7 ms·

Alternate title: Amazon employee was given a warning by HR after she explicitly broke company policy regarding talking to the press I know it's fun to hate on

• JohnFen 7y ago
  Your alternative title is accurate, but doesn't make Amazon look any better.
• uoaei 7y ago
  This is the "strikes are illegal therefore strikers are wrong" argument.
  • tengbretson 7y ago
    There are proper channels for affecting change internally at a company. It's clear that these channels are working to some degree since an internal faction just pressured the company into adopting an aggressive climate pledge. My sympathies end when you get exactly what you were asking for from your employer in a negotiation and you continue bad mouth them to the press.
    • uoaei 7y ago
      This is the "you may only effect change if it's pre-approved" argument. Appeals to authority all the way down.
      • tengbretson 7y ago
        Not at all. This is the "adhere to the agreed upon decorum of negotiation or get treated like the child you seem so keen to act like" argument.
        • deleted 7y ago
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        • uoaei 7y ago
          The concept of "decorum" has historically been used as suppression from above of deviations from the status quo. Particularly to shut up women's movements, branding them as "hysterical" and "bitchy".
        • deogeo 7y ago
          And corporations are those who decide what the "agreed upon decorum" is.
      • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        Right, that's part of working in a large organization. Sometimes the rest of the organization doesn't want to do what you'd prefer, and you need to either disagree and commit or disagree and leave. The idea that you have to get your way, that any strategy becomes appropriate and justified if you haven't yet achieved the changes you want, is incredibly toxic.
        • uoaei 7y ago
          The rest of the organization, comprised almost entirely of workers, has almost no say in what is written in the "explicit company policy", so I don't see how your point is relevant.
          • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
            I don't agree. Company policies are definitely influenced, although not fully determined, by what employees think the company policies ought to be.
            • uoaei 7y ago
              In an era where everyone must earn wages to survive, employees sign on to companies' terms. Not so much the other way around, unless you're counting empty platitudes. If US history is any indication, the only way to reverse this trend is to enact laws protecting laborers.
        • toomuchtodo 7y ago
          Is it not toxic to allow a company to treat workers in the way that some firms do? Is it not toxic to defer to a corporation's actions over that of citizens? It feels like the word "toxic" is used in this context to whitewash degenerate status quo corporate behavior as acceptable. Sometimes, any strategy does become appropriate and justified if you haven't yet achieved the changes you want, depending on the issue at hand. At some point, being reasonable may no longer be an effective strategy.
          • deleted 7y ago
  • xenocyon 7y ago
    Interestingly, if Amazon did have a union, it would be obvious that being openly critical of the company wouldn't be grounds for firing (else no union leader could ever retain their job). The only reason we're debating the employees' right to criticize is because we don't have unions.
    • toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Any efforts to unionize Amazon employees in progress? If not, why not (considering labor organization is a federally protected activity)?
    • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      A principal designer like Costa would almost surely be considered a supervisor, and thus not be protected by or allowed to join the union.
      • BrandoElFollito 7y ago
        Is the ability to join a union limited in the US?
        • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
          Most people in the US can be fired at will. Part of the US's basic labor law (the Wagner Act) is a provision that you can't be fired for unionizing, but the Wagner Act doesn't cover people in supervisory roles. So supervisors technically could join a union, but can also be easily fired for doing it. Legal obstacles aside, though, it would be pretty clearly inappropriate in this case. If I'm an entry-level SWE looking to unionize, the principal designers are by any reasonable metric management; they're the ones who go around telling me what I should do and how I should do it, often more so than the person I actually report to in the org chart. I don't think any union representing line employees would let those employees' managers join.
          • BrandoElFollito 7y ago
  • tidepod12 7y ago
    This implies that there is something wrong with this argument. In cases where strikes are illegal, they are made so because voters have determined that it is in society's best interest to make them so. If you disagree with that, fine, but that is your opinion and is not universal. If your stance is that Amazon's policy regarding public speaking is wrong, then that again is your opinion. I reached out to a friend who knows about Amazon's public speaking policy. The policy does not prevent employees from speaking to the press, nor does it prevent employees from speaking negatively about Amazon. It actually even says that talking publicly about an employee's experience working at Amazon is encouraged as long as you say that "this opinion is my own and not my company's". The policy does also say that employees must get prior approval before speaking publicly on behalf of the company or before sharing confidential information. I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with this policy, and the employee in question definitely violated that. She explicitly identifies herself as "an Amazon insider" in her interview with TechCrunch where she then goes on to talk about Amazon's effort regarding climate change. If I had to guess, I would say that this phrase is probably what got her into trouble. No company would be happy if one of their employees, without prior approval, represented themselves as an "insider" giving special information to the press, and I don't blame the company for that or see anything wrong with enforcing policies against that (except in cases of actual whistleblowing, which this is not).
