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.
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.
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.
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 a company functioning is a matter of national security, it should be significantly more controlled by the nation.
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).
Target, Walmart, grocery stores, etc. all are able to do curbside pickup and in many cases deliveries via stuff like Instacart.
Amazon isn't the only option.
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.
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.
Edit: See boiled cabbage's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739059 More data can bring more clarity.
Re: the OP - this isn't just a throwaway account. It's a pretty obvious agenda beyond just sharing the facts.
Amazon isn't exactly a champion of taking care of your employees, so yeah, you go guys.
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.
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.
Their view is well represented here.
I mean, come on. What would take for you to piss into bottle at your work instead of going to toilet.
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.
[1] https://nypost.com/2019/11/30/amazon-warehouses-are-cult-lik...
- 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.
Corporate employees have never had more leverage than they do right now.
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 aren't any masks and gloves available to anyone.
> "Are you an Amazon employee as well?"
Just a reminder that that sort of question violates the HN guidelines.
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?
But that's the price you pay for a job that has no requirements beyond being able to use your hands.
It's not like the guy was violating a reasonable quarantine; he was violating a retaliatory silencing "quarantine" outside of guidelines.
I mean, for N95, maybe. Surgical masks you can buy from China. On Amazon. They'll ship by air mail, but I'm sure Amazon could get them even quicker.
Having said that, my opinions are a little more pro-corporate than most of the commenters here due to my personal experience.
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.
Instacart is not the only game in town, either.
"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.
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.
You're arguing that shaving off a couple minutes a day is worth the loss of human dignity that these workers experience.
It's been done before, numerous times.
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.
There are many people that don't see the government as an ATM machine, and think that its role should be limited.
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...
And when we talk huge sums of money, morality often is tossed out of the window first.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/03/07/p...
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.
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.