could be true. Assuming Corona exposure was just happy coincidence that would allow company to fire employee and maybe even suggest that the fired employee was responsible for endangering others health.
Somewhat related, I have been receiving a lot unsolicited communications for signing various anti-amazon documents.
Tech companies in general and Amazon specifically seem scared to death of unionization. I think Amazon's actions in this matter are going to backfire tremendously.
Having worked with unions, is it because they tend to have better benefits and support for their employees? Having a union rep in their disciplinary activities?
I assume your comment is that Amazon would lose money if a union happened?
Having worked with unions, it is because they introduce and entirely new and superfluous bureaucratic hierarchy to a company.
I have had situations where it was not allowed to move a computer monitor from one cube to another - that had to be done by a union employee. Literally taking a unused spare monitor from one desk, and putting it on another employees desk where it was need. ...and there was a formal requisition process to get that done which took two weeks to get through approvals, assignment, and finally have it done.
I have had union workers walk off the job during a major system outage because their facility managers forced them to take their break time. The whole company was down - it was all-hands-on-deck outage due to Hurricane Sandy. The actual union workers wanted to help us get the systems back online for the company, but the union rep wouldn't let them work.
I have had great workers quit or refuse jobs with our company because they knew and loathed the union - not the company, but the UNION.
I don't have any problem with unions at companies that protect the SAFETY of workers, as they are needed in various industrial jobs. ...but at a TECH companies where workers are making six figures, have matched 401k plans, and safe and comfortable desk jobs? ...it just screams "ridiculous" to me.
I've seen the same thing. Most recently at a trade show.
That said unions help more than they hurt, in my opinion. It's also pointless to paint all unions with the same brush like that, you worked with a group of people that had bad management. That's can happen in any organization, not just unions.
Not they're not all great all the time but I think the Hollywood unions are something we as tech workers could model ourselves after. You still negotiate your own salary and such but certain benefits like pension/retirement/healthcare (which are great at scale but hurt employers and employees at smaller businesses) can be amalgamated across the membership.
Like for example just a couple years ago the writers unions got into a spat with their agents over double dipping with production companies and not representing the interests of their clients. That kind of bargaining power can be wielded to fix institutional problems across an industry, but it doesn't have to come at the cost of individual gains - the writers still negotiate their own compensation and sign their own deals.
Unions can be a great way for industries to self regulate imo.
>> Hollywood unions are something we as tech workers could model ourselves after
That's a guild, not a union. And sure, it's good. As long as you don't care about people that aren't in it right now. SAG does their very best to keep new entrants out.
I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. SAG-AFTRA is a labor union and a member of the AFL-CIO.
And they don't work to keep new entrants out. Union workplaces do prefer to hire union members, but if they can't then they'll work to get someone enrolled in the union.
> I have had situations where it was not allowed to move a computer monitor from one cube to another - that had to be done by a union employee
Can you explain to me where this is a union thing? Like I'd honestly like you to point out and explain your logic why this is specifically because of a union.
The reason why I bring this up is because I have encountered the same issues at my prior jobs which were non-union. Literally the exact same issue, where I was not allowed to move a computer monitor because it had to be done by another department after submitting a formal request.
I feel like people tend to blame unions for everything and yet I see the exact same shit people blame unions for at my non-union jobs. Is that because of an invisible union? Is there something I'm missing?
I experienced this "move a monitor" scenario myself whilst I was working at a DoD contractor company. I had to move cubicles and moved my stuff myself. My boss noticed and told me I couldn't move my monitor or docking station... but everything else I could. So I had to move my monitor and docking station back down to my old cubicle so that a few days later the "correct people" could move the items back up for me.
Why is this a union thing? No idea. Is it real? Yes.
Perhaps somebody is enjoying some popcorn watching an unending battle between "the invisible hand of the free market" and "an invisible union".
Absolutely. Had exactly this issue with wanting to move monitors just 3 weeks ago in a company where a previous union drive failed and had a lot of people spouting this sort of hoary, old cliche.
You can use asterisks around a word for emphasis, it reads less like you are yelling.
Some reasons to have unions at tech companies:
IP restrictions, unpaid oncall/overtime, crunch, getting a larger cut of the wealth they produce, better parental/health/timeoff benefits, having a representative in disciplinary hearings, requiring clear salary and performance processes, and about a half dozen other ideas.
You can disagree that these are real concerns at tech companies, but they are not ridiculous.
How does overtime / unpaid time work with salary workers? How much will the union take from my pay? Any amount is unacceptable given the current tax climate. Honestly it sounds like you just need a better company if you have these concerns. I work for the exact company in this article and we have all of these things you listed.
We could change our labor law to organize new unions on the Japanese or German models where nobody questions their legitimacy but instead we have this late 19th century model and the corporations act the part. Well I suppose they can’t call in mercenaries in a strike.
But how do you temper managements abuses for lower waged work though?
If only there was some sort of system to enforce laws. Oh wait, that only exists in a perfect world where a government actually cares about your rights...
Honestly I get it on both sides, but I really think the union has to be a jerk. It's annoying to most small independent types or middle management areas, but the people in the union need that type of power to influence the BS corporate hierarchy of exploitation to absurd degrees. It's fine to be exploited, it's annoying when the company will drop you in a heartbeat because some minor issue thats come up. If we had laws that at least made it easier for employees to exert their rights (through agencies that the government didn't short change like they love to do) we would have no need for unions. Culturally it'd be a precedent that management can't be dicks.
I think we're talking about amazon warehouse workers. I absolutely agree and I would loathe having to work in such an environment but when your job is put the package on the truck as fast as you can a union is a very nice thing to have.
Please name one Amazon Warehouse stock picker or forklift operator who is making 6 figures please. Also, where are all these tech workers making 6 figures at? BLS OES Job wage data shows about 80% of tech workers don't make 6 figures. The ones that do are in cities where $90k is the poverty line ffs.
