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Like unions or not, the contracts they have were arrived at over decades of negotiations between companies and employees. So while many will bemoan that unions

by dwater 5y ago

Like unions or not, the contracts they have were arrived at over decades of negotiations between companies and employees. So while many will bemoan that unions make it impossible to fire bad employees, the purpose of those provisions is to make sure that companies aren't firing workers without cause, or because of the companies' own fault, as appears to be the case here. Amazon may have stopped most of its employee unionization efforts so far, but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive class action lawsuit to me, and it almost certainly wouldn't have happened if these employees had the bargaining power of a group.

sneak 5y ago
What's wrong with firing employees without cause? A business relationship like employment is by mutual consent. Either party can opt out at any time. I'm not sure this is something that needs fixing. You seem to feel differently. What am I missing?
- hobs 5y ago
  Empathy for other human beings who will have negative outcomes if for pointless reasons their employment is turned off by a computer.
  - sneak 5y ago
    What empathy? Why would anyone want to continue in a business relationship where the other party doesn't want to? There are tons of places hiring right now; Amazon isn't the only game in town for labor.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - alo45 5y ago
      Because you’re talking about people who don’t have extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on their purpose as a class on HN? This comment is extremely tone deaf and betrays why this industry is fundamentally flawed when it comes to human factors. Engineers and product leads building these systems have simply never experienced the other end of the table, and then reduce the equation to a “business relationship” just like you’re doing here. I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense. I don’t know, call me crazy, European, idealistic, whatever, but putting a human in the loop to say “eh, that’s a bad call” isn’t a lot to ask nor the demise of capitalism. If a human being double checking and delivering bad news is the only thing holding the economy back from grand designs of glorious, automated scale, I’d prefer another economy that pays more attention to its purpose - which is the sustenance of humans, not the concentration of wealth based on flagrant disregard for the welfare of people it serves. I like the way Sorkin put it: “we used to wage war on poverty, not poor people,” and I think your initial question about empathy illuminates much of that sentiment.
      - sneak 5y ago
        > Because you’re talking about people who don’t have extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on their purpose as a class on HN? This strikes me as ad hominem; I'm talking about standard unskilled workers. Anyone who doesn't have enough savings on hand to buy food and shelter for the short period of time while switching jobs in one of the best labor markets for workers that our generation has ever seen is simply irresponsible. There are so many unfilled jobs right now. > I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense Oh, come on. We're talking about consent to a business transaction between human beings here, obviously. Please do try to comment in good faith.
        alo45 5y ago
        Seriously, though, what the fuck is a “standard unskilled worker?” Did that sound like anything but a reductive take on people less privileged than you in your head? At the least it’s a further elimination of empathy and human factors from your point. I didn’t think there was much left to discard, but here we are, with the lower social strata in an Excel column. Luckily for us, I’m not debating you and need not concern myself with whatever you’d like to call the argument. I’m simply appealing to whatever sliver of empathy you have to consider that just maybe firing someone with a batch job is a good place to think about an ethical line. I didn’t even advocate to draw one, just introduced nuance to think about as a counterweight to your extraordinarily simplistic view of labor and its role in society. If you can’t meet me even there and instead take an opportunity to call people who just might starve to death on the other end of such an experience “irresponsible,” based on ostensibly a distant understanding of finance and employment for lower social classes, we are not going to agree on anything. The ad hominem would be noting that from your views it reads like you have next to no experience with the financial circumstances you’re discussing, which given the topic seems an interesting but unnecessarily personal observation. If these comments are in bad faith in this forum then I have absolutely no interest in baptizing my views. Honestly, I’d be curious how your interview at Dominos would go. I’m not being snide. You should take a break from this line of work and go after the so many unfilled jobs you’re talking about for a while, because I think it would refine your viewpoint on this (speaking from personal experience). You know how one can interview for a cybersec gig and disclose that they were fired once for some bullshit and everyone shares a good laugh about the story while cutting an offer letter? That doesn’t happen at Dominos.
    - pope_meat 5y ago
      You do have to admit, Amazon has reduced the number of options you can have for employment. Last I checked, toys r us ain't hiring, cause Amazon ships the toys now.
      - jcpham2 5y ago
        Walmart delivers groceries to my door and lets me tip the driver in the app, have they similarly limited employment opportunities or do they expand them? I’m not sure at this point, both are horrible corporations I’ve resisted as long as I can can, yet both regularly siphon money from my checking account.
