The flip side to being a general union buster and hard-nosed employer advocate during "peacetime" is that you lose the moral high ground in crisis and have no where to turn to but more employee-alienating policies. I mean, let's be honest: Amazon's warehouse workers look like heroes right now. And they need stuff, that they don't need under normal circumstances. And the public, on the whole, wants to give it to them. Yet without an existing healthy relationship, the only tool in the union's box is to threaten work stoppage. And the only tool Bezos has is to fire people trying to keep a lid on the thing.
And now we've seen that it's metastasized, and he's having to fire tech workers now too. Needless to say, this isn't where Amazon management would have wanted to be.
So folks: the next time a union calls up and wants to sort out a deal, talk with them and work something out. In the current world, it's hard to see anything but good guys and bad guys. And the workers are the good guys.
But Amazon can't have that now, because the only resolution that they can see here is either victory or complete capitulation to a hostile union. And in the process their alienating their engineering class too.
Normally, tech employers don't have many hundreds of thousands of employees. You'll always be able to find anecdotes to support any narrative you want when you're looking at that big of a workforce.
>Normally tech employers don't fire people for complaining about company policies
I've worked in tech for a long time, at a lot of different companies, and consulted for many more. Tech employers fire people all the time for complaining about company policies. You just don't hear about it because...
>and it's almost always news when they do
No, it's really not. When some 20 person startup lets someone go because of a disagreement, it doesn't appear in WaPo. It does happen whenever Amazon or FB or Google are involved because those are big names. But just because you don't see it in the news when every other tech company does it, does not mean it isn't happening.
>A general sense of shared cause and cameraderie is part of the way the industry is "supposed" to work, and part of that is a culture of reasonably open discussion of this stuff.
This sounds wonderful and ideal, but I've never experienced this at any of the tech companies I've worked at, even the big name Silicon Valley ones.
>But Amazon can't have that now, because the only resolution that they can see here is either victory or complete capitulation to a hostile union.
The world isn't this black and white. I assure you from talking with my friends at Amazon that there is plenty of open discussion about the working environment, while also plenty of satisfaction and happiness with their job. And a couple of particularly outspoken people being fired hasn't changed that in the past, and I strongly doubt will change it now.