Management can choose to share profit fairly in a keep what you catch manner so everyone's interests are aligned, and report accounting fairly, to the whole company.
Or Management can choose to do what Bezos did and ruin the retail market by selling at a loss for 2 decades while playing guile and psyop games with the public; he owns washington post BTW. Amazon is terrified of unions because that means they can't be profitable. Agriculture, Warehousing and logistics are major employers of illegal alien labor; the way Bezos makes money is by undercutting brick and morter retailers' supply chain costs because he doesn't have to hire anyone to run a store.
The reason unions form is management gets abusive; this pandemic is one such instance.
My girlfriend worked at Macys. She was paid $14hr to do white collar admin work and was in a "union". Each month we would walk a few blocks away downtown to a small office. This is where we paid "dues". We couldn't pay online or have it deduct from her check. The person we handed our check to would just roll their eyes and throw her check into a pile of checks. She couldn't afford these dues. The best part? You were required to be in the union.
The union helped Macys layoff thousands of workers including her with no severance in a nice streamlined fashion. I am wrong, but this is what I learned: Unions are basically fat cat organizations that leach hard working people.
Poorly run unions produce bad outcomes. There are also governments and corporations that leech off hard working people. It's a human dynamics problem, not a problem specifically with unions.
Essentially yes. Unions have varying levels of active members which sometimes leads to a self-interested bureaucracy acting against the wishes of the membership. See for instance this recent well-known example:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/bernie-san...
There is nothing magic about unions or democracy which means that they guarantee good outcomes. You have to work at it and be involved. In fact everyone has to.
Non-ironically, yes, and many union members in the US agree. Even before COVID-19, there were high-profile wildcat strikes this year, and it's only accelerating now.
I'm going to assune good faith here, maybe it's a cultural thing, who knows?
Regardless, here in the US it is typical for couples to form a partnership in which both income and expenses are shared. Possibly the reason for the recent emergence of the term 'Partner' to describe one's Significant Other.
This didn't pass the smell test, and sure enough Monaco, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Iceland, all have higher per capita GDPs. Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and Finland are in the same ballpark or a little lower. Germany and Belgium are lower, but still above 1/3 lower.
UK and France are ~1/3 lower. Italy and Spain are ~50% lower.
Switzerland pop: 8.5m gdp/capita: 65k -- reputation as a tax haven
Ireland pop: 6.5m gdp/capita: 69k -- reputation as a tax haven
Norway pop: 5.3m gdp/capita: 85k -- petrostate
Iceland pop: 364,260 gpd/capita: 54,753
Monaco pop: 37,497 gdp/capita: 162k -- french riviera
--Most populous Western Europe nations--
Germany pop: 82m gdp/capita: 44k
France pop: 67m gdp/capita: 38k
UK pop: 66m gdp/capita: 39k
Italy pop: 60m gdp/capita: 32k
Look I'm all for a larger welfare state, and there are plenty of things our nation could learn from Europe. But to pretend that if we made our country more European our economy would grow to resemble a tiny nation/tax haven like Ireland more than the UK, France, or Germany is unrealistic.
If you drop Mississippi, Idaho, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Alabama from the US numbers, then the US GDP per capita number would look bigger. Anyone can get different numbers by cherry-picking higher performers and dropping lower performers, but OP wrote "Europe" not "this list of rich countries in Europe".
The original claim was also a bad and misleading comparison. It doesn't make sense to compare a single country to an entire continent of 44 different countries, which are quite different from each other in a large variety of salient ways.
why not? the US is a large country (with more land area than the "entire continent" it's being compared against) with fifty states that are also quite different from each other. the US states are less autonomous than EU, but the country is large and diverse enough that it makes more sense to compare it to the entire EU than a very wealthy subset of US state-sized countries.
It doesn't make sense to compare the EU to a federation with more than double its land area, composed of 50 different states, which are quite different from each other in a large variety of salient ways.
I think the merged-with-less-developed countries is a red-herring. Run the calculation against the Eurozone and it doesn't change much.
There's no single apples-to-apples measurement we can make; the US has more natural resources than the EU, suffered far less harm from all the major conflicts up through WW2, &c.
I don't know whether or not liberalizing the economy of the EU would raise per-capita GDP or not, but the post I was replying to was claiming that a very specific and easy-to-check fact was wrong, so I checked it.
The US isn't homogenous either. DC, Massachusetts, New York, California, Alaska, and Washington have much higher GDPs per capita than other states / provinces.
The US is a nation state, the European Union is not. Comparing the two should only be done with a truckload of caveats to begin with. If anything, compare the Eurozone to the US.
With visa-free travel, common regulations, etc., the European Union is certainly starting to approach the United States (notice the plural in "States"?) in developing a similar federal structure.
Brexit shows that there's still a major difference: member states can elect to leave. Economic penalties etc follow, and political fallout, but here in the US we fought a major war to demonstrate that states are _not_ allowed to secede from the union. (As much as many blue states might wish they could ...)
The EU includes a lot of less developed countries from former dictatorships, former communist countries, and the former Yugoslavia. There's a lot of catching up which hasn't finished yet. Plus it's mostly missing the US's oil resources. Straight-up GDP comparisons don't tell you so much about quality of life for the average person in the street.
So the comment you're replying to was correct, for at least one plausible definition of "1/3 lower than the US".
As for the countries you mentioned:
Monaco: < 1 square mile, not reproducible in a larger country
Norway: Giant oil reserves / tiny population, not reproducible without that
Switzerland: Valid
Ireland: GDP numbers shouldn't be taken at face value because tax laws[2] encourage corporations to attribute EU-wide revenues to Ireland. Reported GDP per capita is 135% of the US value, but 2016 median household income[3] was only 87% of the US value[4]. This cuts both ways, though - other EU countries should have their estimates nudged upwards.
