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Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

396 points by kevlar1818 6y ago

foob4r 6y ago
Seems like Amazon's getting desperate now. Too bad the US government is the weakest in decades it's been to do something for the workers.
- Despegar 6y ago
  It's been that way for the past 40 years or so, but I think that's starting to change.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    On the bright side, Trump is quite petty and may push support where someone deems feasible for him through government channels to these efforts, just because he doesn't like Bezos.
- da_chicken 6y ago
  It wouldn't matter. The current administration is from a party whose platform is as anti-labor as their opposition was under Woodrow Wilson. Even if we had a strong Federal government right now, it would be interested in aiding Amazon, not it's workforce. As it is I fully expect to hear talking points that "responsible" workers wouldn't strike or try to organize, or that there should be a law against unionization during national emergencies.
  - rednerrus 6y ago
    Trump hates Bezos enough to try to shut USPS to get to him. I'm sure he'd love to get the double whammy of screwing over Bezos and a boost from working class voters in swing states.
    - rayuela 6y ago
      This! Amazon is taking a huge risk in exposing themselves to the wrath of a personal feud between Bezos and Trump.
    - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
      If that's how he feels personally, his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board don't show it. And if it would take legislation, he'd never get it past Mitch McConnell.
      - kevingadd 6y ago
        Your first point aside, Republicans have been trying to privatize the USPS for decades (though it's definitely the case that many Democrats are in favor of this too for whatever reason). The White House has been actively rejecting the idea of providing aid to the USPS over the last month or two despite the fact that the situation has demolished their revenues. I think it's at least quite plausible that the WH could try to do this since it aligns with their priorities, and that McConnell would be fine with it. The House, probably not.
    - duxup 6y ago
      Trump has plenty of employees in his businesses, and support from lots of business folks. I would expect Trump to cut his nose off to spite his face at any moment ... but not if it meant using the federal government to side with a labor movement like this. He has likely made that choice already with his appointments.
      - klenwell 6y ago
        > Trump has plenty of employees in his businesses, and support from lots of business folks. On that topic: For some, it was a plainly calculated choice. Thomas Peterffy, a billionaire who owned the largest estate in Greenwich, donated to Trump but never pretended to admire him. “When the choice is between two ideologies, then it’s a luxury to dwell on the personalities of the candidates,” he told me. “It’s a luxury that we cannot afford.” Peterffy, who made his fortune as a pioneer in digital trading, said that the choice was between “a high degree of government regulation or a diminished amount of government regulation, because, basically, that’s how the U.S. will get to socialism—increasing government regulation.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/how-greenwich-republicans-learned-to-love-trump https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/how-greenwich-...
  - TheBobinator 6y ago
    Forcing work during a pandemic that might kill people without providing them PPE or making changes to operations is the literal height of insanity. Amazon has been a subsidized american corporation servicing chinese interests for 2 decades; the US goverment recieves hundreds of billion in chinese bond purchases a year and for the privelage of having this subsidy the Federal government the federal government in turn provides a subsidty to amazon in the form of forging anti-trust prosecution against amazon for running a retail division that ran a loss for 2 decades while prosecuting wal-mart. End of the day, best way to handle this is to make an app for it. People run it on their phones which everyone has, and they co-ordinate and vote that way as a single block and as seperate groups.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    > The current administration is from a party whose platform is as anti-labor as their opposition was under Woodrow Wilson Is that true? Increased tariffs, renegotiated trade deals (increased tariffs), attempting to tighten immigration, lowering taxes on repatriation of cash. Those are all pro worker.
    - andybak 6y ago
      Yes but all those things are also fairly safe in terms of his other demographics. Trump's brand of populism strikes me as being all about surface gestures. Has anything he's done for workers also disadvantaged his rich donors?
    - munk-a 6y ago
      It is true yes - though it's also true that recently both sides of the aisle have been anti-labor. The trade deal renegotiations didn't focus on or accomplish good changes to keep labour local and, while I'm not wholly against tariffs tax changes have wiped out any local investment motivations tariffs were supporting. Lastly, the repatriation of cash was a loss for everyone - companies that skirted tax laws got a gift in being able to reclaim a lot of cash they had been unable to access due to dodging taxes while also paying a much reduced rate... And I think that action happening again so soon is just a clear signal to companies to avoid actually bringing any money into the country until they can get a tax holiday to get it in for free - it's like your kid eating the cookie jar and you saying "Well, I'm going to dock your allowance thirty percent this week... And I will refill the cookie jar but don't do that again!" - we rewarded these companies for skirting tax laws by letting them skirt some more tax laws while wagging a finger and saying "Naughty naughty!"
      - linuxftw 6y ago
        > we rewarded these companies for skirting tax laws If it's legal, it's not skirting the law. > both sides of the aisle have been anti-labor No argument here. But if we're comparing the current administration to (recent) previous, it's an improvement.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
  - maximente 6y ago
    actually, i wouldn't be surprised if trump tries to go left of biden in a few key areas if only to try to win the next election. i think he's under immense pressure due to mishandling the pandemic - he's not polling well at all, not that that means everything - and i suspect he's not above wildly shaking up policy in order to pick up votes, esp. in the critical swing states. his party isn't in a position to throw up a challenger so the Rs are stuck with him, from my point of view: if desperate enough, who knows what he'll try?
