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.
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.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...