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"Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of

by Grimm1 6y ago

"Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of the application process for applying to warehouse jobs" How does this match the title of the piece. Then, "So I imagine that in the U.S., they're tracking labor organizing activity but not union members yet." So they have no proof and this is all speculation. Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here. Amazon used some people to catch people cheesing their job application process and then because the US doesn't have strong unions and they know they look at labor stats for people joining Unions this "journalist" has extrapolated they are definitely "surveiling" people. This is really low quality. Edit: I'm fine with the allegations being true, the point I'm making is this isn't the article that we should be discussing because it's lazy journalism -- another poster below me linked much more well thought out and written posts on the subject being discussed by this article.

badRNG 6y ago
Leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements. [1] This isn't "speculation" or "poor journalism", it is an assessment that exists within the context of a company that has been aggressively anti-union for years, for which employees are trained to rat out union organizers,[2] and, of course, in light of their retention of Pinkertons to infiltrate employee Facebook groups dedicated to organizing. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports... [2] https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-revealed-in-leake-1829305201 https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-re...
- Grimm1 6y ago
  Fine but you had to use alternative sources to get that information. This particular piece is trash because it didn't go get those leaked documents and then discuss them in depth like the vice link. That is real investigative journalism. This linked piece speculated the entire way through. This should be dropped from the front page and we should be discussing the vice or gizmodo article which actually put in the work to go through the allegations.
  - badRNG 6y ago
    The linked article is an interview with the journalist who leaked the documents discussed in the Vice and Gizmodo articles. I think this story is intended to be a continuation of the discussion on the original story.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      Okay that is not particularly clear to me from the article and it's doing a disservice to the overall discussion then, imo. They should at least be linking to the original articles then to give context on that fact.
      - badRNG 6y ago
        You may be right about that. The reason I went looking for the Vice article in the first place was due to what was said in the first paragraph of the article: >According to documents, Amazon reportedly runs a surveillance program to track activism among its workers. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Lauren Gurley of Motherboard magazine, who broke the story.
        Grimm1 6y ago
        I'll fully admit I gloss right over the names of journalists typically in favor of reading the content of the article, though had I read that I still would have had to search for the story much like you did. I can take two things away here, I should slow down when reading an article and this article should still be more obvious about the work they're discussing.
piokoch 6y ago
Amazon had all kinds of issues in Poland. They were paying so badly at the beginning that many people who applied for the job were former convicts. Some of them took advantage of the opportunity and start steeling stuff from packages (inventing ingenious methods of smuggling them outside in the process). This was a plague at some point. Eventually thiefs were caught and fired. But then they applied for the job again through agency and came back (Agency was an employer, not Amazon, so, probably Amazon did not have enough data to check who i who). The fact that Amazon needs to employ top notch investigators is in itself rather hilarious. Those super agents are chasing people who earn about $610 a month (minus taxes).
- Grimm1 6y ago
  Sure I don't really care about that though, I care that this piece is a really bad representation of journalism and the fact that it's on the front page instead of better researched and fielded pieces two of which have been linked in a sub comment here from another poster are not.
josefx 6y ago
> How does this match the title of the piece. Read again: > > It involves collecting data, it seems, from Facebook groups, from social media. In some cases in the case of the Pinkertons, there is a line in one of the documents that we've obtained that says that Pinkerton operatives were inserted into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to gather intelligence on what their warehouse workers were up to. The Pinkerton case seems to be one case out of several mentioned in the papers and while the stated reason is to sniff out the application process even that is in direct conflict with official statements by Amazon. > So they have no proof and this is all speculation. They list a few points they know about right before the line you quoted. > Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here. Still a lot better than the copy pasted Amazon press releases after it lost the lawsuit in France. Those were pure fiction with Bezos in the role of the poor abused Emperor Palpatine.

by Grimm1 6y ago

badRNG 6y ago

Leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements. [1] This isn't "speculation" or "poor journalism", it is an assessment that exists within the context of a company that has been aggressively anti-union for years, for which employees are trained to rat out union organizers,[2] and, of course, in light of their retention of Pinkertons to infiltrate employee Facebook groups dedicated to organizing. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports... [2] https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-revealed-in-leake-1829305201 https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-re...

Grimm1 6y ago
Fine but you had to use alternative sources to get that information. This particular piece is trash because it didn't go get those leaked documents and then discuss them in depth like the vice link. That is real investigative journalism. This linked piece speculated the entire way through. This should be dropped from the front page and we should be discussing the vice or gizmodo article which actually put in the work to go through the allegations.
- badRNG 6y ago
  The linked article is an interview with the journalist who leaked the documents discussed in the Vice and Gizmodo articles. I think this story is intended to be a continuation of the discussion on the original story.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    Okay that is not particularly clear to me from the article and it's doing a disservice to the overall discussion then, imo. They should at least be linking to the original articles then to give context on that fact.
    - badRNG 6y ago
      You may be right about that. The reason I went looking for the Vice article in the first place was due to what was said in the first paragraph of the article: >According to documents, Amazon reportedly runs a surveillance program to track activism among its workers. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Lauren Gurley of Motherboard magazine, who broke the story.
      - Grimm1 6y ago
        I'll fully admit I gloss right over the names of journalists typically in favor of reading the content of the article, though had I read that I still would have had to search for the story much like you did. I can take two things away here, I should slow down when reading an article and this article should still be more obvious about the work they're discussing.

piokoch 6y ago

Amazon had all kinds of issues in Poland. They were paying so badly at the beginning that many people who applied for the job were former convicts. Some of them took advantage of the opportunity and start steeling stuff from packages (inventing ingenious methods of smuggling them outside in the process). This was a plague at some point. Eventually thiefs were caught and fired. But then they applied for the job again through agency and came back (Agency was an employer, not Amazon, so, probably Amazon did not have enough data to check who i who). The fact that Amazon needs to employ top notch investigators is in itself rather hilarious. Those super agents are chasing people who earn about $610 a month (minus taxes).

Grimm1 6y ago
Sure I don't really care about that though, I care that this piece is a really bad representation of journalism and the fact that it's on the front page instead of better researched and fielded pieces two of which have been linked in a sub comment here from another poster are not.

josefx 6y ago

> How does this match the title of the piece. Read again: > > It involves collecting data, it seems, from Facebook groups, from social media. In some cases in the case of the Pinkertons, there is a line in one of the documents that we've obtained that says that Pinkerton operatives were inserted into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to gather intelligence on what their warehouse workers were up to. The Pinkerton case seems to be one case out of several mentioned in the papers and while the stated reason is to sniff out the application process even that is in direct conflict with official statements by Amazon. > So they have no proof and this is all speculation. They list a few points they know about right before the line you quoted. > Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here. Still a lot better than the copy pasted Amazon press releases after it lost the lawsuit in France. Those were pure fiction with Bezos in the role of the poor abused Emperor Palpatine.