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Wal-Mart Tells Workers: Don’t Download Labor Group’s Chat App

279 points by miraj 10y ago

0xmohit 10y ago
Another link: http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/11/15/wal-mart-tells-workers-dont-download-labor-groups-chat-app.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/11/15/wal-mart-tell... Interesting: Wal-Mart has instructed store managers to tell their employees that the app wasn't made by the company and described it as a scheme to gather workers' personal information, according to a document viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  That's totally unsurprising to hear. Wal-Mart apparently defaults to portraying unions as pure evil. I don't know what the current procedure is like, but they used to make new hires watch laughably biased "educational" videos about unions. I don't remember the contents in detail, just that they roughly reminded me of '80s anti-drug PSAs/specials, with union organizers essentially taking the place of the "drug pusher" who wants to profit by ruining your life. Wal-Mart management, of course, takes the place of the wise parent/guardian who has your best interests at heart.
  - vitus 10y ago
    I think the parent comment was pointing out that the foxbusiness article was pretty blatant plagiarism -- in fact, if you go through the two articles side-by-side, you can see that the foxbusiness article is pretty much taken verbatim, albeit some slight restructuring (that IMO harms the overall flow of the piece). One point, though, although I'm not sure how to interpret this, is that the original author (Nassauer) is linked at the bottom of the foxbusiness piece.
    - Sanddancer 10y ago
      The WSJ is owned by News Corp, the same company that owns Fox News. So this is probably not plagarizing, just a company printing an article in their various holdings.
  - Frondo 10y ago
    It works, too. In the popular media, unions have been so thoroughly demonized for several decades. Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job. And the kinds of people who're going in for these jobs at Walmart probably aren't the most educated to begin with, so watching a video that confirms the biases they've picked up from popular media, well, that's probably a pretty effective tactic on Walmart's part. This is all not to say that unions in the US are blameless. They could surely learn a lot from the way unions operate throughout Europe. There's been corruption, greed, and mismanagement in the big unions, just like every big organization (especially big American organizations; something in our cultural DNA seems to make us prone to graft), but us workers still absolutely need them or something like them to keep up the good fight.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      I'm in my late 30s. My image of unions is an amalgam of my uncle who got paid well for his union job and the guy I knew a decade ago who bragged about intentionally disrupting a UAW production line. (and of course other stuff, but I've seen both ends of it. I also don't give the UAW a lot of credit for tiering their recent agreements: http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2015/10/30/workers-paid-equally-uaw-gm-deal/74904590/ http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-moto... It's almost literally "got mine".)
    - tankenmate 10y ago
      In fact WalMart's European arm, ASDA, is heavily unionised and management have a love / hate relationship with it but on the whole put up with it. At one point ASDA management tried to induce workers to waive their right to collective bargaining in return for a pay rise; a court found that unlawful and fined the company and made them compensate the affected workers £2,500. So they have largely buried the hatchet but it is the only place in the world that WalMart tolerates unions.
    - chrisbennet 10y ago
      "Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job." Or have had the actual experience of not being allowed to plug in your own electrical cord at a trade show and blaming in on the union - which is probably right. I'm not saying unions are all bad but in the US ones don't have a good track record. When the AFL-CIO asks for an exemption to the $15 minimum wage it doesn't help their image. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-15-dollar-minimum-wage-unions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-...
jimmywanger 10y ago
Just to play devil's advocate here, this is from the article: > The app, called WorkIt, invites users to register by providing a name, email, telephone number and ZIP Code. Users can also s hare (sic) their job title and Wal-Mart store number.... That is a bunch of personally identifying information. You can easily steal somebody's identity with those bits of information, or at least have a good idea of who they are. I see how Walmart's corporate line is at least somewhat believable upon further thought. And there has been no disclosure on how they're storing this information. Are they storing it on AWS/GCE/Azure or Linode? Or do they have their own locked down racks that safeguard this information? Look, I'm not saying that there's anything malicious about this, or the Walmart isn't trying to bust worker collaboration. But, in today's security conscious world, you really should ask these questions when you're requesting PII to sign up to your app. And malice vs carelessness doesn't matter when your personal information is leaked all over the web.
- btown 10y ago
  "Locked down racks" is complete FUD. It's not like there's HIPAA or PCI compliance issues here. Incompetently managed bare metal servers are just as hackable, perhaps more so, than incompetently used cloud IaaS. Workers should be careful, but storage has absolutely nothing to do with this.
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    > "Locked down racks" is complete FUD. That was my point. I'd much rather have them Amazon boys or Google boys take care of my data than my own sysadmin team - the Amazon/Google sysadmins are sharp, they apply all patches, and they have procedures in place to make sure they don't do anything incredibly stupid. The fact they don't mention how they store any of this information that could have potential career altering affects bothers the heck out of me. I'd much rather they just say that they stored everything in AWS, than run their own bare metal.
    - TheDong 10y ago
      What you're saying is even more FUD though. Using AWS EC2 or GCE's compute doesn't mean you aren't responsible for sysadmining. You still have to patch your boxes, you still have not do incredibly stupid things. The actual security difference between servers on a rack and virtual machines in a cloud is roughly a dozen ip-tables rules (security groups).
santaclaus 10y ago
> The app, released on Android phones Monday Why Android only?
- qq66 10y ago
  It's hard to buy an iPhone on Walmart wages.
- sfall 10y ago
