> 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.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/30/amazon-wo...
From Vice
>Amazon did not immediately respond to an email Tuesday morning asking how many people at the site have been ordered into self-quarantine
Even if they did quarantine others, putting someone on a 14 day quarantine 17 days after contact is hard to explain.
It would be harder to explain why Amazon didn't put on quarantine an employee who was vocal about his exposure to the virus.
At most it sounds like malevolent compliance.
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.
Full paid leave is not what most people in the US would call retaliation, particularly in the case of a warehouse worker.
Amazon has an abusive culture. Let's not "both sides" that out of existence, shall we?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if the plaintiff produces no evidence, Amazon does not need to make a defense. Thus OP is correct.
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.
And arbitrators are always required to be agreed on by both parties.
We have these things called "courts" that are well-suited to addressing complaints like this one.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously, I mean the opposite ; )
That’s how we came to have employer-provided healthcare:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...
Supposition does not mean "burden of proof".
> the burden of proof in my mind is on the company
Your presumption that the company is at fault is unjust.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sentence is simply false.
I think your confused. OP isn't suggesting that Amazon is guilty, but that there is enough evidence to warrant investigating what happened.
Everybody is pretty clear about amazons reputation towards their employees, including software engineers.
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.
But the worker was placed on a 15 day paid leave to self quarantine because he stated he had direct contact with someone infected with covid19.
And then he not only broke his quarantine but also made it his point to go to work, potentially risking his colleagues.
Even if you argue that he did't carried covid19, that action is not justifiable, neither safety-wise nor legaly-wise.
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.
Yet in every post you make, you continue to misrepresent the situation.
You are being hugely dishonest
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.
> 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.
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.
You have a reasonable indication, but no preponderance of evidence. You probably have enough for discovery.
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.
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.
They'd have been smarter to respond to it sooner, but better late than never.
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?