    • uoaei 7y ago
      The "appeal to authority" fallacy is one of the fallacies most commonly recognized as such. Usually arguments based on fallacies are classified as "wrong" because no alternate, valid support is given. > In cases where strikes are illegal, they are made so because voters have determined that it is in society's best interest to make them so. Laws are seldom (never?) passed by popular vote, and I highly doubt this hypothetical outcome would occur if the question was ever presented to the people. Citizens have little say in legislative matters except when given a choice between 2-3 representatives, the winner of which gets the power to vote in their stead. This obviously makes it easier to influence the legislative process, since you only need to influence the representative and not all their constituents. The representatives are completely unaccountable until they're up for re-election, which occurs every 2-6 years. Passing a law can be done in much less time with zero input from citizens. So using the law as a basis for social approval of policy is obviously moot. Another point: she never claims to speak for Amazon. Being an Amazon insider doesn't automatically imply that they are a spokesperson for Amazon, it just means they have access to information which does not exist outside Amazon. Your reading of this seems quite charitable to Amazon's case for seemingly no good reason. Lastly, "confidential information" is often dubiously and vaguely defined to capture all information classified by laws as confidential, but also a lot more than that based on what the company thinks is bad PR. Take for instance the Google controversies last year regarding Search in China and image processing for military drones. When you give a single company the power to both define and enforce what falls under that umbrella, you can't expect them to do anything but use it to benefit the bottom line. This is the reason we have oversight bodies at all.
• papito 7y ago
  Indeed, a very misleading headline in the age of automatic outrage. If your values do not align with your place of employment - quit. You are working for a private entity, not the government,
  • deogeo 7y ago
    > If your values do not align with your place of employment - quit. Why? There are many avenues for change, why limit yourself to just quitting? People are more than just workers and consumers.
    • papito 7y ago
      The issue in this case was specifically that the employees did not pursue internal avenues and instead went public with it. Nothing stops you from writing an email to the CEO and express your concerns. At your own risk, of course.
    • zo1 7y ago
      Because it's a very non-confrontational way of expressing your view and "voting" with your time & effort. Why fight an entity that you give value to anyways through your employment, it almost cancels out. Rather work to better a company that aligns with your own views while at the same time potentially calling out the other company. Then again, if they choose to stay and their contract says they aren't allowed to do this (assuming its reasonable), then they should also accept it when they get fired and move along.
• Nextgrid 7y ago
  If the company had nothing to feel guilty about they wouldn’t have a problem about their employees talking to the press.
  • filoleg 7y ago
    This sounds eerily similar to the commonly mocked argument of "why would you care about strong encryption, privacy, and agencies spying on you, if you have nothing to hide?"
    • Nextgrid 7y ago
      I am not sure the analogy applies. First off we are talking about benign matters like employees' opinions, not trade secrets (common sense would prevent the latter from leaking). Second, I am not advocating to force anyone to disclose anything, but merely for them to have the potential to do so if they wish. If you trust them enough to complete the task then surely you should also trust their common sense about what to talk and not talk about (trade secrets, etc) to the press? If the thought of anyone being able to "ruin" the company's reputation by airing dirty laundry is scary, then maybe fix the root cause instead of the symptoms and ask yourself 1) why is there dirty laundry to begin with? and 2) why would the employee be unhappy enough to leak it? There are tons of happy small businesses with no such thing as "PR" nor media policy (just employees' common sense) and they don't seem to implode, because either there's no dirty laundry or the employees are paid & treated well enough to not put the company in disrepute. It's like mutual trust & respect.
      • filoleg 7y ago
        >If you trust them enough to complete the task then surely you should also trust their common sense about what to talk and not talk about (trade secrets, etc) to the press? I trust people at the company to have common sense about what to talk and not talk about, as long as it is their job, as they are most likely able to have the full story and consider the situation from all angles. However, I do not trust an average engineer's common sense to know what to talk/not talk about, especially considering how narrowly scoped most of the engineering work (and, conversely, their exposure to the overall big picture) is. >There are tons of happy small businesses with no such thing as "PR" nor media policy (just employees' common sense) and they don't seem to implode, because either there's no dirty laundry or the employees are paid & treated well enough to not put the company in disrepute. It's like mutual trust & respect. Agreed with this one, but it only seems to support my previous point about the big picture. If you work at a small company, you are way more likely to have an understanding of the big picture than a cog at a big tech company, who stands very little chance at doing so. >If the thought of anyone being able to "ruin" the company's reputation by airing dirty laundry is scary, then maybe fix the root cause instead of the symptoms and ask yourself 1) why is there dirty laundry to begin with? and 2) why would the employee be unhappy enough to leak it? There doesn't have to be any real "dirty laundry", it's all about how people on the outside can spin the story, even if the facts leaked are true. Just look at this submission post itself. Factually, it is true, because an employee spoke out about the company on the topic of climate change and got fired for it. Or, a more level-headed view, would be something more like "An employee acted as if they were representing company views while giving an interview regarding company policies and got fired for it regardless of their stance on the issue." Which of the two do you think will be more unfavorable to the company and paint it in a bad light? Which one opens up the company more to the potential damage?