      - Noos 5y ago
        It wasn't Amazon's fault; Toy stores had been declining well before it, with companies like KB toys going defunct in 2009. In general what was happening was that it was much harder for retail speciality stores and small chains to compete with Wal-mart and other megastores, and the market seemed to collapse. A tremendous amount of retail just died in the 2000s, with only a few survivors. Either folding, or being bought out and merging with other companies that folded.
        alo45 5y ago
        That’s a lot like saying it was the patient’s underlying cancer that ultimately killed her, not the pillow held over her face by an overly ambitious family member eyeing the lucrative estate she would leave behind. Amazon accelerated what you describe in every quantifiable way and it was undoubtedly baked into the overall strategy. Yes, the situation was already terminal thanks to the Internet and poor online shopping execution by the incumbents, including Walmart, but overlooking Amazon’s involvement (going so far as to call it not their fault) and pointing at Walmart as the disease itself is a tiny bit of revisionism. Am I the only one old enough to remember discussions in older forums like these about how brilliant Bezos was to identify and exploit such a now-obvious opportunity? It was obvious then to the point of being damned near Amazon’s entire thesis.
        5y ago
    - jvolkman 5y ago
      Are you looking for hypotheticals? Maybe a person has no financial safety net and has a sick family member at home that requires all of their time outside of work, leaving none for a job search.
    - birdyrooster 5y ago
      lol your life is so privileged that you don't realize it
    - alex_c 5y ago
      >What empathy? Feels like this sums up so much of our world, it's scary. Anyway. Main issue is with "mutual consent", or more specifically, negotiating power. A contract negotiated between two parties with similar amounts of power will have terms that protect both sides. These will often define things like advance notice for cancellation, or penalties for early cancellation. The paying party usually wants the most flexibility for cancellation, the counterparty wants certainty of revenue, so a balance is found. Assuming everyone did their work, both sides should be reasonably happy with the terms of the contract. A negotiation between a large corporation and an individual (low-level) employee is not really a negotiation, the individual employee can only accept or reject the corporation's offer but they cannot typically negotiate specific parts of the contract. Individually, they have no leverage. If they decline the offer and move on to the next company, they don't have any more negotiating power over there either. Let's also talk about BATNA a bit here. BATNA for a company: they just hire the next person that comes along, still with the terms dictated by the company. BATNA for an employee: accept an offer somewhere else (again with the terms dictated by the company), or starve. So what can an individual employee do to get more leverage and get an outcome closer to a "mutual consent" contract? Well, the obvious option is to coordinate their negotiation with others who also have low individual negotiating power but share similar interests. Combined, they should have a lot more leverage. We could call this negotiating process "collective bargaining", and the group of individuals a "union".
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        The market-driven counter to this is that if companies don't offer terms that employees agree to, they won't be able to get any employees and therefore over time, in the aggregate, they will move towards outcomes similar to what would be achieved in a mutual consent arrangement, without the need for unions. Of course if that was correct we likely would not have seen the rise of unions in the first place because things would simply have adjusted over the many decades if industrial revolution leading up to wide scale establishment of labor unions. When it comes down to being able to survive, people will accept the terms they're given. They don't have the luxury of waiting for a "market correction" on labor rates and benefits. Open markets can find efficient solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, much like waiting for evolution to find a solution for a problem, it doesn't always happen at a time scale suitable for human lifetimes.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Why would anyone want to continue in a business relationship where the other party doesn't want to? Because people arrange their lives around their work situation and it can be significantly damaging to them to lose their jobs due to a bad manager or, as in this post's example, a flawed algorithm.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      This shows a distinct lack of understanding of how crappy it can be when you're poor. It takes awhile for a new job to cut that first check. In America, usually around a month. That month can be insanely scary with no money and mouths to feed.
      - sneak 5y ago
        That's why welfare, food assistance programs, and unemployment exist. Amazon (and every other employer) pays in to those programs by law when employing people.
        bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        Hah, is this naivete, or just obtuseness? And the CEOs or their lobbyists go to state and federal capitols to lobby for destruction of these programs, or "donate" to politicians' election campaigns with "wink wink, you know what we want."...
        imwillofficial 5y ago
        These programs also take awhile to get money into the account. For the poor, losing a job arbitrarily, with no protections, even cultural, can be massively life disrupting.