    - silverreads 6y ago
      Biden will stick with the party and it's "obligations" no matter what, so you've got a really good point here. Trump could punch low and swing left, where biden has no footing. Maybe maybe, this could catalyze a general republican swing to the far left?
      - orestarod 6y ago
        This sounds like a circus. Not saying that it's better anywhere else in essence, but in US politics the political words meanings have been absolutely butchered.
        silverreads 6y ago
        I mean, is that out of character though? I was going to vote for bernie but if trump extends federally funded healthcare to everyone and abolishes private health insurance (which, as far as I know, wouldn't negatively impact his financial supporters as much as bidens), hell yeah I'd vote for him. One issue, done deal.
Pfhreak 6y ago
tl;dr: Email lists with 500+ people must be moderated and have a manager moderate them. (It's unclear if manager means 'manages employees' or 'manages email list'.) This seems pretty draconian to me, if it's true.
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  It would seem like a pretty clear-cut case if these managers denied messages talking about unionizing.
  - willis936 6y ago
    "I'm sorry. Your message about labor rights does not fall in line with Amazon's mission and has been filtered." You wouldn't even need a human to do this.
    - jimmaswell 6y ago
      It would potentially be a slam-dunk lawsuit if it was that explicit.
- jm4 6y ago
  Not really. Big email lists like that generate tons of spam. What Amazon is doing is presumably to block unionization efforts, but, frankly, what's surprising is that they didn't have a control like this in place already. I work for a much smaller company than Amazon (without a chance of a union ever forming) and we don't let just anyone blast out emails to hundreds of people. We used to and it drove everyone nuts. People were selling their event tickets, giving traffic updates, offering up pets for adoption, etc. It's ridiculous. We had one list that was generating 100+ emails a day that were irrelevant to most of the people on the list. Every sizable list has an "owner" who controls access to send to the list. We have other channels like an area on the intranet where people can post these broadcast kinds of messages so it won't clog up people's inboxes. I thought most large companies did this.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
minimaxir 6y ago
Note: this was posted last week, and therefore not caused by a Amazon VP leaving (but perhaps could be partially a cause to the VP leaving)
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  Last week's post (2 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23024033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23024033
unethical_ban 6y ago
>The company told Recode that the moderation policy is not new but that Amazon has begun enforcement against lists that either weren't following the rules or had previously been granted exceptions after a "routine audit." An internal message to employees, obtained by Recode, said the change was to "minimize disruption to any business-critical email lists." "We have always had the rule ready, in case we needed to start enforcing it."
outside1234 6y ago
Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare.
- aphextron 6y ago
  >Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare. Money. Lots and lots of money. Amazon also operates at a scale unimaginable for most of us, which I imagine is enough of an interesting problem for some people to look past everything else.
  - pacala 6y ago
    Therein lies the problem. As the machine scales larger and larger, the cogs at the bottom have worse and worse conditions. Almost as if 'software is eating the world' is not the key to unlock Utopia, as techno-optimists would have you believe.
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      I think technology certainly is a key to a more 'Utopian' (desirable) society. The underlying problem is how we leverage the technology. If technology is simply used to displace and concentrate wealth and power through private ownership without adequately sharing the benefits of growth in technology with everyone (reduced labor, more free time to pursue personal goals, etc.) then yes, it absolutely isn't helping (basically the situation we have now). Can a Star Trek like economy ever exist? I'd love to be apart of one, but it seems unlikely given many underlying human behaviors.
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      It was always that way. It used to be that nobility lived the good life at the expense of the peasants. Now we have replaced nobility with educated office workers. And the system is set up that if you are part of the top x percent you will never have to see how the bottom lives. They are well hidden.
      - pacala 6y ago
justanotherhn 6y ago
Does the top management at Amazon know this us ultimately a futile cause? What are they trying to do? Delay efforts until more on their delivery business is automated? If anyone has an idea please let me know.
- adrianN 6y ago
  The longer you delay the efforts the more profits you make in the meantime.
- revicon 6y ago
  What makes you think this is a futile cause? Union protections are at an all time low right now, it's likely they can continue suppressing employee organization if they kill lines of communication. Especially with the historic high unemployment rates hitting middle america right now.
WilliamEdward 6y ago
Amazon is interesting because there is a rift in the company; on one side you have upper middle class engineers, and on the other working class warehouse labourers. It's easy to dismiss union organisation coming from the former side, but the real tragedy is the thousands of workers working in dangerous conditions. They won't get their union.
- euix 6y ago
  Yea this something I realized recently with the VP guy leaving. As a upper-middle elitist working engineering/ML/management how do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance? I have been considering a career changing and one of the things is studying for interviews at the FAANGS and I have trouble working for the "man" as it is and this whole affair is just turning me off more.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    This isn't that hard: Just don't work for the evil ones! If their recruiters contact you, tell them why. There are plenty of non-evil companies that will pay you well to do interesting work. Even in your "FAANG" list, Netflix just makes entertaining videos. Apple makes pleasantly overpriced hardware and competes on privacy in software. Apply to them, instead of ad-tech and sweatshops-as-a-service.
