Wal-Mart Tells Workers: Don’t Download Labor Group’s Chat App

That said, I don't think it's out of order for... whatever OUR walmart is (a union?) to release a privacy statement. But painting them as identity thiefs, phishers, or ad resellers is absurd. In my view, Walmart is pandering to fears without actually identifying real concerns.

This is completely untrue. There are a lot of people who need to work to eat and pay rent. Often they're backed into a corner where there's literally no other jobs available than Walmart, which means that Walmart can offer any wage they want and the potential employees have no options beyond accepting, or being on the street.

Seriously, do you think that's how it happens? Is that bluster, naivety, or what?

"He sonny, do you want to eat dirt or accept our below healthy subsistence wages?" seems closer to how it goes. People don't work for low wages because they can't bargain, they work for low wages because the alternative is for them not to work and the government won't mandate a Living Wage.

It's not fair because people who have less resources, from birth usually, are in a far worse bargaining position and usually don't have the occasion to negotiate their wages. The only chance they have to create leverage is to unionise and force the company to decide whether to waste 20% of their workforce and do a massive employment and training drive (or suffer a strike, or ...) or to accede to paying a, for example, inflation matching wage increase.

Do you seriously believe that any of the floor staff at Walmart have been able to negotiate a separate wage for themselves?

It's an agreement made under duress, we can do better for these people. Don't you agree?

This is self-evidently untrue. You are confusing basic economic models with empirical conditions. While simple models of things like supply and demand are essential to understanding economic conditions, over-reliance on them is like thinking that being able to work simple problems of gravitation is all you need to know about aeronautics.

You are assuming a particular kind of bargaining relationship, the closed shop, that is actually illegal in many jurisdictions. You're also way overestimating the negotiating power of of the individual employee, or (put another way) ignoring the vast economic disparity between the parties and the resulting lack of leverage for the non-specialist employee.

When shareholders pool their capital and hire managers to run the business, is it a loss of freedom for them? Hardly, they can choose to sell their interest in the business if they no longer want to own it, or take a more active role if they are unhappy with the performance of their economic agents. Why are you so averse to low-level employees doing the same thing with their wages - essentially hiring the union to negotiate on their behalf?

However, they do not. There are many potential (unskilled) workers, and Walmart has all the power. They are more than happy to present an offer and say "take it or leave it" to the individual worker.

Contrast that to the highly skilled market that most HN readers inhabit, and it is scary place to be.

On one side of the table, there is Walmart: a large group of well-monied people that pay lawyers, lobbyists, PR teams and think-tanks to level the playing field in their favor.

On the other side, there is you: an individual person who can only bring their time and skill to the table and needs to eat.

Unorganized labor is great for Walmart. If you don't like their terms, there is a large pool of qualified applicants that will take whatever employment they can get.

If Walmart's terms aren't really that great for everybody, where huge swaths of people are not being paid fair market compensation for their productivity then, individually, workers have no option for change.

> I really don't know how you can get any more fair than that? Everyone equally has the ability to decide what works for them and are free to move on when it doesn't work.

People are not being paid fair market compensation for their work that they would be if they were able to bargain collectively the way Walmart is able to. An individual has little recourse against the might of many people who want to pay them as little as possible.

If capital is allowed to consolidate wealth and power into a corporation, labor should be able to collectively negotiate with it. Unions can serve to to bridge the gap of uneven power at negotiations.

> A union has no bargaining power if it has competition, of course.

A union is under the same market forces as anybody else. If it has competition, it must compete.

> A union actually takes away a worker's room to negotiate

Depends on the union. Some allow for negotiation, some have a scale which you can work with.

I would argue that this is where the lack of fairness stems from. In every rural small town I've visited, Walmart is effectively a monopoly.

They're backed by a capital-intensive and incredibly efficient logistics network, and they've leveraged that to put local competition out of business. Consequently, they're the only employer in their industry in that town.

Sure, you could get a job doing something else (if the town has a 'something else'), but that still means there are going to be a large number of jobs controlled by Walmart without competition. And that distorts the local labor market via the disparity in power.

So, all the low paid need to do is reduce the number of people available. Genocide has never been so easily argued for.

That is to say, Walmart purposely aims to undercut the competition on price and to save people money. If they deviated a bit from that mantra they could surely increase their profit margins. Especially in areas where they are now the main purveyor of goods after they've driven out the competition.

I doubt Trump will want a second term - he's made it now, and thumbed his nose at everyone. He'll find out that he can't just do what he wants as president and his days are ridiculously packed, and won't go for a second term.

- appointed as Vice President a guy who wants to electrocute gay kids to turn them straight

- appointed as his senior strategist a literal-not-figurative white supremacist and anti-Semite who thinks Darth Vader is a role model (ain't making that up, either)

- nominating as Attorney General a guy so profoundly tied to his white hoods that he couldn't get confirmed as a justice

- claiming that he'll extend libel laws because his feelings are hurt

That's four--and if you want to throw in the whole "bragging about sexual assault" thing, five through about thirty or so!--more than he'd deserved. Why should he continue to be spotted more?