  android is more prevalent in lower income workers. More of the potential users would use android thus they develop on the predominant platform first.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Not in my observation. Where I work there is a low paid call center on another floor of this giant building, and they all have iphones. Its like shoes. At my socioeconomic level when I want to blow some cash or show off some money I go on a thousands of dollar vacation travel or maybe buy a new car, for me its enough to show I have some dough, but its cheap enough to fit my cash flow. Likewise a step or two or three downward, their way of flashing cash is the $400 sneakers or $400 video game system or in this specific case, the $400 iphone. They may have saved from months of paychecks to afford it, but I'm not really all that different other than I went to Ireland instead. Or I bought a car mostly in cash. Its the same behavior at a different scale. Android is definitely in the middle, from what I observe. No one over $400K or under $40K has an android phone, at least not that I've seen.
searine 10y ago
1. Hello Streisand effect. 2. Does anyone else hope semi-anonymous apps like this will lead to a new age of unionization?
- danharaj 10y ago
  Yes, in particular I hope that apps enable more autonomous, directly democratic, distributed unions that are more resistant to capture by union bureaucrats and management.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  2. More than you can imagine. Technology should be bringing an end to sharecropping, not further increasing economic inequality.
  - nullc 10y ago
    I should have a pony.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      I ain't got time for defeatist or libertarian attitudes (see handle). The future is what we make of it.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    Unclear; Wal-mart or other hugecorps can make fake apps that suck people in just like other fake apps. Guess the wrong app, get a "union" bit set in your employee profile.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  Judging by the information they're collecting, there's nothing anonymous or "semi-anonymous" about this app.
- douche 10y ago
  What a way for corporations to infiltrate budding labor organizations, though. Cynical-me expects a rash of fakes and knock-offs where any data input in the app goes straight to HR.
Animats 10y ago
It's an illegal labor practice in the US for an employer to do that. It's interference with the right to bargain collectively. But WalMart probably doesn't have much to fear from the Labor Department. Even under the current administration, enforcement is weak, and it will probably be weaker under the next administration. It's really tough to organize a union today, even though the law as written is pro-union.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  They're not interfering with the right to bargain collectively though. For all we know, they're genuinely warning their employees that they may be involved in a PII collection scam. They can't reprimand/dismiss you for using the app, but surely they can tell you it's unwise. I don't see why people are so quick to tie Wal-Mart to the pyre; for what they pay, their employees are satisfied to an outsized degree. Given that they are the third largest employer, behind the DoD and the PLA, they've surely done something impressive in building one of the largest and most satisfied minimum-wage-or-thereabouts workforces in the world. Obviously we can't take their statement at face value. We also can't take the union's statement at face value. Each party has its own interests. I'm sure anyone here who has dealt with a real union recognizes that nobody runs one because they love their industry's labourers. They are no less political than the corporations they bargain with.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    It's certainly unwise to interpret their concern that charitably--it only has access to photos and it's a chat app. It has the same concerns any other chat app would have. They don't publish PSAs about texting.
    - randomdata 10y ago
      But if we recognize that it is yet another chat app, like every other chat app, why are people even downloading it in the first place to prompt Wal-mart to feel the need to issue a statement?
SubiculumCode 10y ago
By doing that Walmart is promoting the group ha ha. Min.wage employees are not going to listen to their boss when at home.
scarmig 10y ago
The most dangerous thing about this app is the certainty that, if it takes off, it'll be filled with union-busting labor "consultants" who'll focus on identifying rebellious workers so Walmart can retaliate against them for some other pretext. Note that Walmart already spends millions of dollars on these particular types of specialized attorneys who do pretty much exactly that except over other channels, so this isn't at all far fetched, despite how evil it sounds.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ransom1538 10y ago
Walmart is just a front for off loaded cheap Chinese goods. Sure using labor camps, product dumping and destroying the sky doesn't happen in our backyard. But the concept of Walmart as pro American is disgusting. Anything to harm it is good. Good for this app. Bored? I'll fund a new one.
- PunchTornado 10y ago
  why the hate for imported stuff? Do you want everything you buy to be made in USA? I don't understand you people. Trade is good for all of us. No country can build everything.
  - _RPM 10y ago
    What do you mean you people?
    - RIMR 10y ago
      People like you.
  - j_koreth 10y ago
    I think the commenter is complaining about the massive ecological defeating that is happening in countries that Walmart depends on for production over just complaining that production is not in America
tomrod 10y ago
Hmm. It seems likely this will result in the Streisand effect for Walmart.
fatdog 10y ago
It is a fascinating idea. Let's explore it: The app would let users signal need from a buyer so that workers in their social network could agree on the price to give them. If buyers managed to find the service somewhere else, users could snap a picture of the person/company who won the business and "review" them so that their network knew not to help the winner out, like if their brakes were about to fail or their house caught fire or whatever. Signup would be free but users would pay like %5+ of their paycheck, which they will be fine with because of the increased benefits they get, and we would use the money for expansion and blocking competitors. Uber failed at getting political support because they were greedy capitalists who create injustice, so campaign contributions will be one of our big cost centers, but the returns will be well worth it. Instead of an auction for services and market making like the apps we have today, it's a way to collude to fix prices. If they act now, YC can get %5 for a mere $50m. Imagining the utility elevator pitch, "...no, no, like Grindr but for comrades!" An app for creating labor cartels. What will I call it? "Koloodr."
hellofunk 10y ago
I'm curious, was this article censored off the front page? I saw it near the top briefly, and then when I clicked back to the front page, it quickly disappeared, and it is still not in the front pages despite racking up votes.