    - wgerard 6y ago
      Just to play devil's advocate a little: You should look up some of the ethical issues around cobalt mining [1], which Apple is at least indirectly complicit in. Netflix famously made their culture documents transparent to much derision about their workplace being an unhealthy competitive environment. Relatedly, they're also arguably the most famous progenitor of the "unlimited-vacation-but-don't-actually-take-it-or-else" workplace cliche. 1: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/apple-and-google-named-in-us-lawsuit-over-congolese-child-cobalt-mining-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/a...
robrenaud 6y ago
A third party service that validates all members are part of a company/organization, and then allows anonymous postings viewable to just those validated members would be very useful, IMO. There is good reason to have these discussions in a place where Amazon's management is not in control.
- boatski 6y ago
  Blind pretty much does this now, but it's mostly people asking about pay. https://www.teamblind.com/ https://www.teamblind.com/
- Jimpulse 6y ago
  My company didn't have a large presence on there, but the app Blind seems to fit the bill.
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > Blind seems to fit the bill Blind is based in South Korea. (Disclosure: one of my parents is ethnically South Korean, and I have very high regard for South Korea and its citizens.) Given the stakes involved with workplace organizing and the opacity (from a legal perspective) of a South Korea-based business, Blind may not be the right platform. At the very least, some US workers may be reluctant to open up on a platform not subject to US labor law.
- empath75 6y ago
  Blind.
- elicash 6y ago
  What's needed isn't an anonymous app. Organizing your workplace involves risk, there's no way around that.
greendave 6y ago
Would be interesting to see a comparison of Amazon's tactics and Walmart's. Traditionally Walmart has gotten a lot of bad press for its working conditions and its destruction of small businesses across the US. Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny.
- easytiger 6y ago
  > Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny. Are you quite serious?
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Scrutiny is probably the wrong word, but Amazon faces far less practical opposition compared to Walmart. With Walmart, people will both be mad at them and oppose their stores, warehouses, etc. With Amazon, anger stops at stage 1 usually.
  - sct202 6y ago
    Walmart used to be in all these kinds of headlines if you look back across the last 10 years; shutting down sites that try to unionize, supplier pressure and mistreatment. Hilary Clinton got a lot of flack for being on their board during her presidential runs. Plus there's a class aspect (People of Walmart) that made it easy for people to proudly say they're boycotting Walmart when they would never shop there anyways.
- josefresco 6y ago
  > Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny This was true maybe 4-5 years ago when Amazon was the "darling" of the online retail industry. Those days are long gone.
redmattred 6y ago
Here is the page to cancel your Amazon Prime membership: https://www.amazon.com/mc/pipelines/cancellation https://www.amazon.com/mc/pipelines/cancellation
- jordache 6y ago
  i don't understand this movement. If there is a purity test, to gauge your alignment with the internal company rules associated with every goods + service you rely on, then there needs to be transparency across the entire world economic landscape. Why cherry pick? Just because media decided to bring it to your attention? So you canceled Amazon Prime, everything else in your life was produced by some other entity. Do you go insane because you haven't vetted those sources?
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    No, you just take whatever action where you can, when you can, when it becomes clear that it is necessary.
  - fred_is_fred 6y ago
    What you are proposing is that if you see clear evidence that a company is behaving badly or counter to your beliefs you should take no action because other ones may also be? Whether or not you feel it applies specifically to this case, that doesn't make sense to me.
  - staplers 6y ago
    Sets a precedence for future behavior. Not every murder gets solved, but the threat of consequence can influence things in the right direction.
  - defnotashton2 6y ago
    I have a dream where customers need for transparency is the sole and adequate reason for companies to responsible provide and therefore abide by the current ethical standards.
  - retrac 6y ago
mlcrypto 6y ago
To avoid PIP at Amazon you just gotta be more productive than the people on those internal discussion forums. And they wonder why they're getting pushed out. Leave the trolling for after work
danbolt 6y ago
Is It true that Amazon’s internal chat tool doesn’t have as much support for “fun chat” stuff like stickers and emoji? I’ve been hearing along the grapevine.
retrac 6y ago
Some comments here really had me scratching my head. Remember, it's not just engineers, code monkeys and managers at Amazon. The majority of their employees are unskilled labour. Warehouse workers and delivery drivers. An Amazon warehouse worker in Canada makes just a little more than minimum wage. Even if it might be a nice company to work for if you're in an office, it may be a very different reality for the majority of workers.
- rochester46 6y ago
  Canadian minimum wage is relatively high (and your statement is only true for Ontario, btw. In other parts of Canada, Amazon warehouse worker minimum pay is 150% minimum wage). When viewed through the lens of the reality that is the American workforce, things look very differently. In the US, Amazon warehouse workers make more than double the federal minimum wage. They make, at minimum, more than double the wage of an average McDonalds worker. They make more than Starbucks store workers, more than most construction workers. Even in Canada, Amazon warehouse workers make more than your average Tim Hortons worker. Warehouse workers also get the same health insurance that Amazon SWEs get, which is better health insurance by far than even most white-collar American workers have. >The majority of their employees are unskilled labour. Unskilled laborers getting double minimum wage and great benefits seems to me to be a good thing for society. It baffles me that people are trying to decry this.
  - retrac 6y ago