  - nxmnxm99 5y ago
    Give severance? If a person is getting fired they're obviously not a net positive to their manager, so why would you want to protect them
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      You are assuming they are being terminated after a correct assessment if their value. Good employees still get fired. Managers can be wrong, or play office politics.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      You say "obvious", but in the real world, the lines of net positive or negative have more inputs than that. Adding an algorithm to the mix that may or may not be operating correctly is not a human way to operate. In civilization, we make affordances for people that go against the razors edge of pure efficiency.
    - amznthrwaway 5y ago
      Tell me you’re a naive and idealistic capitalist without telling me that you’re a naive and idealistic capitalist.
- notyourwork 5y ago
  I'm not sure but was always under the impression at-will employment is essentially that. The employer and employee maintain an agreement that either party can terminate at any point in time. Is that not the right interpretation of at-will employment?
- woodruffw 5y ago
  At-will employment is the exception, not the rule, in most of the developed world. It's really only the US that allows employers to unilaterally terminate their employees, and there's ample evidence that companies use it as plausible cover for all sorts of actions that would be illegal (discrimination against protected groups). That, in my book, is indeed something that needs fixing. But even beyond plausible discrimination: mutual consent is least ambiguous when there's mutual and equal power. No such balance exists in the employer-employed relationship: employees are de facto dependent on their employers for their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.
  - mc32 5y ago
    You're only looking at it from one side. What if I want to quit? If I can't be fired, then the complement to that would be I cannot quit. There needs to be a balance where I can quit the company and the company can quit me but where companies don't abuse the system (ex Amazon in this example). I don't think there is a great solution, other than a command economy (but there you are not quite free to change "companies" either).
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      Of course you can quit. The power imbalance is mitigated in other countries by making it hard to terminate without cause and on the other side you will have to give more notice when you quit. In Germany when I lived there it wasn't uncommon to have a contract that let you quit your job with 3 months notice or even 3 months from the beginning of the next quarter, things like that. Sure that's inconvenient for some but it's a good trade-off for others.
      - unicornfinder 5y ago
        Indeed and it's worth mentioning that when every job has that sort of notice period it's less of an issue than you might think. Not to mention there's always room for negotiation with these things.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
- jhgb 5y ago
  > What's wrong with firing employees without cause? For starters, the unequal status of corporations and their employees?
- ineedasername 5y ago
  They're not employees, they're contractors. Meaning the relationship is governed by a contract. If a system that Amazon knows to be flawed is being used to terminate contracts incorrectly then it is a contractual issue. Contract law requires good faith execution of the contract. It is not good faith to terminate contracts using a known bad system.
- croes 5y ago
  Ever tried to cancel your phone contract? Cancelation at anytime is the exception not the norm. Same with most contracts, they all have notice periods. >What am I missing? People have obligations like rent, health insurance, school fees. They have families and children, so a minimum of planning is important. Everything else is inhumane.
  - sneak 5y ago
    My phone, gym, food, housing, electric, gas, water, internet, and insurance are all month-to-month. As are my customers. It's a person's responsibility to plan for job loss.
    - croes 5y ago
      So the notice period is up to 30 days.
- TX0098812 5y ago
  > A business relationship like employment is by mutual consent. This is a childish fantasy.
- DannyBee 5y ago
  So, for starters, what is described in the article (and maybe even the post your responded to) is not really a termination without cause, it is a termination for cause. If you have a policy you require of your employees("You must take a picture of yourself"), and you terminate the employee for not doing it, that is not a without-cause termination. That is a termination for-cause - the cause being the violation of the policy. Termination without cause would basically be "we are downsizing, you are no longer needed". The rules about "without-cause" are pretty consistent state to state. However, the rules on "with cause" vary state to state. In a lot of states, you can't terminate someone for violating a policy if they didn't violate it. These policies are a form of "implied contract". In other states, the employer can act completely and totally arbitrarily, as long as it is not acting illegally. This is actually the minority of states. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
gruez 5y ago
>but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive class action lawsuit to me On what basis? Aren't they contractors? Do contractors get protections against arbitrary "firings"?
- tyingq 5y ago
  Amazon says they are contractors. The US government (some US States as well) has been pushing pretty hard on that view recently.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Contractors get protections afforded under established contract law and principals of executing a contract in good faith. If Amazon has built a system that they know to be inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed then they are violating the terms of the contract.
  - gruez 5y ago
    So let's say I have a startup that uses 10 different SaaS providers. Suppose I decided one day to randomly pick one SaaS provider and stop using them. That sounds "inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed" to me. Would that get me in trouble?