279 points by miraj 10y ago

Another link: http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/11/15/wal-mart-tells-workers-dont-download-labor-groups-chat-app.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/11/15/wal-mart-tell... Interesting: Wal-Mart has instructed store managers to tell their employees that the app wasn't made by the company and described it as a scheme to gather workers' personal information, according to a document viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago
That's totally unsurprising to hear. Wal-Mart apparently defaults to portraying unions as pure evil. I don't know what the current procedure is like, but they used to make new hires watch laughably biased "educational" videos about unions. I don't remember the contents in detail, just that they roughly reminded me of '80s anti-drug PSAs/specials, with union organizers essentially taking the place of the "drug pusher" who wants to profit by ruining your life. Wal-Mart management, of course, takes the place of the wise parent/guardian who has your best interests at heart.
- vitus 10y ago
  I think the parent comment was pointing out that the foxbusiness article was pretty blatant plagiarism -- in fact, if you go through the two articles side-by-side, you can see that the foxbusiness article is pretty much taken verbatim, albeit some slight restructuring (that IMO harms the overall flow of the piece). One point, though, although I'm not sure how to interpret this, is that the original author (Nassauer) is linked at the bottom of the foxbusiness piece.
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    The WSJ is owned by News Corp, the same company that owns Fox News. So this is probably not plagarizing, just a company printing an article in their various holdings.
- Frondo 10y ago
  It works, too. In the popular media, unions have been so thoroughly demonized for several decades. Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job. And the kinds of people who're going in for these jobs at Walmart probably aren't the most educated to begin with, so watching a video that confirms the biases they've picked up from popular media, well, that's probably a pretty effective tactic on Walmart's part. This is all not to say that unions in the US are blameless. They could surely learn a lot from the way unions operate throughout Europe. There's been corruption, greed, and mismanagement in the big unions, just like every big organization (especially big American organizations; something in our cultural DNA seems to make us prone to graft), but us workers still absolutely need them or something like them to keep up the good fight.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I'm in my late 30s. My image of unions is an amalgam of my uncle who got paid well for his union job and the guy I knew a decade ago who bragged about intentionally disrupting a UAW production line. (and of course other stuff, but I've seen both ends of it. I also don't give the UAW a lot of credit for tiering their recent agreements: http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2015/10/30/workers-paid-equally-uaw-gm-deal/74904590/ http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-moto... It's almost literally "got mine".)
  - tankenmate 10y ago
    In fact WalMart's European arm, ASDA, is heavily unionised and management have a love / hate relationship with it but on the whole put up with it. At one point ASDA management tried to induce workers to waive their right to collective bargaining in return for a pay rise; a court found that unlawful and fined the company and made them compensate the affected workers £2,500. So they have largely buried the hatchet but it is the only place in the world that WalMart tolerates unions.
  - chrisbennet 10y ago
    "Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job." Or have had the actual experience of not being allowed to plug in your own electrical cord at a trade show and blaming in on the union - which is probably right. I'm not saying unions are all bad but in the US ones don't have a good track record. When the AFL-CIO asks for an exemption to the $15 minimum wage it doesn't help their image. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-15-dollar-minimum-wage-unions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-...