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed

> "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires", Wright, Ronald (2004). A Short History of Progress. Toronto: Anansi Press. pp. 124.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forlorn_hope

Thereby creating an incentive to accept as many people as possible, thereby lowering standards, thereby hijacking the agenda towards protecting incompetent workers.

If you're unionizing a low-skill segment of the labor market, I don't see a feasible alternative. Even if you only accept the best and brightest, the best and brightest are still trivially replaceable at that level.

Pro sports players' unions.

It makes sense -- owners must act as a collective unit in order to ensure competitive balance and some degree of economic stability. A sports league where one team can afford to buy all of the best players from other teams is going to lose fans very fast. With owners acting collectively, players act collectively as a counterbalance. They make sure that they get a reasonable share of the overall income, and that it's distributed in a way that pays top performers more but also pays well enough at the bottom to keep the league an attractive place for marginal players.

There are still classic craft unions, with apprenticeship and training programs, but not many are left. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is still around. The Plumbers and Steamfitters have apprenticeship programs. The Animation Guild (Local 839, IATSE) represents animators at the major Hollywood studios. They give classes for members, both on using new technology and on classic techniques. Read The Animation Guild's contract, which applies to most animators in Hollywood.[1] This is for a job more creative than most programming.

[1] https://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2015-2...

I mean, you don't have to look any further than the big 3 automakers. I remember watching news reports of workers leaving mid-shift, going to the bar and doing cocaine. For months.

If it wasn't for the union they would have been fired years ago.

That's definitely not the argument. It's that on average most people are better off, or some sort of weighted average of people's well-being.

For IaaS, I agree that you're responsible for some sysadmining, but you start from a known good point in that bare VM OS images (for CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows, etc) will probably have all the appropriate patches applied and up to date. Of course you're on your own when it comes to spinning up your programs to make sure SQL injection doesn't work, etc etc.

PaaS is another thing. In that case, if you're using AppEngine or ElasticBeanstalk or Heroku, you don't have to worry about the base infrastructure or the datastore at all. They should have all the relevant security patches applied at all times, which really cuts down the attack area to just your app, not the web server, datastore, or OS vulnerabilities.

I have faith that the app market is so hypersaturated that any scheme that doesn't epic fail immediately spawns hundreds of clones.

"Our Walmart" is probably legit, although probably a smaller harder to defend target and the problem is going to be inevitable clones and scams.

There is also the meta-threat of normalizing sharing employer information. Sure maybe 99% of people who ask for my IP address or a list of ciphers my sshd permits are really not up to anything bad, but it would be bad to get in the habit of telling rando requesters anything they ask. So, among others, I allow aes256-gcm in my corporate sshd config... and what possible good could come from people answering questions like that ?

He's saying that it's probably not in a form that's easily queryable. With that information in an ill-secured data store that's highly categorized you can do all sorts of mischief.

And how is it FUD? Once you cleanse and normalize data, fraud opportunities become very apparent.

Perhaps giving away large amounts of PII in this app or getting into the habit of giving away PII for the asking puts the employees at risk, but my theoretical examples only put walmart owned property at risk. Well, any employee involved would probably get fired as the fall guy or there's some obscure binder miles away with a written policy forbidding my scenarios, but ...

"sudden concern" Is it a sudden concern? I work at a very large corporation and every six months or so we get a refresher course in not being social engineered etc. Its a sudden concern of us, of some news organizations. Opposition to social engineering attacks is probably not a recent sudden concern of walmart infosec department, they've been around the block a bit and a company doesn't get that big entirely staffed by noobs.

Full name (if uncommon) and email address (if private from an association/club membership, etc.). IP address (I'm pretty sure they can log your IP address unless they specifically say they don't.) And Zip code is mentioned as PII if linked to any of the above.

These are all things they request for signup, and then you can optionally include your job title and your store number. All that stuff put together is very clearly PII, so I'm not quite sure what your point is.

Which article were you reading? They were not trying to organize workers overtly, and just to give advice on lead policies requires absolutely no personal information that needs to be stored.

What part of that can't you tell the difference of, that their demanding of personal information is overreach?

But I've heard about that rigid union electrician since I was a teenager (and wandered, starry-eyed, around my first trade show). 20+ years later, the story never matched up with reality for me.

But yeah, American unions often have a lousy track record. Better than nothing, though. I wish they'd make a comeback.

While in grad school, the heater in our lab was out during a cold-ass New York winter. We put in work requests for weeks, and no repairs were ever made. A fellow grad student finally got fed up, looked up the plans to the heater online, and figured out how to fix it on his own. Months later (it is spring time now) someone from facilities shows up, goes into a fit that someone non-union fixed the heater, and the fellow grad student got into some shit from the department and the deans office. Yes, this is anecdotal, but negative interactions with unions are a real thing.

Edit: Also, the most vocal opponent of the smoking ban on campus was from one of the service worker unions.

According to that article, the problems didn't begin with the who's-allowed-to-plug/unplug. They were structural and systemic, and had to do with the port being mismanaged as much as the unions agitating for their workers.

So, I'm not entirely sure why you're saying it's about plugging and unplugging refrigeration units.

But, also interestingly, they lost Hanjin, and a mere year later, Hanjin's bankrupt. There was a lot of press a few months ago about container ships being stranded, etc.