    - mister_tee 5y ago
      Not the same thing as contracting employees, especially in the eyes of the government. Plus cancellation terms are likely codified in terms of the license agreement.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Depends on the terms of the contract. Contracts must be executed in good faith. That is the law. If you with your SaaS vendors or Amazon with its Flex workers isn't conforming to that part of the law then there is the potential for legal liability.
      - 5y ago

by dwater 5y ago

sneak 5y ago

What's wrong with firing employees without cause? A business relationship like employment is by mutual consent. Either party can opt out at any time. I'm not sure this is something that needs fixing. You seem to feel differently. What am I missing?

hobs 5y ago
Empathy for other human beings who will have negative outcomes if for pointless reasons their employment is turned off by a computer.
- sneak 5y ago
  What empathy? Why would anyone want to continue in a business relationship where the other party doesn't want to? There are tons of places hiring right now; Amazon isn't the only game in town for labor.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - alo45 5y ago
    Because you’re talking about people who don’t have extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on their purpose as a class on HN? This comment is extremely tone deaf and betrays why this industry is fundamentally flawed when it comes to human factors. Engineers and product leads building these systems have simply never experienced the other end of the table, and then reduce the equation to a “business relationship” just like you’re doing here. I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense. I don’t know, call me crazy, European, idealistic, whatever, but putting a human in the loop to say “eh, that’s a bad call” isn’t a lot to ask nor the demise of capitalism. If a human being double checking and delivering bad news is the only thing holding the economy back from grand designs of glorious, automated scale, I’d prefer another economy that pays more attention to its purpose - which is the sustenance of humans, not the concentration of wealth based on flagrant disregard for the welfare of people it serves. I like the way Sorkin put it: “we used to wage war on poverty, not poor people,” and I think your initial question about empathy illuminates much of that sentiment.
    - sneak 5y ago
      > Because you’re talking about people who don’t have extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on their purpose as a class on HN? This strikes me as ad hominem; I'm talking about standard unskilled workers. Anyone who doesn't have enough savings on hand to buy food and shelter for the short period of time while switching jobs in one of the best labor markets for workers that our generation has ever seen is simply irresponsible. There are so many unfilled jobs right now. > I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense Oh, come on. We're talking about consent to a business transaction between human beings here, obviously. Please do try to comment in good faith.
      - alo45 5y ago
        Seriously, though, what the fuck is a “standard unskilled worker?” Did that sound like anything but a reductive take on people less privileged than you in your head? At the least it’s a further elimination of empathy and human factors from your point. I didn’t think there was much left to discard, but here we are, with the lower social strata in an Excel column. Luckily for us, I’m not debating you and need not concern myself with whatever you’d like to call the argument. I’m simply appealing to whatever sliver of empathy you have to consider that just maybe firing someone with a batch job is a good place to think about an ethical line. I didn’t even advocate to draw one, just introduced nuance to think about as a counterweight to your extraordinarily simplistic view of labor and its role in society. If you can’t meet me even there and instead take an opportunity to call people who just might starve to death on the other end of such an experience “irresponsible,” based on ostensibly a distant understanding of finance and employment for lower social classes, we are not going to agree on anything. The ad hominem would be noting that from your views it reads like you have next to no experience with the financial circumstances you’re discussing, which given the topic seems an interesting but unnecessarily personal observation. If these comments are in bad faith in this forum then I have absolutely no interest in baptizing my views. Honestly, I’d be curious how your interview at Dominos would go. I’m not being snide. You should take a break from this line of work and go after the so many unfilled jobs you’re talking about for a while, because I think it would refine your viewpoint on this (speaking from personal experience). You know how one can interview for a cybersec gig and disclose that they were fired once for some bullshit and everyone shares a good laugh about the story while cutting an offer letter? That doesn’t happen at Dominos.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    You do have to admit, Amazon has reduced the number of options you can have for employment. Last I checked, toys r us ain't hiring, cause Amazon ships the toys now.
    - jcpham2 5y ago
      Walmart delivers groceries to my door and lets me tip the driver in the app, have they similarly limited employment opportunities or do they expand them? I’m not sure at this point, both are horrible corporations I’ve resisted as long as I can can, yet both regularly siphon money from my checking account.
    - Noos 5y ago
      It wasn't Amazon's fault; Toy stores had been declining well before it, with companies like KB toys going defunct in 2009. In general what was happening was that it was much harder for retail speciality stores and small chains to compete with Wal-mart and other megastores, and the market seemed to collapse. A tremendous amount of retail just died in the 2000s, with only a few survivors. Either folding, or being bought out and merging with other companies that folded.