Iceland: 92% of US GDP per capita[1]
Denmark: 91% of US GDP per capita[1]
Sweden: 86% of US GDP per capita[1]
Austria: 91% of US GDP per capita[1]
Finland: 79% of US GDP per capita[1]
UK: 75% of US GDP per capita[1]
France: 74% of US GDP per capita[1]
Italy: 68% of US GDP per capita[1]
Spain: 65% of US GDP per capita[1]
EU (all 28 countries): 71% of US GDP per capita[1]
In fairness, Monaco, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland and Iceland are all tiny, distorted one-trick ponies.
Norway is all oil, Ireland is the tax haven of the Fortune 500, Ditto Switzerland, Monaco is the tax haven of the rich, and Iceland is pure tourism.
Pulling out Iceland or Monaco and comparing them to the entire US is like pulling out Palo Alto and Seattle and comparing them to all of the EU.
UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc are a much better representation of what larger, mores diverse European economies look like.
In fact, if you take the whole EU together (as you should, the US number also includes places like the South and the Midwest), the parent comment is correct.
Social support networks have a cost. It's great to make more money until you go bankrupt from healthcare costs. Also, Europe enjoys lower crime and higher life expectancy.
Not because of labor unions, it doesn't. In fact the developed nations of the EU tend to have the strongest unions. You're conflating lack of development due to the cold war with... worker unionization?
I lived in Germany for a couple years and now live in one of the poor(er) states. A comment above this says to jettisoning Idaho will game GDP numbers for the US. I'm currently experiencing earthquake aftershocks AND low GDP.
I honestly think for most people, Germany had a high quality of living (if you ignore AC when it's 35 degrees in summer). But in the US, we've got Mammon and, for better or worse, GDP is how we track that.
people say this, but I have yet to see anyone I know actually move to europe, even those with dual citizenship or an easy path to get it. I do however work with many eastern european expats.
GC was talking about people that need to work with unions (and those in them), not the people actually in the unions. Saying people in unions like unions and so they can't be bad is like saying that oligarchs like being part of an oligarchy so oligarchy can't be bad.
I think unions do good, but they can also be an enemy of progress. Here is a piece about unions that I found on google.
Corporate lawyers are terrible at Opsec. Watch them go on a hunt to find and fire the leaker causing even worse PR. Let this be a lesson. "When you sling mud, you lose ground"
Devils advocate: if you're sent home on full pay and told not to come in, and you come in, that's fireable (doubly so with coronavirus happening). If you do that, you need some strong evidence that it's retaliation. You have away the benefit of the doubt...
no, that individual was exposed to someone confirmed positiv with covid-19. one of the workers he worked with. both public and private sources confirmed it to me.
if you ask me, that's a pretty dick move for someone. Can't you wait your strike protest after your 14 days of quarantine? just 14 days.
With everyone throwing a fit about pastors and churches gathering together during this, where's the outcry over this guy seemingly rounding up groups of employees to picket?
Is it ok to protest dangerous work conditions by actively creating dangerous protest conditions?
> With everyone throwing a fit about pastors and churches gathering together during this, where's the outcry over this guy seemingly rounding up groups of employees to picket?
Where did it say he was rounding up groups of employees and picketing?
> throwing a fit
Who is throwing a fit? I thought they were fining and/or arresting pastors that break the law and threaten the safety of entire communities?
What is the need for him to be on-site, if not for personal contact with other employees? He admits it's for organizing.
(Honest question, I'm not familiar with how organization/ unionization works, or if there's another legitimate reason.)
Have you seen people's reactions to the churches that are still meeting in person? Check out op/eds and letters to the editor in Tampa, Baltimore, and Baton Rouge, just to start. Twitter if you want to see the ugly that is expected from Twitter. But throwing a fit is an understatement.
So? He did not get a covid-19 test, so for all Amazon knows, he's a carrier. There are plenty of lightly-symptomatic people who are ill and contagious for longer than 14 days.
This is a union busting, anti-labor and retaliatory firing. It is illegal in the United States.
Multiple employees have spoken out about the working conditions at Amazon's warehouse facilities over the last couple of weeks. Common complaints include a lack of protective equipment, sanitization, health monitoring, and working "shoulder to shoulder". Workers are getting sick, and Amazon isn't properly reporting the actual cases of COVID-19 at their facilities.
Mr. Smalls announced ahead of time that he was going to lead a general strike at his facility in solidarity with the instacart and wholefoods strike on the same day. This was reported in the media. Amazon knew this was being organized and waited to fire the worker until after the planned protest strike occurred.
Here is Mr. Smalls talking about this in detail: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/03/30/staten-island-whole-fo... - All he was asking for was for the building to be sanitized after a confirmed case of COVID-19 occurred at his facility, at Staten Island near the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States in New York.
The attorney general of New York recognized this issue for what it is.
---
New York Attorney General Letitia James said late Monday evening that "it is disgraceful that Amazon would terminate an employee who bravely stood up to protect himself and his colleagues."
"At the height of a global pandemic, Chris Smalls and his colleagues publicly protested the lack of precautions that Amazon was taking to protect them from COVID-19," she said. "Today, Chris Smalls was fired. In New York, the right to organize is codified into law, and any retaliatory action by management related thereto is strictly prohibited."
Here is another article discussing the actual conditions of Mr. Smalls Facility:
---
Despite Amazon’s efforts, Amazon employees at multiple facilities who spoke to CNBC argue that the measures aren’t enough to keep them safe. They say uneven safety precautions at facilities across the country have sown feelings of distrust between workers and their managers. Workers say they’ve become worried that managers aren’t being honest about whether employees are sick with the virus, so that they can keep the facilities open.