    If that's the case and they're making ~$21 CAD an hour, then Amazon's American warehouse workers are paid considerably more than they are in Canada despite the US having a lower cost of living. At least in my local context, their behaviour doesn't seem to be something worth lauding. It's just another grueling underpaid warehouse job. With a union-busting employer.
    - forgotmylogin2 6y ago
      Then quit and find a job with better pay. My guess is most of them can't because they're already getting the market rate for unskilled labor.
toohotatopic 6y ago
Doesn't this show that the executive layer of Amazon isn't as clever as they appear? Employees can organize easily on Whatsapp or any other platform. In that case, Facebook has all the data and Amazon doesn't have any insight. Facebook then can hire any disgruntled but competent employee easily. The lock down also signals weakness and insecurity. Amazon pays at least market rates and people want to work there. In case of a strike, they can hire new people with no training because workers essentially shop all day, a skill that is ubiquitously available What do they fear?
- rumanator 6y ago
  > Employees can organize easily on Whatsapp or any other platform. That requires employees to sign up to a service and/or Chanel they don't subscribe, or try to jump-start communities from scratch. These actions are targeted at censoring pre-existing communities that are naturally and passively formed.
- jm4 6y ago
  I don't find that to be an entirely realistic scenario, but we can talk hypotheticals. As a company owner, I would welcome the opportunity for employees to quit as an alternative to unionizing. Having your problem quit for another job before you have to fire them is awesome. Having a competitor actively recruit your problem employees? That's killing two birds with one stone. You have to just laugh when it happens. It's great. As for discouraging unionizing via official company communication media, it probably has more to do with discovery and access than wanting to block the communication altogether. Of course they realize people can use Whatsapp, text, online forum, etc. The thing is there needs to be a way to discover a large community of workers on some other platform. That's much harder than going through a company directory or blasting out emails to entire divisions. They don't want to provide easy discovery and access to people who would potentially join a union.
nimbius 6y ago
As a former member of the local 701 and a current member of a union, keep fighting. You start seeing this stuff when the company knows theres a good chance you'll get a union if you want one. I once had all of my lunches turned into safety briefings with some slimeball in a suit lecturing us on the evils of unions for an hour. This prevented us from discussing unions favorably during our only time off during the day, so we decided to start an after-work club at the local pool hall. Less propaganda, more beer and real talk. Try taking your messages out of the office. Find some place the boss doesnt control and believe me, this will help a lot. You're still going to get flyers, phone calls, letters, and even doorstep visitors if you push for a union but just remember: its all bullshit at this point. Remember why you wanted to do this, and keep a running list of issues the company has not addressed. Remember: a union gives you fair bargaining for anything else you want or need for the company to succeed and you to do your job in the future as well. Some of the handouts now might seem generous but believe me, if you back down, the company will fire absolutely everyone they can identify as an organizer that hasnt been let go up till now.
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seemslegit 6y ago
That's why every workplace should have an off-company mailing list / forum / group. Yes even your very employee-friendly workplace with image boards that would never stoop to those kind of tactics.
crazygringo 6y ago
> Internal listservs with more than 500 participants are now required to move to a moderated model where a manager must approve any content before its distribution, according to emails obtained by Recode. Google did a similar thing in November [1]. This is starting to feel like a trend for tech companies reaching a certain level of size/maturity. Now this may be a contrarian opinion, but I actually think this has the potential to be a good thing if you're on the side of workers. Here's why. If you're organizing a union, trying to reveal "evil" projects, or otherwise trying to be a force for good in the company, as long as you're doing it on internal message boards everyone's still halfway-careful of what they say, and big movements/protests are less likely to happen. But by shutting them down or forcibly moderating them, that will hopefully be enough of an impetus for employees to start using third-party forums, where they can "approve" each other through invites, and everyone can speak and organize freely (and with more anonymity if desired) and accomplish perhaps far more than they have so far. As political scientists know, repression of citizens brings short-term stability at the cost of an increased long-term threat. Obviously you can't know for sure... but this feels like the kind of thing that's going to backfire for Amazon (and Google), leading to more and stronger union organization, not less. [1] https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/googles-new-internal-rules-take-hold-employees-complain-of-censorship/1753015/ https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/googles...
floatingatoll 6y ago
The original article by Recode contains more information than the Ars reblog of it: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/29/21240049/amazon-internal-corporate-employee-backlash-email-listservs-worker-activism-coronavirus https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/29/21240049/amazon-interna...
- dang 6y ago
  Changed now. Thanks!
dang 6y ago
Url changed from https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/amazon-locks-down-internal-employee-communications-amid-organizing-efforts/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/amazon-locks-dow..., which points to this.
kevlar1818 6y ago
@dang + HN moderators: Why did you change my link? I originally linked to the ArsTechnica article. And why was it removed from the front page?
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071016
  - kevlar1818 6y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. I dislike this moderation strategy, but I'll respect it.
coronaboi 6y ago
Don’t understand what the fuss is about. To continue their discussions, Can’t these employees get on a service like Blind? Yes, amazon throttling such behaviour is questionable, but why bitch and moan about not being able to use a company resource when there’s something like Blind available?

