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Re:Bye, Amazon by 60secz on Monday May 04, 2020 @02:36PM (#23071619)
* cough *

It goes on to give tips to managers for spotting union activity. “Make it a point to regularly talk to associates in the break room. This will help protect you from accusations that you were only in the break room to spy on pro union associates,” the video says.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/22/how-amazon-is-fighting-back-...

On internal company email lists and chat groups on Thursday and Friday that Recode viewed, Amazon white-collar workers expressed dismay over a report from Vice News that the company’s top lawyer had referred to a recently fired warehouse worker as “not smart, or articulate” and implied that executives should use that to help squelch worker unionization efforts.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/5/21206385/amazon-fired-wa...

Re:Bye, Amazon by product50 on Monday May 04, 2020 @03:26PM (#23072242)
Stop quoting Vox as if they are a reliable news source. They are the ones who mocked tech workers initially for taking COVID seriously: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21128209/coronavirus-fe...
Re:Bye, Amazon by chipotle_coyote on Monday May 04, 2020 @07:21PM (#23074533)
At risk at piling on to something that's already being downvoted, this is an extremely facile take. Nothing in the article you linked was "mocking" tech workers for being worried in mid-February. The word you are looking for is "reporting" on that situation, and also including in that report that officials at that time, in mid-February, said that while there was "always a risk" that these fears were likely overblown. Dragging Vox for accurately reporting what many experts said at the time is dragging them for not being prescient enough to know that the experts were wrong. And to top it all off, that's something that Vox is actively concerned about, given that the last episode of the Ezra Klein Show was a conversation with NYT writer Charlie Warzel about the media's response to the pandemic and how difficult it is to handle this sort of situation.
Re:Bye, Amazon by product50 on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @04:56AM (#23077931)
Yeah - keep on reading Vox and feel enlightened.

You literally are the reason why poor publications like Vox get a free pass. Here, if you don't believe me, read this thread and check yourself (https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1228447944287932416?s=20). And don't tell me now that Balaji is not trustworthy. He is 100x more trustworthy than a random HN user like you.

Re:Bye, Amazon by chipotle_coyote on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @01:53PM (#23082752)
Well, it's sure great that a random HN user like you vouches for him.
[dead]
Re:Bye, Amazon by komali2 on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:10PM (#23073301)
I've watched you comment similarly around here - what if salaries in the US matched the EU? What if quality of life equalized across the globe?

Well, so what? Would we outsource jobs if the entire world was unionized? Doesn't it make sense to promote worker's rights for everyone? If I was a blue collar American worker adopting your position, here is the most rational actions I should take to support it:

> As a blue collar American worker, my not unionizing ensures my company doesn't have to worry about diminishing their massively outsized bargaining position in my labor conditions. The better the labor conditions of my competition, that being laborers in China and India, the less likely my job will be outsourced to those countries. I should either take actions that increase the labor conditions of laborers in other countries, or, take actions to decrease my labor conditions so they stay below those of laborers in other countries.

Do you see how nonsensical, illogical, and perhaps insane that position is?

Re:Bye, Amazon by eanzenberg on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @01:26AM (#23088125)
No thank you. I don’t want every country to look like the EU. Let us be, we are doing well enough thank you very much.
Re:Bye, Amazon by komali2 on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @06:40PM (#23097246)
So then you agree, blue collar American workers should actively work to keep their wages low and quality of work environment low?
Re:Bye, Amazon by arez on Monday May 04, 2020 @04:43PM (#23073017)
the entire german country would like to have a word with you
Re:Bye, Amazon by jcims on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:05PM (#23073242)
If my two late model Audis are any testament, German engineering and standards of quality are headed straight for the shitter.

Get your extended warranties people lol

Re:Bye, Amazon by iso947 on Monday May 04, 2020 @04:52PM (#23073106)
Maybe it would increase warehouse costs and thus increase automation. That’s good.
Re:Bye, Amazon by jshevek on Monday May 04, 2020 @06:17PM (#23074026)
That outcome would be good for most of society, but not for the very workers who are the subject of the concerns expressed in this thread.
Re:Bye, Amazon by amphibian87 on Monday May 04, 2020 @04:56PM (#23073145)
This is a classist argument. Labor, blue collar, lower middle class people have just of much right to better wages, conditions, treatment, as a tech worker or anyone else. In fact bargaining power is the only way employees can have somewhat of a say in any sort of negotiation with their employers, without it it's a completely one sided relationship.

Other than getting packages faster, what innovations are working class warehouse employees producing? The innovation of putting boxes together at blazing speed with no bathroom breaks in a poorly climate controlled environment?

How could outsourcing a horizontally consolidated logistics empire be cheaper than upping conditions by a bit? Unions on average only cost about 10% more than a non-organized operation. That cost could be sent to the consumer or taken from revenue, by selling shares, whatever.

Anything that goes against the status quo of unfettered greed, cold profit is all that matters attitude makes sense for the business. But part of why Americans enjoy such labor safety, higher pay, employer health care, etc is because of organized labor. Class consolidation is the best outcome for the most people and there are laws that facilitate it being broken by Amazon, in firing organizers.

It's not just their warehouse workers they treat like garbage either, they steal successful products on their page and drop the original company from their listings and showing up in search. They charge a kickback just to rank in the search, etc, etc.

Bezos is a very clever successful sociopath in my opinion.

Re:Bye, Amazon by toasterlovin on Monday May 04, 2020 @06:03PM (#23073870)
> In fact bargaining power is the only way employees can have somewhat of a say in any sort of negotiation with their employers, without it it's a completely one sided relationship.

I truly don't understand this position. Unless we're talking about a company town, every single employee has the option of going to work somewhere else. That they don't means that they find value in the relationship with their employer.

> It's not just their warehouse workers they treat like garbage either, they steal successful products on their page and drop the original company from their listings and showing up in search. They charge a kickback just to rank in the search, etc, etc.

None of this is unethical. Not in the least. Nobody has a right to have their products sold on Amazon.com. Amazon is not the government. Other private parties have no inherent claim to be involved in anything Amazon does.

Re:Bye, Amazon by amphibian87 on Monday May 04, 2020 @07:02PM (#23074396)
That's the classic conservative response, well you have a choice to go work somewhere else. That's not really the point.

You conveniently ignore that these workers have a right to organize, and it's illegal for Amazon to say they can't. Just like they have a choice to go work somewhere else, they should also have the ability to organize. Sounds like the free market at work to me, if they would have treated them better maybe they wouldn't have organized.

Also sounds like a cynical position to take given the company's strategy of opening warehouses in poorer southern cities like Memphis.

Also anti-trust law does deem what they do with search unethical.

Re:Bye, Amazon by CamperBob2 on Monday May 04, 2020 @06:23PM (#23074077)
Amazon is not the government.

Any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. Amazon's not there yet, but it's certainly where they want to be. I buy stuff from them, but I don't hold any illusions about them.

Their practice of forcing warehouse workers to submit to searches without compensating them for their time spent in line does bother me, for example, but not quite enough to get me to shop somewhere else. (And yes, as a matter of fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that this does make me a bad person.)