zlacker

> Previously, Costa said Amazon attempted to intervene in the group’s efforts to organize the panel by deleting invitations sent to other workers internally, which the group claims were accepted by more than 1,500 employees.

It’s Amazon’s internal network, and Amazon’s email system, so they have the full right to control what happens on their resources.

At the same time, I find that deleting the an email after it has been sent by the sender unknown to the sender to be a kind of gaslighting, and dystopian. Having a policy to not organize using work resources might be harsh, but at least it is more transparent as in the proverbial line is drawn in the proverbial sand.

>>tareqa+(OP)
No, actually, none of that is true under US labor law. People can organize at their workplaces. It’s a protected action.

>>tareqa+(OP)
I would guess that Costa means the invitations had an associated calendar entry and they deleted the calendar entry. Deleting emails would definitely be pretty creepy, but I don't know if I've ever heard of that happening.

>>claude+O
You can organize at your workplace, but you don't have a right to use work resources to do it. (Workers used to have the right to use their work email, but the NLRB has recently overturned that precedent.)

>>SpicyL+W
It'd be pretty hard to prove or even notice. It's probably happened, the corporate world is too big, but it may not be common.

>>SpicyL+W
Oh, that’s definitely possible. I didn’t think of that. Thanks 'SpicyLemonZest.

>>tareqa+(OP)
I am also curious about the rate of false positives. I wonder how many of those deletions resulted in disrupted work. Maybe I should start taking "I never got your email" excuses more seriously now.

>>eximiu+r1
I witnessed instances in which IT was mandated to delete emails from the server in order to stop a certain piece of information (salary info sent accidentally to a large distribution list). It did not go well, of course, because of POP3. It was pretty hilarious actually seeing people forwarding the email repeatedly. But with a calendar entry, it's a different story as it's centralized.

>>tareqa+(OP)
> It’s Amazon’s internal network, and Amazon’s email system, so they have the full right to control what happens on their resources.

It's against Amazon's interests to have this organization happen in a parallel, side channel instead. But they seem to be pushing this action in that direction.

>>SpicyL+o1
There's also stipulations on when and where you can organize at your workplace. For example, putting up noticed about a union meeting on the bulletin board in the breakroom is allowed, but you can't put that same notice on a factory floor. You also can talk about organizing at work, but only if it's outside of work hours (you can't be on the clock and using that time to talk about organizing).

>>SpicyL+o1
Calling work email a "resource" seems a little dubious to me. I.e. if I use office stationary to write my union manifesto, they have to buy more stationary. If I send an email they don't have to buy more of anything.

Especially in the world we live in right now - email and other work-hosted communications platforms are not a resource provided by work, they are the WORKPLACE.

>>tareqa+(OP)
The issue is, you're undermining the rights of your laborer's to organize, and I'd even be willing to make a case that you may be shooting yourself in the foot in the long run, because if you annoy them to the point they organize anyway, you can expext compensation to be elevated even more than it would have been to satisfy the collective bargaining unit since they will pass on the cost of paying for their own organizing infrastructure (since you can't be trusted to let your employees use yours).

So they need to nut up and shut up. If you can't be trusted to let your laborer's organize in good faith, they have no ground on which to stand when the bill comes for a second labor specific communication network comes due.

All that waste they could avoid by just being decent disinterested network operators. Sad really.

>>kennyw+d4
It does seem dubious, but I can see the argument that the government shouldn't be adjudicating which work resources are or aren't costly to allow. (Internal phone calls don't cost anything either, but I think it's fair to say union organizers shouldn't be allowed to ring up all the desk phones in an office asking them to support some labor action.)

>>kennyw+d4
Email servers, electricity, the time spent setting it all up, the server room that stores the machines, the IT department that maintains the machines and keeps things running, the client hardware that the employee interacts with...

>>benben+z6
The marginal cost of everything you mentioned is zero per email.

>>SpicyL+V5
That scenario is covered by the fact that organizing on company TIME is not allowed.

I think I disagree. This is exactly the role of the government to adjudicate. I would suggest a standard something like "everything is allowed, unless the company can prove significant harm". So instead of the gov saying "email is ok!" you just get to use email, and then the company has to go to the gov and prove that you using email is a drain on their resources in order to fire you.

>>benben+z6
You're explicitly allowed to put up signs in the break room, and the cost of the break room existing is DEFINITELY non-zero. Explain to me how those things are different? Email is the workplace.

>>tantal+R8
Essentialy zero isn't Zero at Amazon scale (or the scale of any large business)

>>tareqa+(OP)
It's not just company resources that are being effectively stolen to push personal political agendas. It's also company time - not just the activists spending their own time that they have been compensated by the company for, but also the time of everyone they send these emails and invites to.

>>SpicyL+o1
First statement too broad, bad advice. An example is bulletin boards that have non-work things on it.

On the second note, accurate but worth noting this will be overturned again when makeup of NLRB changes again (whenever that ends up happening).

>>michae+la
Does an email server processing n emails per second require more power to process n+1 emails per second? My suspicion is that unless that +1 hits some capacity limit, the number of emails we're talking about required to organize union activities would be undetectable.

That said, even if it is detectible, I think that employees should be allowed to drain some small amount of a company's resources to organize. I am allowed to use company resources for emails like "who wants to go for beers after work?" why should I not be allowed to send "who wants to go organize collective action after work?"

>>tareqa+(OP)
Obama's NLRB disagreed with you. Trump's NLRB overturned their previous decision and agreed with your take. This will continue to go back-and forth as control of NLRB changes.

I personally think email is equivalent to an office bulletin board. What NLRB has said about that is you simply can't be DISCRIMINATORY on non-work issues. So if you can post on a bulletin board about sponsoring you in a Charity Fun Run, then you can post about union activity. If the employer only allows work-related things, then it's fine for them to not allow union activity.

>>michae+la
There's still some drain from resources spent monitoring and stopping it. Even though you're already monitoring, you just end up with two cancelling out "essentially zeros."

>>A4ET8a+Z1
I've got a domain with punny code from to two different character sets, the express goal of which is to get my emails to disappear in strange and interesting ways.

I love when people tell me they didnt get my email, that means it worked!

>>throwa+mb
The company has erred in not giving their employees a better way to express themselves and be heard in the first place.

It's not like these people would walk out if an email would make their point just as well.

Incidentally paid sick leave, which warehouse workers don't have and this protest is in favor of, is estimated to actually save money, not cost it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5649342/

As best I can tell, there's evidence that everything these workers are advocating for would have no effect on or better for the company long term through people liking the brand more reducing hiring and training costs by increasing worker retention, reducing the lost of productivity associated with sick workers getting other workers sick, etc.

https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/amazon-sic...

But I guess some people think well paid executives always know better then regular employees.

Personally if I had a say at Amazon, I'd suggest given the 47.3B they had in cash on hand as of nov of last year and how they've been raking it in since people have begun sheltering in place that they at least could afford to experiment.

>>SpicyL+W
Deleting email messages is 100% a thing. I saw it happen myself (and confirmed with coworkers) at one unicorn I worked at.