396 points by kevlar1818 6y ago

Seems like Amazon's getting desperate now. Too bad the US government is the weakest in decades it's been to do something for the workers.

Despegar 6y ago
It's been that way for the past 40 years or so, but I think that's starting to change.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  On the bright side, Trump is quite petty and may push support where someone deems feasible for him through government channels to these efforts, just because he doesn't like Bezos.
da_chicken 6y ago
It wouldn't matter. The current administration is from a party whose platform is as anti-labor as their opposition was under Woodrow Wilson. Even if we had a strong Federal government right now, it would be interested in aiding Amazon, not it's workforce. As it is I fully expect to hear talking points that "responsible" workers wouldn't strike or try to organize, or that there should be a law against unionization during national emergencies.
- rednerrus 6y ago
  Trump hates Bezos enough to try to shut USPS to get to him. I'm sure he'd love to get the double whammy of screwing over Bezos and a boost from working class voters in swing states.
  - rayuela 6y ago
    This! Amazon is taking a huge risk in exposing themselves to the wrath of a personal feud between Bezos and Trump.
  - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    If that's how he feels personally, his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board don't show it. And if it would take legislation, he'd never get it past Mitch McConnell.
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      Your first point aside, Republicans have been trying to privatize the USPS for decades (though it's definitely the case that many Democrats are in favor of this too for whatever reason). The White House has been actively rejecting the idea of providing aid to the USPS over the last month or two despite the fact that the situation has demolished their revenues. I think it's at least quite plausible that the WH could try to do this since it aligns with their priorities, and that McConnell would be fine with it. The House, probably not.
  - duxup 6y ago
    Trump has plenty of employees in his businesses, and support from lots of business folks. I would expect Trump to cut his nose off to spite his face at any moment ... but not if it meant using the federal government to side with a labor movement like this. He has likely made that choice already with his appointments.
    - klenwell 6y ago
      > Trump has plenty of employees in his businesses, and support from lots of business folks. On that topic: For some, it was a plainly calculated choice. Thomas Peterffy, a billionaire who owned the largest estate in Greenwich, donated to Trump but never pretended to admire him. “When the choice is between two ideologies, then it’s a luxury to dwell on the personalities of the candidates,” he told me. “It’s a luxury that we cannot afford.” Peterffy, who made his fortune as a pioneer in digital trading, said that the choice was between “a high degree of government regulation or a diminished amount of government regulation, because, basically, that’s how the U.S. will get to socialism—increasing government regulation.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/how-greenwich-republicans-learned-to-love-trump https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/how-greenwich-...
- TheBobinator 6y ago
  Forcing work during a pandemic that might kill people without providing them PPE or making changes to operations is the literal height of insanity. Amazon has been a subsidized american corporation servicing chinese interests for 2 decades; the US goverment recieves hundreds of billion in chinese bond purchases a year and for the privelage of having this subsidy the Federal government the federal government in turn provides a subsidty to amazon in the form of forging anti-trust prosecution against amazon for running a retail division that ran a loss for 2 decades while prosecuting wal-mart. End of the day, best way to handle this is to make an app for it. People run it on their phones which everyone has, and they co-ordinate and vote that way as a single block and as seperate groups.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  > The current administration is from a party whose platform is as anti-labor as their opposition was under Woodrow Wilson Is that true? Increased tariffs, renegotiated trade deals (increased tariffs), attempting to tighten immigration, lowering taxes on repatriation of cash. Those are all pro worker.
  - andybak 6y ago
    Yes but all those things are also fairly safe in terms of his other demographics. Trump's brand of populism strikes me as being all about surface gestures. Has anything he's done for workers also disadvantaged his rich donors?
  - munk-a 6y ago
    It is true yes - though it's also true that recently both sides of the aisle have been anti-labor. The trade deal renegotiations didn't focus on or accomplish good changes to keep labour local and, while I'm not wholly against tariffs tax changes have wiped out any local investment motivations tariffs were supporting. Lastly, the repatriation of cash was a loss for everyone - companies that skirted tax laws got a gift in being able to reclaim a lot of cash they had been unable to access due to dodging taxes while also paying a much reduced rate... And I think that action happening again so soon is just a clear signal to companies to avoid actually bringing any money into the country until they can get a tax holiday to get it in for free - it's like your kid eating the cookie jar and you saying "Well, I'm going to dock your allowance thirty percent this week... And I will refill the cookie jar but don't do that again!" - we rewarded these companies for skirting tax laws by letting them skirt some more tax laws while wagging a finger and saying "Naughty naughty!"
    - linuxftw 6y ago
      > we rewarded these companies for skirting tax laws If it's legal, it's not skirting the law. > both sides of the aisle have been anti-labor No argument here. But if we're comparing the current administration to (recent) previous, it's an improvement.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
- maximente 6y ago
  actually, i wouldn't be surprised if trump tries to go left of biden in a few key areas if only to try to win the next election. i think he's under immense pressure due to mishandling the pandemic - he's not polling well at all, not that that means everything - and i suspect he's not above wildly shaking up policy in order to pick up votes, esp. in the critical swing states. his party isn't in a position to throw up a challenger so the Rs are stuck with him, from my point of view: if desperate enough, who knows what he'll try?
  - silverreads 6y ago
    Biden will stick with the party and it's "obligations" no matter what, so you've got a really good point here. Trump could punch low and swing left, where biden has no footing. Maybe maybe, this could catalyze a general republican swing to the far left?
    - orestarod 6y ago
      This sounds like a circus. Not saying that it's better anywhere else in essence, but in US politics the political words meanings have been absolutely butchered.
      - silverreads 6y ago
        I mean, is that out of character though? I was going to vote for bernie but if trump extends federally funded healthcare to everyone and abolishes private health insurance (which, as far as I know, wouldn't negatively impact his financial supporters as much as bidens), hell yeah I'd vote for him. One issue, done deal.

