https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/13/amazon-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/13/amazon-...
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
This should give you a hint about this person's intention. Their argument is a classic appeal to authority.
These tweets, made on 27 March, allegedly broke the camel's back:
@marencosta I am matching donations to $500 to support my Amazon warehouse colleagues and their communities, while they struggle to get consistent, sufficient protections and procedures from our employer. DM or comment for match. [1]
@emahlee I'm matching donations up to $500 to support my Amazon warehouse worker colleagues. "The lack of safe and sanitary working conditions" puts them and the public at risk.
It's bad ya'll... [2] and @marencosta re-tweeted it.
@marencosta had been warned by Amazon, in late 2019, to not publicly disparage them.
---
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/13/amazon-...
[1] https://twitter.com/marencosta/status/1243585580736237568
[2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1243441985173651456.html
It's only obvious if you've accepted the status quo ("at will employment", no worker protections). Many other developed countries have substantial worker protections [1], and I see questioning this as work towards progress in having those same worker protections in the US. Young folks haven't been ground down long enough by "The System" to accept that what is wrong is what will always be, which is awesome!
If your employer can fire you, and you have no recourse, for illustrating their abusive work environment (Amazon warehouses, in this case), that's a problem! What's more shocking (IMHO) are those who publicly comment that this is acceptable in a developed nation. The house is on fire, don't snicker at those trying to put the fire out.
[1] https://www.ituc-csi.org/new-ituc-global-rights-index-the (New ITUC Global Rights Index - The world’s worst countries for workers)
The ITUC Global Rights Index rates countries from one to five according to 97 indicators, with an overall score placing countries in one to five rankings.
1 – Irregular violations of rights: 18 countries including Denmark and Uruguay
2 – Repeated violations of rights: 26 countries including Japan and Switzerland
3 – Regular violations of rights: 33 countries including Chile and Ghana
4 – Systematic violations of rights: 30 countries including Kenya and the USA <-- We are here, ranked below 77 other countries
I'm I misremembering or was that story "fired for violating paid quarantine" proven to be iffy at best? I'm looking for confirmation.
Edit: Found what I think I was looking for [0]
> Here is the key point Amazon claims he was exposed to the worker on March 11th. Over the weekened he said he is organizing a strike, so over the weekend they order him and only him into quarantine. A full 18 days after his 5 min exposure. From my reading of it, this almost certainly looks like retaliatory action due to the strike, and a company using the excuse of quarantine to cover it up. Key excerpts from a much clearer article. And yet again, why you never 100% believe a company's PR response when they're trying to cover themselves. They tell just enough truth, but use it to intentionally mislead.
> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/amazon-strik....
>> According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March. Had Smalls been exposed that day, a 14-day mandatory quarantine would have made him eligible to return as soon as 25 March.
>> Smalls said Amazon did not send him home until 28 March, three weeks after the exposure.
>> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said, even as the infected person worked alongside “associates for 10-plus hours a week”.
>> “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.
>> According to Amazon, no one else was fired. Smalls said he was considering legal action, calling it “a no-brainer”.
From the NLRB's page defining protected concerted action[1] (emphasis mine):
"A single employee may also engage in protected concerted activity if he or she is...trying to induce group action, or seeking to prepare for group action. However, you can lose protection by saying or doing something egregiously offensive or knowingly and maliciously false, or by publicly disparaging your employer's products or services without relating your complaints to any labor controversy."
So, let's say an Amazon employee were to simply tweet "Amazon is shit. Don't buy from them." and got fired for it. Then they couldn't defend themselves by coming back and saying "Well, actually, I was talking about working conditions for Amazon's warehouse employees." Fair enough.
With that in mind, here's what allegedly got them fired:
Emily Cunningham tweeted a thread[2] that begins:
"I'm matching donations up to $500 to support my Amazon warehouse worker colleagues. "The lack of safe and sanitary working conditions" puts them and the public at risk.
It's bad ya'll...".
The thread then goes into detail on that point. It could not be more clearly about working conditions.
Maren Costa tweeted[3]:
"I am matching donations to $500 to support my Amazon warehouse colleagues and their communities, while they struggle to get consistent, sufficient protections and procedures from our employer. DM or comment for match. https://chuffed.org/project/help-amazon-warehouse-workers-ex... # via @Chuffed"
...and that's it. Again, it's very clearly about working conditions.
Amazon doesn't get to make a policy against employees criticizing the way they treat their workers. That's how protections for labor organization work.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
[2] https://twitter.com/emahlee/status/1243441985173651456
[3] https://twitter.com/marencosta/status/1243585580736237568
"Don't bite the hand that feeds you. If you must talk against your employer in public, better go anonymous, if you have the courage to reveal your real identity, great! but be ready to bear the consequences. It's unfortunate, but most companies will do the same." [1]
> You have the right to report if your workplace is unsafe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
> If you have concerns, you have the right to speak up about them without fear of retaliation.
Whether or not Amazon ran afoul of the rules remains to be seen.
