Amazon fires warehouse worker who led strike for more coronavirus protection | Hacker News Reader

Amazon fires warehouse worker who led strike for more coronavirus protection

cnbc.com

41 pointsbigpumpkin9 comments

Not surprising. I don’t know when Americans will stop accepting this corporate behavior. If there’s something this virus should teach us is that we, as individuals, are not impervious to anything. Including terrible working conditions. It’s as if we all have Stockholm syndrome and don’t go beyond worshipping corporations, despite the exploitations everywhere. Hell, the system is fundamentally reliant on exploitation.

The worker was in close contact with someone who tested positive for the virus. He was told to self-quarantine at home with pay, and yet he instead still decided to lead the strike and directly put all of his colleagues at risk.

That kind of sounds like sensible corporate behavior to me. What is it exactly that you have against this decision?

It does sound like sensible corporate behaviour. It is also not a fact, but a claim by Amazon which it can use as a convenient and possibly somewhat hard to verify excuse to fire a employee it finds troublesome.

Until there is more information, I can totally picture a scenario where Amazon uses the excuse that they can remove a troublesome employee from leading a walk-out by (falsely) suggesting they have been in contact and need to self-isolate (the pay is nothing for them). When the employee disputes that and come in they get to fire the individual under the pretext that he was not behaving appropriately and endangering other workers.

As an ex-Amazonian (having been surrounded by thousands of exceptional people whose second nature is risk management) I can tell you that coming to work with a cold was frowned upon.

It was not "corporate policy" - it was culture.

Coming to work sick and potentially infecting others is the opposite of failure isolation.

Right - and that's fine. But the article didn't state he was sick. In fact, only a spokesperson for Amazon said he was to self-isolate after coming into close contact with an associate - which is a very convenient accusation (if it was in fact not true) to keep someone from coming in to organise a walk out, and then getting to fire them under the pretext of risk management.

>which is a very convenient accusation (if it was in fact not true)

The key here is that you don't know if the accusation was true or false, but you arguing as if you do.

Which, in the language of Information Theory, is called a bias.

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

Apologies, I wasn't trying to argue that I do know. I was arguing the same as you imply here.

That because we don't know, you have to view the statement from the Amazon spokesperson as another unverified fact. Which, if you read your original response, you didn't. In this case, the information bias came from you. I was (possibly not clearly) trying to point out that lack of verification of the claim he was sick and/or in contact with somebody who was is important, specifically because it is advantageous for Amazon that everyone believe it to be true. I am not saying it isn't. We just don't know. Hope that makes it clearer.

Union busting is the norm sadly in the USA. Never forget the organisations that actually led to the workers of the world achieving a better standard of living*

*until mass consumerism and racing to the bottom led to these massive organisations flouting human rights but just out of view of the average consumer

Where’s Bezos hiding during all this? New Zealand or space?

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