Pfhreak 6y ago

tl;dr: Email lists with 500+ people must be moderated and have a manager moderate them. (It's unclear if manager means 'manages employees' or 'manages email list'.) This seems pretty draconian to me, if it's true.

jimmaswell 6y ago
It would seem like a pretty clear-cut case if these managers denied messages talking about unionizing.
- willis936 6y ago
  "I'm sorry. Your message about labor rights does not fall in line with Amazon's mission and has been filtered." You wouldn't even need a human to do this.
  - jimmaswell 6y ago
    It would potentially be a slam-dunk lawsuit if it was that explicit.
jm4 6y ago
Not really. Big email lists like that generate tons of spam. What Amazon is doing is presumably to block unionization efforts, but, frankly, what's surprising is that they didn't have a control like this in place already. I work for a much smaller company than Amazon (without a chance of a union ever forming) and we don't let just anyone blast out emails to hundreds of people. We used to and it drove everyone nuts. People were selling their event tickets, giving traffic updates, offering up pets for adoption, etc. It's ridiculous. We had one list that was generating 100+ emails a day that were irrelevant to most of the people on the list. Every sizable list has an "owner" who controls access to send to the list. We have other channels like an area on the intranet where people can post these broadcast kinds of messages so it won't clog up people's inboxes. I thought most large companies did this.
- Pfhreak 6y ago

minimaxir 6y ago

Note: this was posted last week, and therefore not caused by a Amazon VP leaving (but perhaps could be partially a cause to the VP leaving)

floatingatoll 6y ago
Last week's post (2 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23024033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23024033

unethical_ban 6y ago

>The company told Recode that the moderation policy is not new but that Amazon has begun enforcement against lists that either weren't following the rules or had previously been granted exceptions after a "routine audit." An internal message to employees, obtained by Recode, said the change was to "minimize disruption to any business-critical email lists." "We have always had the rule ready, in case we needed to start enforcing it."

outside1234 6y ago

Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare.

aphextron 6y ago
>Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare. Money. Lots and lots of money. Amazon also operates at a scale unimaginable for most of us, which I imagine is enough of an interesting problem for some people to look past everything else.
- pacala 6y ago
  Therein lies the problem. As the machine scales larger and larger, the cogs at the bottom have worse and worse conditions. Almost as if 'software is eating the world' is not the key to unlock Utopia, as techno-optimists would have you believe.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    I think technology certainly is a key to a more 'Utopian' (desirable) society. The underlying problem is how we leverage the technology. If technology is simply used to displace and concentrate wealth and power through private ownership without adequately sharing the benefits of growth in technology with everyone (reduced labor, more free time to pursue personal goals, etc.) then yes, it absolutely isn't helping (basically the situation we have now). Can a Star Trek like economy ever exist? I'd love to be apart of one, but it seems unlikely given many underlying human behaviors.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    It was always that way. It used to be that nobility lived the good life at the expense of the peasants. Now we have replaced nobility with educated office workers. And the system is set up that if you are part of the top x percent you will never have to see how the bottom lives. They are well hidden.
    - pacala 6y ago

justanotherhn 6y ago

Does the top management at Amazon know this us ultimately a futile cause? What are they trying to do? Delay efforts until more on their delivery business is automated? If anyone has an idea please let me know.

adrianN 6y ago
The longer you delay the efforts the more profits you make in the meantime.
revicon 6y ago
What makes you think this is a futile cause? Union protections are at an all time low right now, it's likely they can continue suppressing employee organization if they kill lines of communication. Especially with the historic high unemployment rates hitting middle america right now.

WilliamEdward 6y ago

Amazon is interesting because there is a rift in the company; on one side you have upper middle class engineers, and on the other working class warehouse labourers. It's easy to dismiss union organisation coming from the former side, but the real tragedy is the thousands of workers working in dangerous conditions. They won't get their union.

euix 6y ago
Yea this something I realized recently with the VP guy leaving. As a upper-middle elitist working engineering/ML/management how do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance? I have been considering a career changing and one of the things is studying for interviews at the FAANGS and I have trouble working for the "man" as it is and this whole affair is just turning me off more.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  This isn't that hard: Just don't work for the evil ones! If their recruiters contact you, tell them why. There are plenty of non-evil companies that will pay you well to do interesting work. Even in your "FAANG" list, Netflix just makes entertaining videos. Apple makes pleasantly overpriced hardware and competes on privacy in software. Apply to them, instead of ad-tech and sweatshops-as-a-service.
  - wgerard 6y ago
    Just to play devil's advocate a little: You should look up some of the ethical issues around cobalt mining [1], which Apple is at least indirectly complicit in. Netflix famously made their culture documents transparent to much derision about their workplace being an unhealthy competitive environment. Relatedly, they're also arguably the most famous progenitor of the "unlimited-vacation-but-don't-actually-take-it-or-else" workplace cliche. 1: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/apple-and-google-named-in-us-lawsuit-over-congolese-child-cobalt-mining-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/a...