      - alo45 5y ago
        That’s a lot like saying it was the patient’s underlying cancer that ultimately killed her, not the pillow held over her face by an overly ambitious family member eyeing the lucrative estate she would leave behind. Amazon accelerated what you describe in every quantifiable way and it was undoubtedly baked into the overall strategy. Yes, the situation was already terminal thanks to the Internet and poor online shopping execution by the incumbents, including Walmart, but overlooking Amazon’s involvement (going so far as to call it not their fault) and pointing at Walmart as the disease itself is a tiny bit of revisionism. Am I the only one old enough to remember discussions in older forums like these about how brilliant Bezos was to identify and exploit such a now-obvious opportunity? It was obvious then to the point of being damned near Amazon’s entire thesis.
        5y ago
  - jvolkman 5y ago
    Are you looking for hypotheticals? Maybe a person has no financial safety net and has a sick family member at home that requires all of their time outside of work, leaving none for a job search.
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    lol your life is so privileged that you don't realize it
  - alex_c 5y ago
    >What empathy? Feels like this sums up so much of our world, it's scary. Anyway. Main issue is with "mutual consent", or more specifically, negotiating power. A contract negotiated between two parties with similar amounts of power will have terms that protect both sides. These will often define things like advance notice for cancellation, or penalties for early cancellation. The paying party usually wants the most flexibility for cancellation, the counterparty wants certainty of revenue, so a balance is found. Assuming everyone did their work, both sides should be reasonably happy with the terms of the contract. A negotiation between a large corporation and an individual (low-level) employee is not really a negotiation, the individual employee can only accept or reject the corporation's offer but they cannot typically negotiate specific parts of the contract. Individually, they have no leverage. If they decline the offer and move on to the next company, they don't have any more negotiating power over there either. Let's also talk about BATNA a bit here. BATNA for a company: they just hire the next person that comes along, still with the terms dictated by the company. BATNA for an employee: accept an offer somewhere else (again with the terms dictated by the company), or starve. So what can an individual employee do to get more leverage and get an outcome closer to a "mutual consent" contract? Well, the obvious option is to coordinate their negotiation with others who also have low individual negotiating power but share similar interests. Combined, they should have a lot more leverage. We could call this negotiating process "collective bargaining", and the group of individuals a "union".
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      The market-driven counter to this is that if companies don't offer terms that employees agree to, they won't be able to get any employees and therefore over time, in the aggregate, they will move towards outcomes similar to what would be achieved in a mutual consent arrangement, without the need for unions. Of course if that was correct we likely would not have seen the rise of unions in the first place because things would simply have adjusted over the many decades if industrial revolution leading up to wide scale establishment of labor unions. When it comes down to being able to survive, people will accept the terms they're given. They don't have the luxury of waiting for a "market correction" on labor rates and benefits. Open markets can find efficient solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, much like waiting for evolution to find a solution for a problem, it doesn't always happen at a time scale suitable for human lifetimes.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Why would anyone want to continue in a business relationship where the other party doesn't want to? Because people arrange their lives around their work situation and it can be significantly damaging to them to lose their jobs due to a bad manager or, as in this post's example, a flawed algorithm.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    This shows a distinct lack of understanding of how crappy it can be when you're poor. It takes awhile for a new job to cut that first check. In America, usually around a month. That month can be insanely scary with no money and mouths to feed.
    - sneak 5y ago
      That's why welfare, food assistance programs, and unemployment exist. Amazon (and every other employer) pays in to those programs by law when employing people.
      - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        Hah, is this naivete, or just obtuseness? And the CEOs or their lobbyists go to state and federal capitols to lobby for destruction of these programs, or "donate" to politicians' election campaigns with "wink wink, you know what we want."...
      - imwillofficial 5y ago
        These programs also take awhile to get money into the account. For the poor, losing a job arbitrarily, with no protections, even cultural, can be massively life disrupting.
- nxmnxm99 5y ago
  Give severance? If a person is getting fired they're obviously not a net positive to their manager, so why would you want to protect them
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    You are assuming they are being terminated after a correct assessment if their value. Good employees still get fired. Managers can be wrong, or play office politics.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    You say "obvious", but in the real world, the lines of net positive or negative have more inputs than that. Adding an algorithm to the mix that may or may not be operating correctly is not a human way to operate. In civilization, we make affordances for people that go against the razors edge of pure efficiency.
