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Comment by burger_moon | Hacker News Reader

You know where there isn't outcry about this? In Seattle at the Amazon corp offices. There are regular company wide email threads (seattle-chatter@ among others) making jokes about the shitty working conditions of warehouse employees. Walking around the hallways and lunch areas you hear people making jokes about how awful it is. Nobody there cares. Change the type of free coffee in the lunch areas though and all hell breaks loose.

Quitting that company was such a relief to myself, and cutting ties with everything Amazon was at least important to me. I cannot morally support a company that treats their employees in such a way.

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I've been subscribed to that mailing list for about five years and I've never seen anybody making jokes about bad warehouse working conditions. Sometimes it gets brought up to let someone know that overcrowded bathrooms or "bad coffee" aren't so bad in relative terms.

Also, some people care enough to sign their names next to quotes in support of warehouse worker strikes: https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/quotes-of-...

Just to be clear - did you sign your name in support or are you a current Amazon employee defending the company’s reputation in light of these deaths?

How did you come to this conclusion... this is just flaming

No, I’m asking sincerely. They’re claiming knowledge of internal conversations at Amazon about these issues and then questioning whether the grandparent had supported warehouse workers in a protest action.

I don’t think it’s “flaming” to inquire more or less the same thing they did of the original poster, especially since they stake out public support around these issues as some kind of litmus test.

Didn't Amazon "encourage" warehouse workers to post tweets praising their working conditions? (Who knows if they actually worked there though). Someone found them and saw that the accounts had a pattern, and the tweets were eerily similar as well.

With that in consideration, one has to ask whether they're also astroturfing HN...

I know in the twitter thread that went viral, most of the "Amazon workers" were actually satirical accounts, that kept ramping up the outrage.

The whole situation is shitty to be sure, and encouraging employees to defend you from Twitter mobs is stupid, but holy shit did a lot of people get baited hard during that whole ordeal.

That was back in July. I'm genuinely curious to know how many of those employees that showed solidarity are still employed by Amazon today?

I left corporate for similar reasons. Got tired of people cracking jokes about crying at their desks, poor treatment of workers, and an especially terrible policy restricting your side projects.

It's a shame, because there was so much I loved about the culture in AWS.

Did you quit an amazon corporate position or a warehouse position? I'm sure the two are very very different so I would be impressed if you left the corporate position because of warehouse chatter. More recently I have been considering applying to a corporate position but would hate to feel the same way in a couple of years there.

I am guessing that the warehouse workers don't read "seattle-chatter" mailing lists or have lunch-area coffee to complain about.

Actually, pretty much every Amazon FC (at least in North America) has free coffee machines in the breakrooms. Some FCs have really bad coffee, but it is there and it is free. It used to cost money at some sites (to pay for the vending machine) but based on associate feedback it is now broad policy to be free.

I work in a corp office where the coffee is far worse than many FCs I've been to.

>I am guessing that the warehouse workers don't read "seattle-chatter" mailing lists or have lunch-area coffee to complain about.

They do at least get the coffee, and it's awful as expected.

While it’s always a difficult moral quandary to sort out the ethics of a given employer, there are plenty of opportunities in the software world that won’t make you complicit in treating working class people the way that Amazon does:

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver...

https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-i...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amazon-used-...

https://www.ft.com/content/b0c22a35-f553-39ec-8b89-d5986d02b...

> There are regular company wide email threads (seattle-chatter@ among others) making jokes about the shitty working conditions of warehouse employees. Walking around the hallways and lunch areas you hear people making jokes about how awful it is. Nobody there cares.

I've been here for about three years, never saw any of that.

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