At some facilities, workers say essential supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes are rationed or there’s none available, putting them at risk of catching the virus. Warehouse workers say they’re forced to choose between going to work and risking their health or staying home and not being able to pay their bills.
Amazon is in the wrong here. They retaliated against Mr. Smalls. This was a labor movement action, and they illegally fired Mr. Smalls for organizing at this facility.
These workers aren't asking for more money. They are asking for safe and sanitary working conditions. Are they not entitled to a healthy working environment?
Edit: Formatting issues. This was a copy-paste from a comment I made on a /r/business thread on reddit. Formatting on HN is a bit different. :)
How does at-will employment work with union busting? I remember working at Amazon they were very adamant about everything being at-will. Furthermore, in their management training, they didn't even tiptoe around their hatred of unions. They basically have a formal system developed to rat out any union organizers. The only reason I can infer for the existence of such a system is so that they can bust unions. They seem willing to take the legal risks that come with retaliation.
>How does at-will employment work with union busting?
It's similar to the way at-will employment works with ADA protected classes - sure, they can fire you, but if you can show that them firing you was because of a protected action (union organizing), you can sue and will likely win.
Given the likely fact that Amazon only cared about quarantine for this individual, only after they organized a strike, and three weeks (!) after exposure, it's pretty clear that what Amazon did here was illegal.
Amazon is simply betting that the employee either can't afford a lawyer or their lawyer isn't better than Amazon's legal team. They can spend a lot of money on making sure of that.
It is my understanding, that from a legal perspective firing an employee in retaliation for engaging in organized labor even if their employment agreement is "at-will" (which is the default), is illegal. But IANAL.
“Union busting” is a pretty vague term. There’s no legal issue with a company hating unions or trying to prevent a union from forming, as long as they don’t prevent employees from talking or retaliate against them for it.
Is there a company out there that does full time employment, with benefits, and pays their taxes (no dutch sandwhich/offshoring) in the same space as Amazon? That is, an online megastore, not worrying about AWS/cloud.
I think there's more than a few of us who are ready to vote with their dollars.
I've been personally boycotting Amazon for years, and very happy with that decision. There are so many stories like this which are more or less egregious.
Now would be a great time to do this given the delays of the once-convenient fast shipping times. That said, what are the equal alternatives?
I think for most consumers, some things are absolutely required in order to switch away from Amazon: fast shipping, an inventory of hard-to-find items (e.g. car part or furnace element typically found on Amazon), a good refunds/returns system, and a massive crackdown on counterfeit products.
That last one is really important to me. Vendors are now filling legit containers of brand name items with fake product, then resealing them as new. This is becoming increasingly common now. I've noticed it with food (Pumpkin seeds, noticed a poor re-seal job), vitamins (a hole in the top seal beneath the cap despite being plastic wrapped), and Clorox bromine tablets for a spa (tablets didn't match store bought version). These products have all been obviously tampered with.
Not for show of solidarity but for practical reasons, India has realized the advantages of its vast network of neighbourhood mom-n-pop shops in these times. It is time that people take note of this and start supporting local businesses even if they can cost a bit more. Of course it is understandable to order online due to lack of local availability or very significant price differential on non-trivial purchases but if these small businesses close, then the impact would be great in times like this.
Where I work, we're basically donating money to the Bezos charity known as AWS at this point. We have so much waste in our multiple AWS accounts. We have people who double things up because they can't/don't/won't communicate (effectively). It's truly an unmanaged disaster. Bring it up to management, they don't seem to care. Even back on the napkin estimates are showing us wasting > 100k a year on unnecessary or outright unused AWS services. They still don't care. And I know we're not alone and that there are other places (even in my immediate geographical area) that have waste well in excess of what we're pissing away.
That sounds like really bad management. But not only from decision makers bur also from operators. If you’re not using a resource (like unused EC2 instances) why not just turn it off. It sounds like gross incompetence from all the parts.
Your company is operating inefficiently in some regard. You’ve done the leg work and determined this inefficiency costs about ~$100k annually. You take this to your leadership with a proposal: we can save this money through better communication among teams, a review of existing system for “unnecessary” or unused services, and “management”.
From an engineering perspective, this makes perfect sense!
But management reacts negatively, maybe even becoming skeptical of your value to the org. Why?
1. The savings you propose are too small to make a significant difference to profitability. $100k is equivalent to between .3 to 1 FTE engineers depending on geography.
2. Someone has to run this project, they will cost money. Engineers will have to be involved, they will cost money. Every project team is going to have to evaluate their usage and provide justification documents, so now the costs are cascading through the org.
3. Remember that the cost of a decision is the sum of the the cost of the thing done plus the cost of the things forgone. People working on this are not working on things customers will pay for—that is, things that get multiplied by many customers now and into the future and differentiates from the competition. This project has its own costs. The savings must be very, very high to compensate for both.
4. It’s hard to imagine how the savings can be sustained without significant new bureaucracy. Every resource allocation is going to have to go through an architecture, implementation, harmonization, and business necessity justification review. That is a lot of new gate keepers.
5. You indicated that teams already “can’t/won’t/don’t communicate.” This means the teams are going to have significant political battles over who owns/runs which resources. Ownership of a the architecture is a tool to bludgeon other departments into compliance—which will make inter-team conflicts worse because they can’t just agree to disagree. Suddenly, one team winning an argument means winning forever.
6. Solving the previous point with better communication is not viable—it would mean solving fundamental problems in organizational management and psychology.
So, what can you do? The fundamental issue here is that the scale of the problem does not match the scale of the organization. Cost saving projects that succeed—like google early on deciding to develop their own servers and racks instead of buying off the shelf—provide a sustaining competitive advantage. Google saves so much money from its infrastructure investments that it lets them build products that would be wildly expensive for others to replicate.