robrenaud 6y ago

A third party service that validates all members are part of a company/organization, and then allows anonymous postings viewable to just those validated members would be very useful, IMO. There is good reason to have these discussions in a place where Amazon's management is not in control.

boatski 6y ago
Blind pretty much does this now, but it's mostly people asking about pay. https://www.teamblind.com/ https://www.teamblind.com/
Jimpulse 6y ago
My company didn't have a large presence on there, but the app Blind seems to fit the bill.
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > Blind seems to fit the bill Blind is based in South Korea. (Disclosure: one of my parents is ethnically South Korean, and I have very high regard for South Korea and its citizens.) Given the stakes involved with workplace organizing and the opacity (from a legal perspective) of a South Korea-based business, Blind may not be the right platform. At the very least, some US workers may be reluctant to open up on a platform not subject to US labor law.
empath75 6y ago
Blind.
elicash 6y ago
What's needed isn't an anonymous app. Organizing your workplace involves risk, there's no way around that.

greendave 6y ago

Would be interesting to see a comparison of Amazon's tactics and Walmart's. Traditionally Walmart has gotten a lot of bad press for its working conditions and its destruction of small businesses across the US. Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny.

easytiger 6y ago
> Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny. Are you quite serious?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Scrutiny is probably the wrong word, but Amazon faces far less practical opposition compared to Walmart. With Walmart, people will both be mad at them and oppose their stores, warehouses, etc. With Amazon, anger stops at stage 1 usually.
- sct202 6y ago
  Walmart used to be in all these kinds of headlines if you look back across the last 10 years; shutting down sites that try to unionize, supplier pressure and mistreatment. Hilary Clinton got a lot of flack for being on their board during her presidential runs. Plus there's a class aspect (People of Walmart) that made it easy for people to proudly say they're boycotting Walmart when they would never shop there anyways.
josefresco 6y ago
> Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny This was true maybe 4-5 years ago when Amazon was the "darling" of the online retail industry. Those days are long gone.

redmattred 6y ago

Here is the page to cancel your Amazon Prime membership: https://www.amazon.com/mc/pipelines/cancellation https://www.amazon.com/mc/pipelines/cancellation

jordache 6y ago
i don't understand this movement. If there is a purity test, to gauge your alignment with the internal company rules associated with every goods + service you rely on, then there needs to be transparency across the entire world economic landscape. Why cherry pick? Just because media decided to bring it to your attention? So you canceled Amazon Prime, everything else in your life was produced by some other entity. Do you go insane because you haven't vetted those sources?
- claudeganon 6y ago
  No, you just take whatever action where you can, when you can, when it becomes clear that it is necessary.
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  What you are proposing is that if you see clear evidence that a company is behaving badly or counter to your beliefs you should take no action because other ones may also be? Whether or not you feel it applies specifically to this case, that doesn't make sense to me.
- staplers 6y ago
  Sets a precedence for future behavior. Not every murder gets solved, but the threat of consequence can influence things in the right direction.
- defnotashton2 6y ago
  I have a dream where customers need for transparency is the sole and adequate reason for companies to responsible provide and therefore abide by the current ethical standards.
- retrac 6y ago

mlcrypto 6y ago

To avoid PIP at Amazon you just gotta be more productive than the people on those internal discussion forums. And they wonder why they're getting pushed out. Leave the trolling for after work

danbolt 6y ago

Is It true that Amazon’s internal chat tool doesn’t have as much support for “fun chat” stuff like stickers and emoji? I’ve been hearing along the grapevine.

retrac 6y ago

Some comments here really had me scratching my head. Remember, it's not just engineers, code monkeys and managers at Amazon. The majority of their employees are unskilled labour. Warehouse workers and delivery drivers. An Amazon warehouse worker in Canada makes just a little more than minimum wage. Even if it might be a nice company to work for if you're in an office, it may be a very different reality for the majority of workers.

rochester46 6y ago
Canadian minimum wage is relatively high (and your statement is only true for Ontario, btw. In other parts of Canada, Amazon warehouse worker minimum pay is 150% minimum wage). When viewed through the lens of the reality that is the American workforce, things look very differently. In the US, Amazon warehouse workers make more than double the federal minimum wage. They make, at minimum, more than double the wage of an average McDonalds worker. They make more than Starbucks store workers, more than most construction workers. Even in Canada, Amazon warehouse workers make more than your average Tim Hortons worker. Warehouse workers also get the same health insurance that Amazon SWEs get, which is better health insurance by far than even most white-collar American workers have. >The majority of their employees are unskilled labour. Unskilled laborers getting double minimum wage and great benefits seems to me to be a good thing for society. It baffles me that people are trying to decry this.
- retrac 6y ago
  If that's the case and they're making ~$21 CAD an hour, then Amazon's American warehouse workers are paid considerably more than they are in Canada despite the US having a lower cost of living. At least in my local context, their behaviour doesn't seem to be something worth lauding. It's just another grueling underpaid warehouse job. With a union-busting employer.
  - forgotmylogin2 6y ago
    Then quit and find a job with better pay. My guess is most of them can't because they're already getting the market rate for unskilled labor.

