What a strange statement. "We support their right to criticize their working conditions, only actually we don't at all"
Four bad outcomes. All they do is "remove a troublemaker" from their standpoint. Why not just address the issues? They look like they want to bring back the days of company towns and central control. This doesn't make me want to work there, it's a strong dis-incentive for that.
It doesn't really matter what Amazon does (see this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22871216), the woke crowd has already made up their mind about the company and will criticize them regardless. The only thing that is going to satisfy the woke crowd is Amazon's failure.
Their best strategy is to focus on being the most customer centric company so that people like myself and millions upon millions of others keep buying from them.
I worked at another company the woke crowd loved to hate on and no matter how much more actual woke stuff our company did, the woke crowd still promoted the less woke company with the more woke brand because we were Goliath and they were David. We should have stopped wasting our effort to appease the unappeasable and just focused on being customer-centric like Amazon does. The loudest critics aren't trying to build a better world. They are trying to signal to others about how woke they want others to think they are.
This doesn't mean that Amazon and my previous employer shouldn't do good things. They should and do. What it means is that they should do it because those things are the right thing and they should pay no mind to the haters because haters are gonna hate. You can't be Goliath and not get hated on.
Not sure treating employees badly makes for a better world. Perhaps more profit at the top makes for a better world for some.
This isn't even about people at the top. When everyone is on the same team and owns equity in that collective endeavor, someone that goes outside to publicly bad mouth the team is hurting everyone on their team. That's some Grade-A anti-social behavior. I'm an IC and far from the top, but I never want to work with such people who use righteous indignation to justify their anti-social actions.
These two people are two nobodies who took it upon themselves to be the arbiters of judgement and instead of checking with their colleagues to see if their views were collectively aligned with the consensus of their colleagues. They should be asking themselves "AITA?". If you are whipping up public outrage that hurts your colleagues without validating if there is consensus among your colleagues, the answer to that question is unequivocal "yes".
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” ― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow