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Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”
- FpUser 5y ago>"in which employees are awarded virtual stars and badges for activities that “add direct business value,”" Sure, sure. I'll take your virtual crap in exchange for my virtual work. Well fuck you Amazon.
- sbinthree 5y agoWhatever the corporate equivalent is of a late stage authoritarian dictatorship.
- thrwaway9871 5y ago"Algorithms"
- umeshunni 5y ago"Suppressing hate speech"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- scarmig 5y agoSo much of what we call "capitalism" is just creating authoritarian planned economies in the miniature and shrugging our shoulders and saying that it's all "private" so rights like free speech don't apply. And both factions of the elite who run the country like it that way.
- awb 5y ago> shrugging our shoulders and saying that it's all "private" so rights like free speech don't apply Centralized control over industry can have some pretty bad consequences too.
- gruez 5y agoI think you missed the whole "capitalism" vs "planned economies" comparison entirely. The advantage of capitalism over planned economies isn't that it's democratic or whatever. It's that in capitalism, individual companies are allowed to fail if they perform poorly, whereas in a command economy it takes the entire country down.
- scarmig 5y ago1) Within the United States, the largest corporations are closely associated with government, with a very porous interface between their highest levels. And they certainly aren't always allowed to fail. 2) Once a megacorporation has established dominance in a given market, a combination of network effects and regulatory capture removes competitive pressures. This allows the internal planned economy of the corporation to continue without competitive pressures. See e.g. Google, which essentially throws money earned through dominance in ad markets against the wall in every direction but produces little of new value. The reason my "capitalism" has quotation marks is to point out that actually existing capitalism in the USA has pretty much nothing to do with competitive free markets.
- mc32 5y agoThe old, it’s a private company so they can set their own rules (see all the responses to Twitter censorship accusations).
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoThey can set their own rules, within the bounds allowed by law. It appears to me that they would only be allowed to make this restriction if they prohibit all non-work conversation: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-rights-during-union-organizing https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoOver a chat app they provide for work use, I'm not seeing the ethical issue. Pay and overwork is one thing but why can't these employees use their phone for things they don't want the company to observe? Phones are cheap.
- rubiquity 5y agoWould you be ok with them taking away the break room if such discussions were happening in the break room?
- awb 5y agoI don’t think companies are required to provide a break room, are they? If a company goes above and beyond the requirements of the law and then removes that perk, I don’t see any legal issue with that. As long as they’re not a monopoly, the option of working for another employer is a good way of combating legal, but immoral company policies.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wewtyflakes 5y agoPeople are living social creatures, they are not robots, and the pursuit to treat humans as APIs for units of productivity will lead to a predictable outcome of causing human misery.
- infamouscow 5y ago"Spreading misinformation."
- hotpotamus 5y agoI believe it's just "corporation". Have you ever worked for a company that was run democratically? I've worked at good and bad places, but ultimately the orders came from the top. I don't think Amazon is very unique in their governance and attitude towards their workers, they're just more competent than most at execution.
- TeeMassive 5y agoThey can do things that's within the law. Recording conversations have been considered harassment in the past. Blocking vocabulary related to unionization could be considered blocking employee from self-organizing.
- hotpotamus 5y agoWell good for Amazon then that The Federalist Society has managed to install extremely right wing and anti-labor judges over the past few decades. If there's any leeway in the law for consideration, I can tell you which way that consideration will go. Not so good for society sadly.
- TeeMassive 5y ago> Well good for Amazon then that The Federalist Society has managed to install extremely right wing and anti-labor judges over the past few decades. You need to stop to see the world in black and white. The Federalist Society is a corporatist / statist organization. They hate labor. They love big pharma, etc.
- b9be520d93286 5y ago
- bko 5y agoIt sounds like its an internal chat app, presumably meant for business. If people were openly talking about "slave labor" and "vaccine" on any public company slack channels, I would think they'd shut it down at most organizations. I don't think you're allowed to use company time to organize. I don't think its unreasonable to make people work when they're on the clock and remove distractions. Many are used to comfortable jobs where they can post memes on slack or comment on social media during the working day, but these jobs are really the exception not the rule.
- kotaKat 5y agoIt's not even a "chat app". It's some "shout out" social network system. Amazon FC employees already have access to Chime and there's no message filtering there. I've seen the "u word" dropped back and forth on it myself.
- 4oo4 5y agoI agree with that but I think including "pay raise" is a step too far. Employees have the right to discuss pay, via the NRLA. That is not inherently politically loaded language despite Amazon trying to make it so.
- bko 5y agoYeah you may be right. I don't know about the specifics or have any opinion about particular words. I just think work should be professional. It's not a family. It's a group of people that get together to get a job done.
- wbsss4412 5y agoThere are enough words on the list to get at intent, and it would seem that maintaining professionalism isn’t the only intent of that list. “Accessibility”, “fairness”, “harassment”, etc are all normal words to use within the context of professional discussion.
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- iamdamian 5y agoFor anyone who is concerned about the level of authoritarian control companies like Amazon have over employees, you might find the book Private Government worth a read: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/private-government https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/pr...
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoWhy would you use a work-provided chat app to discuss things the company may not like? For example, do you not expect your employer to know if you're browsing for another job over company provided Internet on company provided laptops? If they were spying on the guest Wifi, that's another thing.
- zardo 5y agoPresumably because the work chat app is something that every worker has.
- black_puppydog 5y agoHonest question: are workers allowed to use physical pin boards to put up e.g. After hour part invitations or yoga groups? Asking of course because these would be analogous; zero marginal cost to let the workers use them once they're up.
- DennisP 5y agoMaybe because union organizing is protected by law? It doesn't count as working so Amazon can get away with this as long as they prohibit all non-work conversation, but if they're specifically targeting union organizing then it looks like they're breaking the law: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-rights-during-union-organizing https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
- klyrs 5y agoI'm amused by the implication that they're willing to break the law (specifically forbidding discussion of unions) and inadvertently impede work conversation (forbidding code snippets that include a union type).
- advisedwang 5y agoWhat blows my mind is that it sounds like the "Shout-Outs" this applies to is essentially a reward system. It's a place for talking about the positives. By adding filtering to force it to be positive they completely poison its own goal, as everyone would know how limited it is.
- imchillyb 5y agoDoes Amazon /want/ a counterculture within their employees? Because this is exactly how companies create countercultures within the ranks of their employees.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lwansbrough 5y agoPretty shameful for the programmers who implemented this.
- umeshunni 5y ago[flagged]
- Kerrick 5y agoI wouldn't be surprised if it was sold to programmers as a "dynamic block list" so they could respond to the changing landscape of slurs, and then execs decided to use that functionality to add these other words.
- buildbot 5y agoWhich tangentially, is 100% why any Apple (Or other) engineer building "on device" CSAM scanner that is remotely update-able should think really hard...
- bushin 5y ago"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
- awb 5y agoNo programmers implemented this yet. > a planned internal messaging app > “This particular program has not been approved yet and may change significantly or even never launch at all.” > “If it does launch at some point down the road,” said the Amazon spokesperson, “there are no plans for many of the words you’re calling out to be screened. The only kinds of words that may be screened are ones that are offensive or harassing, which is intended to protect our team.”
- not2b 5y agoApparently meaning: they were caught, so now they have to rethink it.
- uncomputation 5y ago> The major goal of the program, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, said, was to reduce employee attrition by fostering happiness among workers — and also productivity. Shout-Outs would be part of a gamified rewards system in which employees are awarded virtual stars and badges for activities that “add direct business value,” documents state. At the meeting, Clark remarked that “some people are insane star collectors.” Truly insane, there is nothing stranger (or more dystopian) than fiction after all. Rather than fix the system of working their employees to death (literally in the case of the tornado) or improving their conditions, Amazon tries to use virtual gold stars (not even physical stickers like kindergarten) as a band-aid. That list of banned words is right out of 1984 (as cliché as it is to reference at this point): ethics, fairness, freedom. I cannot imagine anyone here seriously defending this unless you’re just looking to be a contrarian. This is not “par for the course” for manual labor jobs as some people are claiming. Most manual labor jobs do not restrict you from talking about ethics or justice with your coworkers or have even a need for some virtual gold stars beyond a little whiteboard in the building with number of sales, employee of the month, etc. The fact that these techniques won’t work for Amazon just shows that their laborers are really over-worked compared to the norm. Unfortunately, Amazon is able to use their massive resources and capital to pay just more than the local factory, packing gig, etc. so they have a stream of desperate people willing to take it.
- FinNerd 5y agoWhy don’t their employees quit then and work somewhere better if they have the opportunity? If they don’t have a better opportunity than seems like Amazon is providing a valuable opportunity. Not to mention we seem to be in a worker-favorable economy.
- vkou 5y agoWhy would they quit when they can collectively bargain instead?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago> If they don’t have a better opportunity than seems like Amazon is providing a valuable opportunity. So when are we letting children back in the coalmines?
- TeeMassive 5y agoThey should use code words they can't ban. union = continuous improvement meeting pay raise = productivity increase slave labor = being a proud employee
- kelseyfrog 5y agoYou can almost hear the euphemism treadmill[1] accelerate beyond its limit. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/05/opinion/the-game-of-the-name.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/05/opinion/the-game-of-the-n...
- stjohnswarts 5y agoThis seems like a double-plus-good feature added to the chat.
- booleandilemma 5y agoOf course. A software company trying to solve all of its problems through software. Maybe Amazon should address why their employees feel they need to say these words in the first place.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoThey would format and factory reset their workers if they could
- whateveracct 5y agoFAANGs are masters of accountability-laundering through software.
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- 8note 5y ago> this is dumb Sounds like a great way to miss out on improvement opportunities.
- adharmad 5y ago"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ”
- nomilk 5y agoWe (community) should keep an open source database of what is banned. It would be insightful. For example any youtube comments mentioning "Open Street Maps" are automatically deleted ~30 seconds after commenting (very sneaky, the commenter might not even notice..). Imagine what you could tell about a company by knowing what they don't allow their employees/users to talk about. EDIT: also relevant, Paul Graham's essay What You Can't Say http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- jmyeet 5y agoThis is incredibly shortsighted and possibly illegal. There are limits to what companies can do to prevent or impede you from forming or joining a union. Amazon will need to tread very carefully here. But why would anyone use the company's messaging app this way anyway? Wouldn't employees be safer just using Signal, Google Talk (or whatever it's called now), FB Messenger, WhatsApp or whatever? If not, won't moves like this drive employees to do just that? We've had 40+ years of Reagonomics at this point, which have been a disaster for the lower and middle classes. It's about time we see the pendulum swing back the other way.
- nemo44x 5y agoThe middle classes have never been wealthier thanks to a greatly improved upper middle class over the last 40 years and the lower class has shrunk considerably over those years.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sega_sai 5y agoIt's an interesting full circle from capitalistic company to soviet style censorship.
- iddan 5y agoIt’s a classic example of the Horseshoe Effect [0]: extreme capitalism and extreme soviet communism are closer to each other than to social-democracy for instance [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
- koolba 5y agoThey’re completely different though. In communism, man censors and exploits man. In capitalism, it’s the other way around.
- avidphantasm 5y agoWhen I was in grad school my advisor was in China for a few months. Any emails where air quality was discussed seemed to end up black-holed. Similar messages using pig latin versions of the same phrases seemed to make it through just fine.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y agoSomewhat unsurprising - more interestingly, was it individual words or combinations of phrases that caught the filter? Also amusing that somewhat simple ciphers still easily defeat the Great Firewall (would ROT13 have also worked?)
- jimt1234 5y agoFunny you mention ROT13. I lived in China for a short time, and I experienced this same thing (certain email messages seemed to get /dev/null'ed), so we started ROT13'ing the messages as a joke, thinking it would never work. But it did! We never had a ROT13 email message go missing.
- avidphantasm 5y agoIt's been about 10 years, but I think simple obvious words like "pollution" or "air quality" were problems. In addition to using pig latin, I imagine you could also use oblique or florid prose to get by the filters, but that takes more time.