jimmywanger 10y ago

Just to play devil's advocate here, this is from the article: > The app, called WorkIt, invites users to register by providing a name, email, telephone number and ZIP Code. Users can also s hare (sic) their job title and Wal-Mart store number.... That is a bunch of personally identifying information. You can easily steal somebody's identity with those bits of information, or at least have a good idea of who they are. I see how Walmart's corporate line is at least somewhat believable upon further thought. And there has been no disclosure on how they're storing this information. Are they storing it on AWS/GCE/Azure or Linode? Or do they have their own locked down racks that safeguard this information? Look, I'm not saying that there's anything malicious about this, or the Walmart isn't trying to bust worker collaboration. But, in today's security conscious world, you really should ask these questions when you're requesting PII to sign up to your app. And malice vs carelessness doesn't matter when your personal information is leaked all over the web.

btown 10y ago
"Locked down racks" is complete FUD. It's not like there's HIPAA or PCI compliance issues here. Incompetently managed bare metal servers are just as hackable, perhaps more so, than incompetently used cloud IaaS. Workers should be careful, but storage has absolutely nothing to do with this.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > "Locked down racks" is complete FUD. That was my point. I'd much rather have them Amazon boys or Google boys take care of my data than my own sysadmin team - the Amazon/Google sysadmins are sharp, they apply all patches, and they have procedures in place to make sure they don't do anything incredibly stupid. The fact they don't mention how they store any of this information that could have potential career altering affects bothers the heck out of me. I'd much rather they just say that they stored everything in AWS, than run their own bare metal.
  - TheDong 10y ago
    What you're saying is even more FUD though. Using AWS EC2 or GCE's compute doesn't mean you aren't responsible for sysadmining. You still have to patch your boxes, you still have not do incredibly stupid things. The actual security difference between servers on a rack and virtual machines in a cloud is roughly a dozen ip-tables rules (security groups).

santaclaus 10y ago

> The app, released on Android phones Monday Why Android only?

qq66 10y ago
It's hard to buy an iPhone on Walmart wages.
sfall 10y ago
android is more prevalent in lower income workers. More of the potential users would use android thus they develop on the predominant platform first.
- VLM 10y ago
  Not in my observation. Where I work there is a low paid call center on another floor of this giant building, and they all have iphones. Its like shoes. At my socioeconomic level when I want to blow some cash or show off some money I go on a thousands of dollar vacation travel or maybe buy a new car, for me its enough to show I have some dough, but its cheap enough to fit my cash flow. Likewise a step or two or three downward, their way of flashing cash is the $400 sneakers or $400 video game system or in this specific case, the $400 iphone. They may have saved from months of paychecks to afford it, but I'm not really all that different other than I went to Ireland instead. Or I bought a car mostly in cash. Its the same behavior at a different scale. Android is definitely in the middle, from what I observe. No one over $400K or under $40K has an android phone, at least not that I've seen.

searine 10y ago

1. Hello Streisand effect. 2. Does anyone else hope semi-anonymous apps like this will lead to a new age of unionization?

danharaj 10y ago
Yes, in particular I hope that apps enable more autonomous, directly democratic, distributed unions that are more resistant to capture by union bureaucrats and management.
toomuchtodo 10y ago
2. More than you can imagine. Technology should be bringing an end to sharecropping, not further increasing economic inequality.
- nullc 10y ago
  I should have a pony.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I ain't got time for defeatist or libertarian attitudes (see handle). The future is what we make of it.
- kabdib 10y ago
  Unclear; Wal-mart or other hugecorps can make fake apps that suck people in just like other fake apps. Guess the wrong app, get a "union" bit set in your employee profile.
jlarocco 10y ago
Judging by the information they're collecting, there's nothing anonymous or "semi-anonymous" about this app.
douche 10y ago
What a way for corporations to infiltrate budding labor organizations, though. Cynical-me expects a rash of fakes and knock-offs where any data input in the app goes straight to HR.