In business language this is referred to as cost leadership. Ferrari has a much lower need for cost leadership than Toyota. Ferrari still needs to contain costs to be profitable, but it primarily competes on differentiated products in a focused market. They might be interested in saving money on aerodynamic simulations so they could do even more of them. But Toyota would quickly go bankrupt if they didn’t make cost leadership part of everything they do—just a few years a failing to improve efficiency would lead to their cars costing many thousands of dollars more than competitors in a market sensitive to price.
Which kind of company do you work for: one that serves the broad market (AWS) or something more niche (IBM Mainframes)? One that competes on price (commercial airlines) or one that competes on differentiated features (private jets)? Craft your project proposals to the business and they may have a much higher probability to getting heard.
It's the type of reply I want to write every time I see misguided comments from people who don't have the full picture of the business and don't even know that they don't have the full picture.
> Where I work, we're basically donating money to the Bezos charity known as AWS at this point.
And ended with:
> And I know we're not alone and that there are other places (even in my immediate geographical area) that have waste well in excess of what we're pissing away.
That was my point. I perfectly (okay, maybe not perfectly, but well enough to understand that it's not worth my time to pursue) understand why and how these things happen, it isn't my first rodeo. And, honestly, I think I'd probably applaud the guy for figuring out how to get _damn near every one in SV_ to open up their fat fucking VC wallets to the man if it weren't for his business practices, like what we see in TFA.
If this is an issue that really bugs you, perhaps consider working for a company that has similar values to you.
Working for tech in the valley is going to be extremely biased on focused differentiation, so cost containment has a lower priority.
On the other hand, the people I know in logistics and manufacturing are extremely concerned about cost containment. For them, charging more for the product/service is orders of magnitude more difficult than cutting costs—indeed, improving efficiency is often the primary method of growing the company (through lower prices or increased output). Such companies, even ones making hundreds of millions in revenue, would be very interested in proposals that save $100k/year.
Customers are getting what they are paying for (and couldn't get the same service and yet pay less, since saving money would cost them money).
You do sound resentful, though. Is it because you think an aws customer has a moral obligation to divert money they would save in aws costs into salaries for their own employees as opposed to finding aws employees so that bezos doesn't get his cut?
Avoiding an expense is cheaper than any "tax writeoff" from spending that money instead. (unless we're talking about tax credits or incentive schemes or something like that)
On the other hand i have the suspicion that Amazon just offers the better deal. And on balance, most people would prefer to spend less and get more than perform what's essentially charity because they like the other CEO less.
I prefer to think of it as hedging, not charity. If you never eat at your third favorite restaurant, then soon you won't have a third favorite restaurant.
IANAL, but would be interested to know if it would've BENEFITED their case if they met with a lawyer BEFORE putting their plans into action. It seems this would've been a pretty legitimate way of confirming their intention, and would've put Amazon in a much more compromising position after the fact.
Would it be illegal for Amazon’s competitors to extend job offers to those who are at risk of being fired for going on strike? (If the fear is being fired as retaliation)
The aim of the law is to prevent employers from blocking unionization. Your hypothetical might prevent harm to specific individuals who were fired, but it wouldn't achieve the overall goal of protecting the right to organize. Instead it would rid the employer of the organizers, which is what the employer wants.
If you can’t give two fcks for the workers, do it for tour own consumers’ ass.
Amazon must enforce sanitary and safe working conditions during the COVID19 epidemic lest it becomes itself a source of contagion. More so now that home delivery is so important in the “stay home” strategy.
For fcks sake people, how big a stick do you need before you notice?!
> The scientists found that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detectable in aerosols for up to three hours, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel.
24 hours is within the time-frame of same-day deliveries at the least. I think OP's point still stands; it's a disease vector.
It's almost like I didn't really care so much about your point, and just wanted to point out that your information was flawed so that it doesn't get repeated elsewhere.
Ah ok, so if I had used “packaging” instead of “carton” I’d have satisfied your censorious zeal? Someone else already mentioned this study, I’m sure you’ll entertain yourself finding other factual errors within:
If transmission via packaging were happening, what evidence would you expect us to have at this point, and why?
(Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, but only in proportion to how easy the evidence would be to find if it existed, and how hard we've looked.)
>The worker was exposed to covid-19, was told to quarantine, and came back on site anyway.
worker was exposed to co-worker with covid-19; Amazon knowingly allowed exposed worker to continue working; when worker found out of the exposure and Amazon's failures worker organized a strike; only after organizing a strike did Amazon require worker to stay home in quarantine.
>This strikes me as an egregious safety violation
Not only a safety violation by Amazon but a Constitutional violation.
Depends on the circumstances of his contact, what parts of the site he was in, who he came into contact...etc. I'm not sure one potential case warrants the entire warehouse being shuttered if appropriate disinfection and continued monitoring are in place. They seemed to catch his exposure via some string of events, so there is some effort in risk analysis happening.
It sounds like they quarantined everyone that was in close contact with someone that got COVID-19. We can argue about whether or not they quarantined the appropriate number of people / wide enough, but given the size of a warehouse, I don't agree that it is reasonable to shutter the entire warehouse based on 1 person.
Shuttering distribution facilities will send more people to grocery stores and supermarkets. It's not really better on-net to shut down the Amazon delivery chain, as long as you take reasonable measures to disinfect the facility.
> You should know that cheerleading Amazon's continued abuse of employees is not a good look.
That's true, but that doesn't appear to be what happened here. It doesn't appear to be abuse.
> This is someone's livelihood you're talking about.
And, if I'm understanding it correctly, that person intentionally effectively brought a deadly weapon to the workplace after being told not to. Their response doesn't seem like abuse, it seems within reason, even if maybe there were other, better options.
>And, if I'm understanding it correctly, that person intentionally effectively brought a deadly weapon to the workplace after being told not to.
You are not understanding it correctly.