- charlieyu1 5y agoYou clearly don’t understand when they use “gcd” to mean Chinese Communist Party
- newacct0 5y ago[flagged]
- s1artibartfast 5y agoPlease keep in mind this is a rewards program text box, not a chat app. The program itself may be stupid, but I don't know any company that would allow these terms in internally visible recognition. My company uses manual review for recognition, but I would expect a call from my manager if I sent a public kudos "Great job fighting for union pay raises for the slave labor at our company"
- mellosouls 5y agoI don't know any company that would allow these terms in an internally visible recognition. Certainly not the case at every organisation; unions have a strong presence in some long-established private industries and public sector organisations, including general communications.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoDo those companies have recognition programs where where you can reward people for union topics?
- mellosouls 5y agoThat's very different to the quote which claimed no supported visible presence.
- lupire 5y agoThat's why it is illegal for management to interfere with labor organizing. Because they will abuse their power wherever they can.
- tyingq 5y ago"union" would be a pretty normal term for a kudos app. Like "great job working with the union and the company on that safety issue!"
- marricks 5y agoThe article referred to it as an "internal social media program." Why call it something else? Do you know more about its functionality you wish to share with the rest of us?
- Sebguer 5y agoAh, of course, Dave Clark, the man who was famously known as "the Sniper" because he'd lurk around warehouses to catch people that were taking breaks, and also was directly behind Amazon deciding to pick a fight with Bernie Sanders.
- teeray 5y agoThis will probably just develop a worker creole. In high school, we developed new underhanded profanity for the same reasons—-banned speech.
- imgabe 5y agoWait I thought words like "master" and "slave" were already not allowed in work correspondence, right? Now it's a great injustice that they're banned? Make up your minds people. https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-engineering-team-rolls-out-inclusive-language-list https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-engineering-team-roll... https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dhzhzjsbevs 5y agoDoes America not have labour laws that protect unionization? You idiots need to stop voting for establishment politicians for fear of wasting your vote. Got news for ya, both your parties suck donkey balls.
- upwardbound 5y agoA lot of comments in this thread are referring to peeing in bottles, so here's the article that documents what they're referring to: https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottles-union/ https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottl...
- josephcsible 5y agoIf this upsets you, then you probably shouldn't use the "it's a private company" defense when people are upset by other instances of Big Tech being guilty of censorship.
- BrainInAJar 5y agoNo, because concerted activity is protected at work. Being a nazi on twitter isn't.
- notch656a 5y agoAgreed, although it seems a pretty blatant violation of the first amendment that government can tell a business owner what speech they must allow on their private property.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoI'm not sure you understand the difference between "Big Tech company using censorship to prevent their underpaid and overworked employees taking collective action" and "Big Tech company using censorship to avoid legal liability after yet another dumb fuck who hung out on their platform with like minded dumb fucks decides to shoot up a mosque/school/night club/music festival, and live streams it on Big Tech's platform". Suffice to say, there's a significant difference, and trying to conflate the two implies either innocent ignorance or deliberate dishonesty. I'm going to assume it's the former, because I've always taken Napoleon's alleged aphorism to heart - the one about "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance".
- josephcsible 5y ago> Big Tech company using censorship to avoid legal liability Big Tech censors a bunch of stuff that there would have been zero legal risk in leaving up.
- ck2 5y agoI don't understand why this "game" of businesses being allowed to prevent workers from organizing in the USA It's their lives, it's freedom, not a game, business has no right to get in the way. Clear law has to be set. Zero interference. No tap-dancing around the edges.
- jimt1234 5y agoI administered Microsoft Exchange for "Evil Corp" back in the 90s. I was asked to install a filtering package that monitored emails for keywords (curse words). After collecting data for about a week, there was one clear conclusion: The worst offenders were in middle-management. Oh yeah, and I had to explain to some uptight HR director what a "MILF" is. Good times.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoAmerican Pie was a great movie.
- Evgeny 5y agoPutinesque.
- charlieyu1 5y agoun as union, pr as pay raise, sl as slave labor. Just like how the Chinese dodge censorship
- thumbsup-_- 5y agoAll they need is to agree to use "onion", "praise" and so. So much bad press for something that can be worked around so easily
- charlieyu1 5y agoChina managed to censor 8x8 as a reference to Tienanman so I don’t think it’s enough
- Renaud 5y agoIt's trivial to make a long list of banned variations. The point is not about the technological cat-and-mouse game, it's about Amazon being so afraid of their employees that they have to resort to measures akin to those used in China to prevent people from voicing their discontent while encouraging sanctioned behaviour (awarding stars like in kindergarten, really?). It's pitiful. If anything, it's quite revealing of the lack of moral and ethical compass from those making these petty decisions, and those who knowingly implement them.