Animats 10y ago

It's an illegal labor practice in the US for an employer to do that. It's interference with the right to bargain collectively. But WalMart probably doesn't have much to fear from the Labor Department. Even under the current administration, enforcement is weak, and it will probably be weaker under the next administration. It's really tough to organize a union today, even though the law as written is pro-union.

microcolonel 10y ago
They're not interfering with the right to bargain collectively though. For all we know, they're genuinely warning their employees that they may be involved in a PII collection scam. They can't reprimand/dismiss you for using the app, but surely they can tell you it's unwise. I don't see why people are so quick to tie Wal-Mart to the pyre; for what they pay, their employees are satisfied to an outsized degree. Given that they are the third largest employer, behind the DoD and the PLA, they've surely done something impressive in building one of the largest and most satisfied minimum-wage-or-thereabouts workforces in the world. Obviously we can't take their statement at face value. We also can't take the union's statement at face value. Each party has its own interests. I'm sure anyone here who has dealt with a real union recognizes that nobody runs one because they love their industry's labourers. They are no less political than the corporations they bargain with.
- duaneb 10y ago
  It's certainly unwise to interpret their concern that charitably--it only has access to photos and it's a chat app. It has the same concerns any other chat app would have. They don't publish PSAs about texting.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    But if we recognize that it is yet another chat app, like every other chat app, why are people even downloading it in the first place to prompt Wal-mart to feel the need to issue a statement?

SubiculumCode 10y ago

By doing that Walmart is promoting the group ha ha. Min.wage employees are not going to listen to their boss when at home.

scarmig 10y ago

The most dangerous thing about this app is the certainty that, if it takes off, it'll be filled with union-busting labor "consultants" who'll focus on identifying rebellious workers so Walmart can retaliate against them for some other pretext. Note that Walmart already spends millions of dollars on these particular types of specialized attorneys who do pretty much exactly that except over other channels, so this isn't at all far fetched, despite how evil it sounds.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ransom1538 10y ago

Walmart is just a front for off loaded cheap Chinese goods. Sure using labor camps, product dumping and destroying the sky doesn't happen in our backyard. But the concept of Walmart as pro American is disgusting. Anything to harm it is good. Good for this app. Bored? I'll fund a new one.

PunchTornado 10y ago
why the hate for imported stuff? Do you want everything you buy to be made in USA? I don't understand you people. Trade is good for all of us. No country can build everything.
- _RPM 10y ago
  What do you mean you people?
  - RIMR 10y ago
    People like you.
- j_koreth 10y ago
  I think the commenter is complaining about the massive ecological defeating that is happening in countries that Walmart depends on for production over just complaining that production is not in America

tomrod 10y ago

Hmm. It seems likely this will result in the Streisand effect for Walmart.

fatdog 10y ago

It is a fascinating idea. Let's explore it: The app would let users signal need from a buyer so that workers in their social network could agree on the price to give them. If buyers managed to find the service somewhere else, users could snap a picture of the person/company who won the business and "review" them so that their network knew not to help the winner out, like if their brakes were about to fail or their house caught fire or whatever. Signup would be free but users would pay like %5+ of their paycheck, which they will be fine with because of the increased benefits they get, and we would use the money for expansion and blocking competitors. Uber failed at getting political support because they were greedy capitalists who create injustice, so campaign contributions will be one of our big cost centers, but the returns will be well worth it. Instead of an auction for services and market making like the apps we have today, it's a way to collude to fix prices. If they act now, YC can get %5 for a mere $50m. Imagining the utility elevator pitch, "...no, no, like Grindr but for comrades!" An app for creating labor cartels. What will I call it? "Koloodr."

hellofunk 10y ago

I'm curious, was this article censored off the front page? I saw it near the top briefly, and then when I clicked back to the front page, it quickly disappeared, and it is still not in the front pages despite racking up votes.