Amazon told the worker to quarantine three weeks (!) after they were near another co-worker who had COVID-19.
Amazon did not tell the person with the virus to quarantine. (!)
Amazon did not tell any other worker to quarantine. (!)
Amazon only came up with the "quarantine" argument AFTER the worker led a strike that demanded better health and safety measures.
It's clear Amazon acted unlawfully in this instance, and that the quarantine argument was a pretext in order to fire someone for an action that is protected by law.
You are not understanding it correctly, because Amazon is trying to make it difficult to do so.
The infected person last reported to work on March 11. A two-week period had passed. The striker was the only person ordered to self-quarantine, and he was ordered to do so only after announcing his intention to lead a strike, after any risk of infect had passed.
Can you explain why you only had skepticism towards the worker in this situation, and none towards Amazon?
I'm glad you reevaluated your position once you had more information, but I'm genuinely confused by the thought process in comments like your original comment. Amazon has a history of treating warehouse workers terribly (docking points for taking too many breaks, and firing workers with too many points etc), and this is documented in lots of news articles. They deployed a PR team on Twitter to talk about how their warehouse conditions were great - and the PR team felt the need to mention that they even got bathroom breaks, as if that is something to be proud of. They even have a reputation for treating their office workers like crap, although this varies somewhat from team to team (based on my own experience and those of my friends who also worked at Amazon as software devs, turnover is pretty high). It's actually not that easy to find a journalist willing to listen to you, and requires a lot of persistence and courage on the part of the worker risking their job. Especially with a company with as much power as Amazon, I'm sure many of the workers reaching out to journalists fear that Amazon will be able to figure out who talked.
So where does this skepticism towards the worker's stories come from?
I didn't express skepticism towards anyone involved. Rather,was basing my opinion based purely on the facts I saw presented in the article.
1. Amazon told him to self quarantined because he had been exposed, to not return to the place of work for 2 weeks
2. He came back before the 2 weeks was up
3. The fired him for it
Given those facts, action 3 seems reasonable. I even prefaced my thoughts indicating that they the actions only reason reasonable if I my understanding of the situation is correct.
Turns out, my understanding of the situation was incorrect. More information was presented. If that information is also true, then their actions (firing him) no longer seem reasonable.
> Like all businesses grappling with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, we are working hard to keep employees safe while serving communities and the most vulnerable
Because people who can afford Amazon prime and prices are the most vulnerable
I mean, so far yes. I think people with disposable income and those who travel a lot have been early adopters when it comes to getting the virus. Politicians, professional athletes, and rich people seem disproportionately likely to be infected, and I wouldn't be surprised if that imbalance still existed once you accounted for the differences in test availability. ofc that's my North America-centric perception which may change in the coming months
Can be elderly. Family members could very well be buying on Amazon & having it shipped to those in their family +70. This is what I would be doing if my parents were older & nobody was able from the family to deliver to them.
> Despite that instruction to stay home with pay, he came on site today, March 30, further putting the teams at risk
The employee was exposed to another employee who tested positive for covid-19. They asked him to stay home with pay for 14 days and he came back to the building to protest, putting other employees at risk.
With respect, Amazon publicly claims the employee violated quarantine. The employee publicly claims that Amazon fired them out of retaliation.
From this distance, while we may all have our respective sympathies, both stories are plausible and we don't really know. It is abundantly obvious that companies generally find reasons (legitimate or otherwise) to fire those advocating for a union, but it isn't exactly unheard of for an employee knowing they are facing termination or disciplinary action for legitimate reasons to cover that over with some socially-acceptable reason like various claims of discrimination or starting a union like this, etc. It's not a secret hack nobody's ever heard of.
It's also clear that Amazon has the data. If they do not choose to share it, that itself would become a form of data.
- How many employees did they quarantine in that facility?
- Were all employees exposed to the original worker quarantined?
- How long after exposure--i.e. was Smalls later, or were others quarantined at (roughly) the same time?
- Who makes the call to quarantine workers, and what discretion do they have?
I don't necessarily expect Amazon to have all those facts available immediately. I do think that they must provide them if they wish to have any credibility.
It's possible that Amazon fired the employee both for violating quarantine and out of retaliation, as the former would have provided legal cover for the latter.
Does Amazon's instruction to him to stay home override his rights as an employee to organize and participate in collective action?
I don't actually know the answer. But in general, I'm guessing that you can't end a strike by ordering all employees to stay home and then firing them if they don't.
The coronavirus gives Amazon an excuse to use to order employees to stay home if they try to organize their coworkers. It's not a coincidence that Amazon only ordered this employee to stay home after seeing that he led a strike. If Amazon actually cared about their employees' wellbeing, they would have told Smalls to stay home after he had been exposed, not more than two weeks later.
I would like to add, if the quarantine order on March 30th is about the contact of March 11th, and it seems it is, and if he's the only one being quarantined, then I don't think there's any discussion about whether or not this should be in the right or in the wrong
Yeah, imagine taking the word of a multi-billion dollar company's PR people with a grain of salt. They don't have agendas unlike throwaway accounts. At least in this case we know what both sides' interests are here!
It raises the question of how to protest in the age of quarantine.
I agree that breaking quarantine is bad, but let's look at his side of this. Amazon has the ability to shut down any protest or picket by alleging that an attendee was sick, or that a strike organizer was exposed.
Here’s a tip: all the WFH employees should strike in solidarity with the workers until the company agrees to meet their demands. It’s easy, coordinate with your peers and just don’t login and tell your boss you won’t until they fix the situation.
Corporate employees have never had more leverage than they do right now.
It’s really easy to stop labor action without at least very strong solidarity-sentiments and community, if not legal protection. Otherwise all you do is start firing a person or two a day and let everyone else know their name is in the hat for tomorrow unless they get back to work.