- bluescrn 5y agoThere's also a ton of unicode characters that'd probably pass straight through the filter. Something like "ʯƞﺂơƞ"
- cosmiccatnap 5y agoI must get aws job offers from recruiters every couple of months and they just can't seem to understand why I would turn them down.
- fartcannon 5y agoI just cancelled my subscription. It's all garbage anyways.
- JetAlone 5y agoI give you a warm welcome to the wonderful world of boycotting Amazon!
- zimpenfish 5y agoThey're just going to create their own Grass Mud Horse Lexicon. https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/04/the-grass-mud-horse-dictionary-how-chinese-bloggers-evade-censorship/ https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/04/the-grass-mud-horse-dic...
- cutler 5y agoAlso banned are "invasion" and "war" but "special operation" is allowed.
- locallost 5y agoSounds like something they would do in the USSR.
- albertopv 5y agoI would never use a company provided message app for stuff like this, always used WhatsApp, telegram or similar.
- nemo44x 5y agoEveryone says that Twitter can limit speech because it’s not the government and 1a isn’t at issue. So why is it different when a private corporation limits speech on their platform? Do you understand now why we think it’s a bad precedent?
- mschuster91 5y agoTalking on Twitter is not legally protected. Talking about unionization, wages and workplace conditions however is.
- nemo44x 5y agoSure but not in their platforms or tools.
- dmje 5y agoInsane 1984-ness. How the f did the world come to this
- tgv 5y agoUnchecked greed, that's how.
- 0des 5y agoStop giving them money ostensibly by not using sites on their platforms, get your friends to do the same. Greed must be fed otherwise it is just idle hunger.
- tgv 5y agoI don't give "them" money. I don't buy there, but that doesn't solve the problem. Governments (all over the world) need to protect worker's rights, consumer right's and the environment much better through legislation and supervision, as in good, old-fashioned social democracy.
- 0des 5y agoMy point was stop supporting things hosted on AWS. It sounds impossible because it is.
- shultays 5y agoRestrooms Why?
- mschuster91 5y agoProbably because there were a lot of people either complaining about the state of the restrooms (when people have to literally speed-shit because their lunch breaks are so short and the loos are on the opposite end of the warehouse, they won't clean up skid marks) or that they could not use restrooms at all due to said time constraints.
- MarcosDione 5y agojust switch to 'onion', 'ay praise' and 'cotton fields'.
- Lapsa 5y agoamazon is lame. wanted to order a book - faced some never ending "prove you are you to login" bullshit. very customer friendly except for one thing
- sph 5y agoYes, Amazon is lame because you weren't able to login, certainly not because of the worker abuse mentioned in this very post.
- GuB-42 5y ago"union" is banned? It may be a problem when discussing SQL queries. Other terms from the article that can be used in technical discussions: "master", "slave", "robots", "accessibility". Special mention for "fire", which is an Amazon product. Anyways, Amazon denies it, and I tend to believe them for that reason.
- sph 5y agoIs this an attempt at satire? The Amazon warehouse workers are not the ones discussing SQL queries or master/slave protocols.
- jokoon 5y agoI wish there could be some shopping platform that respects their employees even if my order takes 3 weeks to land.
- kqr 5y agoHave you considered starting a co-op in this space? Something fully employee-owned, working for the benefit of themselves, their customers, and their communities. I don't generally use Amazon so I don't know exactly what their selling points are, but surely there ought to be some way to compete?
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- EdwardDiego 5y agoAnyone else get 1984 vibes, when the Amazon rep says this about a censorious app for their workers? > Our teams are always thinking about new ways to help employees engage with each other Yes. "Help".
- unglaublich 5y agoBut we, consumers, keep buying at Amazon. Buying is complying.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- spacephysics 5y agoRegardless if it’s a chat app or some kudos system (as others alluded to), if online gaming has taught me anything, then banned words that people really want to say will either be written as b4NN3D or have an alias that seems innocuous at first glance.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]