toohotatopic 6y ago

Doesn't this show that the executive layer of Amazon isn't as clever as they appear? Employees can organize easily on Whatsapp or any other platform. In that case, Facebook has all the data and Amazon doesn't have any insight. Facebook then can hire any disgruntled but competent employee easily. The lock down also signals weakness and insecurity. Amazon pays at least market rates and people want to work there. In case of a strike, they can hire new people with no training because workers essentially shop all day, a skill that is ubiquitously available What do they fear?

rumanator 6y ago
> Employees can organize easily on Whatsapp or any other platform. That requires employees to sign up to a service and/or Chanel they don't subscribe, or try to jump-start communities from scratch. These actions are targeted at censoring pre-existing communities that are naturally and passively formed.
jm4 6y ago
I don't find that to be an entirely realistic scenario, but we can talk hypotheticals. As a company owner, I would welcome the opportunity for employees to quit as an alternative to unionizing. Having your problem quit for another job before you have to fire them is awesome. Having a competitor actively recruit your problem employees? That's killing two birds with one stone. You have to just laugh when it happens. It's great. As for discouraging unionizing via official company communication media, it probably has more to do with discovery and access than wanting to block the communication altogether. Of course they realize people can use Whatsapp, text, online forum, etc. The thing is there needs to be a way to discover a large community of workers on some other platform. That's much harder than going through a company directory or blasting out emails to entire divisions. They don't want to provide easy discovery and access to people who would potentially join a union.

nimbius 6y ago

As a former member of the local 701 and a current member of a union, keep fighting. You start seeing this stuff when the company knows theres a good chance you'll get a union if you want one. I once had all of my lunches turned into safety briefings with some slimeball in a suit lecturing us on the evils of unions for an hour. This prevented us from discussing unions favorably during our only time off during the day, so we decided to start an after-work club at the local pool hall. Less propaganda, more beer and real talk. Try taking your messages out of the office. Find some place the boss doesnt control and believe me, this will help a lot. You're still going to get flyers, phone calls, letters, and even doorstep visitors if you push for a union but just remember: its all bullshit at this point. Remember why you wanted to do this, and keep a running list of issues the company has not addressed. Remember: a union gives you fair bargaining for anything else you want or need for the company to succeed and you to do your job in the future as well. Some of the handouts now might seem generous but believe me, if you back down, the company will fire absolutely everyone they can identify as an organizer that hasnt been let go up till now.

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seemslegit 6y ago

That's why every workplace should have an off-company mailing list / forum / group. Yes even your very employee-friendly workplace with image boards that would never stoop to those kind of tactics.

crazygringo 6y ago

> Internal listservs with more than 500 participants are now required to move to a moderated model where a manager must approve any content before its distribution, according to emails obtained by Recode. Google did a similar thing in November [1]. This is starting to feel like a trend for tech companies reaching a certain level of size/maturity. Now this may be a contrarian opinion, but I actually think this has the potential to be a good thing if you're on the side of workers. Here's why. If you're organizing a union, trying to reveal "evil" projects, or otherwise trying to be a force for good in the company, as long as you're doing it on internal message boards everyone's still halfway-careful of what they say, and big movements/protests are less likely to happen. But by shutting them down or forcibly moderating them, that will hopefully be enough of an impetus for employees to start using third-party forums, where they can "approve" each other through invites, and everyone can speak and organize freely (and with more anonymity if desired) and accomplish perhaps far more than they have so far. As political scientists know, repression of citizens brings short-term stability at the cost of an increased long-term threat. Obviously you can't know for sure... but this feels like the kind of thing that's going to backfire for Amazon (and Google), leading to more and stronger union organization, not less. [1] https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/googles-new-internal-rules-take-hold-employees-complain-of-censorship/1753015/ https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/googles...

floatingatoll 6y ago

The original article by Recode contains more information than the Ars reblog of it: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/29/21240049/amazon-internal-corporate-employee-backlash-email-listservs-worker-activism-coronavirus https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/29/21240049/amazon-interna...

dang 6y ago
Changed now. Thanks!

dang 6y ago

Url changed from https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/amazon-locks-down-internal-employee-communications-amid-organizing-efforts/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/amazon-locks-dow..., which points to this.

kevlar1818 6y ago

@dang + HN moderators: Why did you change my link? I originally linked to the ArsTechnica article. And why was it removed from the front page?

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071016
- kevlar1818 6y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. I dislike this moderation strategy, but I'll respect it.

coronaboi 6y ago

Don’t understand what the fuss is about. To continue their discussions, Can’t these employees get on a service like Blind? Yes, amazon throttling such behaviour is questionable, but why bitch and moan about not being able to use a company resource when there’s something like Blind available?