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.
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.
I think your confused. OP isn't suggesting that Amazon is guilty, but that there is enough evidence to warrant investigating what happened.
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.
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.
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.