> You have the right to report if your workplace is unsafe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amazon has to create the appearance that they aren't violating federal law
https://twitter.com/AMZNforClimate/status/125013592573822566...
Other major tech firms have done the exact same thing when employees have raised concerns.
They make it clear that they won't retaliate against you if you don't do the wrong things, but they won't actually enumerate what those wrong things are. It's like an extended round of the Chairman's Game. [1] [2]
[1] The game forbids its players from explaining the rules, and new players are often informed that "the only rule you may be told is this one". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game)
[2] The game is named in honor of a famous politician who was very well known for coming up with a lot of rules for his subjects to follow, without bothering to explain to them what the rules were.
We need to be very clear when talking about it:
There is no abuse of H1Bs at the typical big tech companies we all know, like MSFT/Google/FB/etc. Their H1B employees get paid market rate, same as the US residents working at those companies. Those H1B employees are screwed over big time by the abusers in the category I am about to describe below and by general public who doesn't make the distinction and lumps them all in the second category. Not even mentioning the visa system that ends up screwing them due to that abuse.
Where the real H1B abuse happens is at those giant consulting companies like Accenture, Tata, Wipro, etc. They hire tons of software devs and pay them about $40k/yr, while flooding H1B visa pool and making it way more difficult for people in the first category to obtain a visa due to the sheer number imbalance.
Not only this creates a false image and leads to general public blaming the first group for all the visa abuse stemming from the second group, it makes it really difficult for the people in the first group to get their visas. There is a yearly cap on H1B, and it is much more difficult to obtain it when overwhelming majority of visa applications are filed by the latter group. For a price of one average engineer in big tech (let's say $160k/yr for easier math, even though the real number is very likely higher), a consultancy agency can hire at least 4 engineers and send 4 H1B visa applications respectively.
H1B visa is for "outstanding talent" that is difficult to find locally. This holds absolutely true for tech giants, as hiring a competent person is really difficult, witnessed it myself. But I find it difficult to believe that an "outstanding talent" would go work for a consulting agency and get paid $40k, while they can switch to a big tech company and get paid at least x4 that amount.
Luckily, it seems like the rules are getting tighter for the latter group, with their denial rates skyrocketing, while the usual tech company H1B approval rates are staying as high as usual (close to 100%)[0].
0. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/it-consulti...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt#Political_Theolog...
Reminds me of this news.yc thread, "We may get fired and I don't know what to do" [0], which had a follow-up from the OP with full backstory ~7 years later, "I stood up to my boss, then he got promoted" [1].
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227175
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/02/2...
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.
612k engineers. Let's assume that Amazon aims to hire the top 20% (I would expect software engineering skills to follow a power curve), so roughly 100k qualified workers.
That's pretty small if you're looking to employ 2-5k of them. That's a lot of competition given that there are likely at least 50 companies making Amazon-type offers.
I'm not saying they can't hire people if 10% of that pool decides they won't work there, but I'd imagine they would want to extend their pool to maybe top 30% at some point.
https://www.amazon.com/UNITED-BARGAIN-DIVIDED-BUMPER-STICKER...
> Under the NLRA, it is illegal for your employer to:
> Fire, demote, or transfer you, or reduce your hours or change your shift, or otherwise take adverse action against you, or threaten to take any of these actions, because you join or support a union, or because you engage in concerted activity for mutual aid and protection, or because you choose not to engage in any such activity.
You can get a basic overview of this topic by googling things like NLRA, NLRB, and protected concerted activity, including very recent examples of how these concepts have applied. They're much broader protections than you think, and Amazon has very clearly broken them. That's why their spokesman is giving out contradictory statements like saying that they allow employees to discuss eachother's working conditions, then firing them for exactly that.
Do not fall into the trap of thinking that "the company has a policy" or "at-will employment" means "you have no legal rights".
https://www.dol.gov/olms/regs/compliance/EO_Posters/Employee...
"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."
The article stated a thousand Amazon employees accepted the event invite before it was deleted by management, which goes without saying that they had enough group interest internally to warrant the event... which is within the purview of their already established employee interest group.
Source: Amazon Employees For Climate Justice @AMZNforClimate We're a group of Amazon employees who believe it’s our responsibility to ensure our business models don’t contribute to the climate crisis. Views ≠ Amazon.
https://twitter.com/AMZNforclimate
These employees are only guilty of voicing their dissent publicly and running afoul of corporate PR policy. We are all entitled to voicing our opinions and beliefs and rallying around a cause individuals are passionate about e.g. climate change impact, Google ending military/China contracts, etc. The unfortunate way I've seen this play out is that at-will employment means an employer is free to sever your relationship at any time with them and can do so under the cloak of bad performance, violating company policy, etc. and it will be an uphill battle to prove retaliation in court when they have the best legal team money can buy. Best to be prepared to look for employment elsewhere if you are organizing a group event to expose your employer to negative PR when on their payroll.
I agree. Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873029
What is your framework for analyzing natural rights violations?