Sure, but this is what labor organizing has been threatened with since the beginning of wage labor and they’ve still won lots and lots of victories.
Google employees organized largely online, internally and did just this. And the situation at Amazon for low wage workers is arguably worse.
If workers at Amazon are legitimately motivated to do this, there’s not much that can stop them. Also, firing workers on top of workers for organizing tends to not play out very well in the courts and Amazon HQ people are well-paid enough to find good lawyers.
It also honestly becomes a matter of national security.
Amazon is crucial right now in maintaining social order. It's one thing to be quarantined at home, but to be quarantined without anything arriving to your house is a quick recipe for riots on the streets. Anyone or anything disrupting this is potentially as dangerous as a famine.
I 100% sympathize with the protestor's plight, but it's an interesting situation.
If the company is so essential that strikes by its employees are too dangerous, then it should be nationalized both in the interest of the nation and to prevent conflict of interest.
Having a private company and having it's employees banned from striking is really contradictory ideologically and dysfunctional. If a company is private, then the employees should be able to have their private right to strike.
If anything like that occurred, I would expect Trump to quickly invoke the Taft-Hartley Act and order the workers back on the job, replacing them with the National Guard if they did not comply.
The Taft-Hartley Act has been around for a long, long time. Among other things, it gives the President power to order workers in an essential industry back on the job if they strike.
I wasn't able to quickly find the current total number of times it's been invoked, but here's a WaPo article about Jimmy Carter using it in 1978. Even at that date, it had been used 34 times.
I learned about this stuff in history class. Did you not? If not, perhaps you should ask yourself why that is.
And maybe you should ask yourself what exactly you're accomplishing by downmodding factual, noninflammatory comments just because you don't like the facts.
If you do, aren't you required to disclose as such by Amazon, in addition to a disclaimer that this is your personal opinion and you are not representing Amazon's official view here, when publicly commenting on Amazon-related issues?
If it was actually on-site, yes, Amazon did the right thing. If it was by the street--somewhere any member of the public has free speech--no, but assuming he was exposed to SARS-CoV-2, going out in public is pretty messed up, and pretty hypocritical.
It's generally legal to fire employees for "free speech" activities done outside the workplace.
More morally hazardous of course, but I don't think anyone would really even challenge the cause here (it's trivially easy to argue that this behavior shows they would endanger workers within the workplace as well).
I hope you don’t believe you can’t infect people after 2 weeks. If so, you’re contributing to the pandemic and the spread of the virus through disinformation. If a patient ever develops symptoms it could be 2 weeks or longer. If they don’t develop symptoms after the incubation period then they are still infectious.
I think the key is to a) trigger emotional engagement by driving a narrative based confirmation bias in the headline, and b) still have all the facts in the story for those that will actually read it which I assume turns out to be not a large percentage of people that see the headline.
Whenever there is anti-Amazon or pro-Union discussion, the first comment on HN will always be siding with management. Why is that?
This obviously an illegal retaliatory firing. Amazon is running domestic sweatshops where they don't even provide basic PPE during a global pandemic, and he was the leader trying to get that gear.
Seriously - what goes through the head of somebody who posts a comment siding with management in a situation like this? I literally can't understand why you'd think to post something like this, unless you're an Amazon executive or shareholder and only care about short term face/profit. Otherwise - why the reactionary take?
I just find this level of obedience to authority baffling. It's endemic in the United States, which otherwise prides itself on it's "maverick" status - except when it comes to shocking levels of obedience and servitude to the police and to market forces.
EDIT: I looked up this user and he is an Amazon employee, which explains this bizarre take. Given Amazon's policy of paying employees to say nice things about the company online, even when they work in unrelated departments, I think we should seriously consider warning/banning users who engage in astroturfing for their employers on HackerNews.
I appreciate your concern for the integrity of the threads, but you've done two things here that we don't allow. You can't bring someone else's personal information and use it as ammunition in an argument like that. It's a form of personal attack, which is not ok. Also, you broke the site guidelines by making accusations of astroturfing without evidence. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
The abuses you're worried about are real in principle. The problem is, internet users are a thousand (nay, a million) times too quick to become aggressive about them, which ends up causing a lot more harm than the things they're fighting.
In particular, (1) most people are posting in good faith, even if they happen to be defending their employers; and (2) most internet comments about astroturfing have no foundation. On that last point: if you saw as much data on this as we do, you'd be shocked at how made up and imaginary they are; having studied this closely for years, I can tell you that it's nearly 100% projection. In both of these cases, the putative cures causes more harm than the putative diseases.
The point about not attacking people because of their employers is particularly important. HN has members working for lots of different employers, and one's work tends to be the thing one knows the most about. The last thing we want on this site is a climate of hostility to disincentivize people from posting to threads where they might know something. I'm not talking about this thread (which I haven't read), I'm saying that in general, it's a super bad tradeoff to tolerate this sort of soft-doxxing on HN, so we don't.
Oh and by the way: HN has reams of anti-Amazon discussion and pro-union discussion. Indeed the top comment on the current thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739059) is a counterexample to what you're saying, and meanwhile the comment you were complaining about was highly downvoted. Such perceptions of HN being biased against one's view are notoriously unreliable; the people who hold opposite views see the community as biased in just the opposite way, and are just as sure about it. You (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) can't trust your ad hoc observations about this, because your pre-existing opinions condition what you notice and how strongly you weight it. It is a well-known cognitive bias, a flaw that we all suffer from.
> Amazon is running domestic sweatshops where they don't even provide basic PPE during a global pandemic
It doesn't help your argument to frame it in hyperbolic terms. Amazon pays a minimum wage of $15/hour, every warehouse is air conditioned, they now offer paid time off to every worker who works >20 hours a week, they have substantial career advancement training and education benefits, they have health benefits and matching 401k program, 20 weeks paid parental leave.