  - amznthrwaway 5y ago
    Tell me you’re a naive and idealistic capitalist without telling me that you’re a naive and idealistic capitalist.
notyourwork 5y ago
I'm not sure but was always under the impression at-will employment is essentially that. The employer and employee maintain an agreement that either party can terminate at any point in time. Is that not the right interpretation of at-will employment?
woodruffw 5y ago
At-will employment is the exception, not the rule, in most of the developed world. It's really only the US that allows employers to unilaterally terminate their employees, and there's ample evidence that companies use it as plausible cover for all sorts of actions that would be illegal (discrimination against protected groups). That, in my book, is indeed something that needs fixing. But even beyond plausible discrimination: mutual consent is least ambiguous when there's mutual and equal power. No such balance exists in the employer-employed relationship: employees are de facto dependent on their employers for their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.
- mc32 5y ago
  You're only looking at it from one side. What if I want to quit? If I can't be fired, then the complement to that would be I cannot quit. There needs to be a balance where I can quit the company and the company can quit me but where companies don't abuse the system (ex Amazon in this example). I don't think there is a great solution, other than a command economy (but there you are not quite free to change "companies" either).
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    Of course you can quit. The power imbalance is mitigated in other countries by making it hard to terminate without cause and on the other side you will have to give more notice when you quit. In Germany when I lived there it wasn't uncommon to have a contract that let you quit your job with 3 months notice or even 3 months from the beginning of the next quarter, things like that. Sure that's inconvenient for some but it's a good trade-off for others.
    - unicornfinder 5y ago
      Indeed and it's worth mentioning that when every job has that sort of notice period it's less of an issue than you might think. Not to mention there's always room for negotiation with these things.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
jhgb 5y ago
> What's wrong with firing employees without cause? For starters, the unequal status of corporations and their employees?
ineedasername 5y ago
They're not employees, they're contractors. Meaning the relationship is governed by a contract. If a system that Amazon knows to be flawed is being used to terminate contracts incorrectly then it is a contractual issue. Contract law requires good faith execution of the contract. It is not good faith to terminate contracts using a known bad system.
croes 5y ago
Ever tried to cancel your phone contract? Cancelation at anytime is the exception not the norm. Same with most contracts, they all have notice periods. >What am I missing? People have obligations like rent, health insurance, school fees. They have families and children, so a minimum of planning is important. Everything else is inhumane.
- sneak 5y ago
  My phone, gym, food, housing, electric, gas, water, internet, and insurance are all month-to-month. As are my customers. It's a person's responsibility to plan for job loss.
  - croes 5y ago
    So the notice period is up to 30 days.
TX0098812 5y ago
> A business relationship like employment is by mutual consent. This is a childish fantasy.
DannyBee 5y ago
So, for starters, what is described in the article (and maybe even the post your responded to) is not really a termination without cause, it is a termination for cause. If you have a policy you require of your employees("You must take a picture of yourself"), and you terminate the employee for not doing it, that is not a without-cause termination. That is a termination for-cause - the cause being the violation of the policy. Termination without cause would basically be "we are downsizing, you are no longer needed". The rules about "without-cause" are pretty consistent state to state. However, the rules on "with cause" vary state to state. In a lot of states, you can't terminate someone for violating a policy if they didn't violate it. These policies are a form of "implied contract". In other states, the employer can act completely and totally arbitrarily, as long as it is not acting illegally. This is actually the minority of states. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

gruez 5y ago

>but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive class action lawsuit to me On what basis? Aren't they contractors? Do contractors get protections against arbitrary "firings"?

tyingq 5y ago
Amazon says they are contractors. The US government (some US States as well) has been pushing pretty hard on that view recently.
ineedasername 5y ago
Contractors get protections afforded under established contract law and principals of executing a contract in good faith. If Amazon has built a system that they know to be inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed then they are violating the terms of the contract.
- gruez 5y ago
  So let's say I have a startup that uses 10 different SaaS providers. Suppose I decided one day to randomly pick one SaaS provider and stop using them. That sounds "inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed" to me. Would that get me in trouble?
  - mister_tee 5y ago
    Not the same thing as contracting employees, especially in the eyes of the government. Plus cancellation terms are likely codified in terms of the license agreement.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Depends on the terms of the contract. Contracts must be executed in good faith. That is the law. If you with your SaaS vendors or Amazon with its Flex workers isn't conforming to that part of the law then there is the potential for legal liability.
    - 5y ago