I mean, come on. There might be some legitimate problems, but when you call it a sweatshop, you've already lost the argument.
Amazon pays very well for an entry-level job. Yes, work conditions suck compared to white-collar work. Many blue-collar jobs do, especially now that the 6-figure blue collar factory jobs have all but disappeared.
But that's the price you pay for a job that has no requirements beyond being able to use your hands.
Who decides whether blue collar workers deserve bathroom breaks? Why do you treat the free market as the sole authority on what working conditions people "deserve"?
You're arguing that shaving off a couple minutes a day is worth the loss of human dignity that these workers experience.
That's the problem with economies at scale, a bathroom break for small store owner is not an issue.
When you have 1000's of stores its a massive saving area, where its much easier to justify pissing bottles. Any small trivial thing at scale can cost or save huge amounts money.
And when we talk huge sums of money, morality often is tossed out of the window first.
You're suggesting that for a small business, because the value of five minutes of a single employee's time is trifling, the small business does not care to regulate bathroom breaks.
I don't really see it that way. In my view, small businesses abuse their employees just dramatically more than large businesses.
For a small business, a single employee may be the only person working the till. The employee simply won't be allowed to go to the bathroom at all except during designated times.
"Yeah, they're really disgusting on ice, aren't they?"
Amazon will keep exploiting everyone they can until they are sued and independently monitored into compliance. Go ahead and pretend all those benefits are the result of Amazon management realizing on their own that they can be good to their people. Every one is either settlements, PR dusting, or mandatory after being caught at prior abuses.
No respect for anyone at Amazon who drinks or spouts the company kool-aid.
20 weeks maternity leave, and that for mothers who were with Amazon for > 1 year (I believe it was 4 week pre-delivery and 16 weeks after). For fathers it was 12 weeks, at least until last December.
There's a pandemic and they're not giving masks and gloves to their workers, which has already caused a number of them to be hospitalized. That's why they're organizing.
Instead of giving them safety gear, they've fired the lead organizer.
They only reason they have any of the rights and conditions you described in the first place is because of organization and agitation, not their generosity.
The end result of letting authoritarian capitalism into the global marketplace can be seen in the conditions of Amazon warehouses in the United States. I'm certainly not the only person to say this, their own employees do as well. Hint - that's why they're organizing.[1]
BUT - more to the point - why post this? Are you an Amazon employee as well? If not - why? I just can't fathom in a situation like this why you'd feel the need to list - from memory? - all of the employee benefits that Amazon provides to its warehouse workers.
>what goes through the head of somebody who posts a comment siding with management in a situation like this?
They identify with management, because they want to be there one day. They see themselves on "the side" of the managers and those in control, and try to view things from that perspective.
It's the same reason you have poor voters who support tax cuts for the rich, even if those tax cuts mean the government can materially do less for them. They don't perceive themselves as users of the welfare state, but as soon-to-be wealthy folks.
That must be the case. Because otherwise it would be sad and pathetic to have a whole forum full of wannabes sitting around playing pretend running companies and worrying about equity dilution and gossiping about minutia in the lives of wealthy venture capitalists. That would be just unbelievably tragic, right?
> It's the same reason you have poor voters who support tax cuts for the rich, even if those tax cuts mean the government can materially do less for them. They don't perceive themselves as users of the welfare state, but as soon-to-be wealthy folks.
FWIW, this is a really patronizing view of poor people. An alternative hypothesis is that some people vote based on principles, whether it personally benefits them or not.
I don't know that it's necessarily a patronizing view. I know a lot of people that do sincerely believe that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires, despite all facts pointing to the idea that they are not.
I don't see how you can take any other view when we showed up to work after being put under quarantine. From the article it doesn't seem like he disputes the claim, he just implies that they wouldn't have fired him if he wasn't organizing a strike. If you're running a massive shipping operation with hundreds of thousands of employees and millions of customers you should be taking steps to guarantee their safety. Beyond Amazon, the US could not afford to have the company shut down because of a COVID-19 infection spreading through their fulfillment centers. It seems ridiculous to say that he could show up to work despite being put on quarantine. Maybe there are missing facts in the case, but with that information I think most people would defend Amazon's actions.
They ordered him under quarantine more than two weeks after he was exposed (outside of guidelines), and days after he stated he would be leading a strike.
It's not like the guy was violating a reasonable quarantine; he was violating a retaliatory silencing "quarantine" outside of guidelines.
It's not so much obedience to authority as identification with it. "Temporarily embarrassed millionaires", etc. Why be surprised to see it so strongly expressed on a site explicitly meant for millionaires seeking to disembarrass themselves?
But it's a wider phenomenon than HN. North American (well, especially Americans... up here in Canada maybe less so) culture in general prides itself on its relative distrust and distaste for government, and talks big about opposition to authoritarianism -- but fails to recognize corporations as having said authority, and they often get carte blanche.
Apologies for the apparent astroturfing. I do work for Amazon but everything I post on social media is 100% my personal opinion. Nobody from work has ever asked me to do anything on social media to make the company look better.
Having said that, my opinions are a little more pro-corporate than most of the commenters here due to my personal experience.
Key excerpts from a much clearer article. And yet again, why you never 100% believe a company's PR response when they're trying to cover themselves. They tell just enough truth, but use it to intentionally mislead.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/amazon-strik...
> According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March. Had Smalls been exposed that day, a 14-day mandatory quarantine would have made him eligible to return as soon as 25 March.
> Smalls said Amazon did not send him home until 28 March, three weeks after the exposure.
> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said, even as the infected person worked alongside “associates for 10-plus hours a week”.
> “You put me on quarantine for coming into contact with somebody, but I was around [that person] for less than five minutes,” he told Vice.
> According to Amazon, no one else was fired. Smalls said he was considering legal action, calling it “a no-brainer”.