Amazon fires worker who led strike over virus
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Key excerpts from a much clearer article. And yet again, why you never 100% believe a company's PR response when they're trying to cover themselves. They tell just enough truth, but use it to intentionally mislead.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/amazon-strik...
> According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March. Had Smalls been exposed that day, a 14-day mandatory quarantine would have made him eligible to return as soon as 25 March.
> Smalls said Amazon did not send him home until 28 March, three weeks after the exposure.
> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said, even as the infected person worked alongside “associates for 10-plus hours a week”.
> “You put me on quarantine for coming into contact with somebody, but I was around [that person] for less than five minutes,” he told Vice.
> According to Amazon, no one else was fired. Smalls said he was considering legal action, calling it “a no-brainer”.
The 2 weeks figure is because we're reasonably confident that if you haven't turned up with symptoms in 2 weeks, you aren't going to.
Visible symptoms aren't the only concern, you can be contagious without symptoms, and there are studies showing that 50% of all infections could be asymptomatic - https://eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.20...
I was precisely stating the reasoning behind the number we see everywhere. I was not offering an opinion on whether that reasoning is sufficient to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
That said, in an emergency it makes sense to focus on people with symptoms and tell everyone else to act like they might be exposed. In which case people who have been exposed and have symptoms should act like you want everyone else to act. Which means that if they are working in a warehouse, you want them to have protective gear to prevent them from giving it to people.
Which is exactly one of the things that this strike was about.
However, there are reports of cases with an incubation period of up to 27 days.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-incuba...
I sure know what I'd be placing a large amount of money on if I was a betting man.
There is only one report based on one case of a 70 year old man in Hubei province, based on contact testing, and did not rule out that he contacted it later.
But that' isn't a policy the company follows. Also they let him work during the 2 weeks he was most likely to be contagious.
> key point Amazon claims he was exposed to the worker on March 11th
Did they claim that? I'm looking for a source on this. "According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March", but when you look at their linked source[1] it says: "Amazon confirmed an associate, who reported for work on 11 March, has since been diagnosed with Covid-19".
> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said
Is this confirmed? You can't just assume this to be true. Pretty damning if so, though.
> “You put me on quarantine for coming into contact with somebody, but I was around [that person] for less than five minutes,” he told Vice.
Viral transmission has no minimum timeline and often occurs at first point of contact (e.g., handshake) or cough/sneeze at any time. Kind of irresponsible to even print that quote without correcting the argument.
It may be that Amazon retaliated, but stuff like this doesn't prove it. We need the hard facts. At this point it's unclear and sounds fishy on both sides.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/30/amazon-wo...
From Vice
>Amazon did not immediately respond to an email Tuesday morning asking how many people at the site have been ordered into self-quarantine
Even if they did quarantine others, putting someone on a 14 day quarantine 17 days after contact is hard to explain.
It would be harder to explain why Amazon didn't put on quarantine an employee who was vocal about his exposure to the virus.
At most it sounds like malevolent compliance.
They did not follow health guidelines until the person complained and then they still don't follow them but instead claim to follow them. Why just claim? After the 14 day phase the guidelines don't suggest any quarantines unless people show symptoms.
Full paid leave is not what most people in the US would call retaliation, particularly in the case of a warehouse worker.
We have these things called "courts" that are well-suited to addressing complaints like this one.
But a strike, right now, is not the answer. It's just pouring gasoline on the fire. Counterproductive at all levels. Labor organization is all about picking your battles, and this is the wrong fight in the wrong place at the wrong time. His beef with Amazon needs to be settled in a courtroom, not on a picket line.
The only worse thing he could have done would be to try to lead a strike during a world war.
Perhaps the workers should just continue to allow amazon to get away with exposing them to covid-19 with no notification, for the greater good.
That’s how we came to have employer-provided healthcare:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...
And it's arguably a terrible system that we're still stuck with today, with the effect of handcuffing productive people to their desks in dead-end jobs. We'd be far better off with universal coverage that's not tied to employment... and yes, that means better-off economically.
If he took health and safety so seriously then he wouldn't be breaking his quarantine after he claimed he had direct contact with someone carrying the virus to drive up to work potentially exposing all his co-workers to the virus.
But the worker was placed on a 15 day paid leave to self quarantine because he stated he had direct contact with someone infected with covid19.
And then he not only broke his quarantine but also made it his point to go to work, potentially risking his colleagues.
Even if you argue that he did't carried covid19, that action is not justifiable, neither safety-wise nor legaly-wise.
Yet in every post you make, you continue to misrepresent the situation.
You are being hugely dishonest
Not that hard. If everyone in the office had contact with someone infected then the best thing to do would have been to quarantine them all right away. Because without that, you now have the possibility that one of them had an asymptomatic case which they could have still had and given to any of the others less than a week ago, which means the others are still inside the window for being infected but not having either recovered or showed symptoms. Which means they still need to be quarantined.
This judgment call changed. If bureaucratic ineptitude was to blame, those people ignored proper procedure, making them insubordinate, and risked lives. And if they found the issue confusing enough to take eighteen days to issue the quarantine notice, they should understand why this employee might think they are being targeted for their labor practices.
The available information changed. This very quickly went from something many people weren't sure wasn't going to be maybe a nasty flu to something that has half the world staying home from work and hospitals getting overrun. Changing your procedures in response to new information is what managers should be doing.
They'd have been smarter to respond to it sooner, but better late than never.
You're trying to spin it both ways. If Amazon was just idiotic about their response to the outbreak, why did they pick that moment to suddenly take things super serious and fire the employee?
Amazon has an abusive culture. Let's not "both sides" that out of existence, shall we?
There is a reason that the courts have something called 'burden of proof'.
When an individual worker does something a large company doesn't like and they fire him, the burden of proof in my mind is on the company. Because HR has professionals and if they can't tell a better story than what we are seeing, then retaliation is the reason 90% of the time.
It isn't unclear. It is perfectly normal for companies to get rid of the whistle blowers. That's why there are (weakly enforced) laws against it.
There are regulatory / liability reasons which may prevent HR from telling their side of the story. The employee is not under the same rules and can say whatever they want without HR being able to refute it.
>the burden of proof in my mind is on the company
Because that is not how the courts operate. It is up to the person making the accusation (which in this case is the employee accusing Amazon of an unjust firing) to provide proof.
If you want to start dismissing all "he said/she said" arguments, then we might as well shut down this entire thread. We are never going to get any further than "he said/she said" unless someone in this thread has insider knowledge of this situation and is willing to break privacy agreements.
It's not necessarily either. It may very well simply be the preponderance of the evidence. Nevertheless, such a suit will be undertaken with the benefit of the discovery process.
But if the plaintiff produces no evidence, Amazon does not need to make a defense. Thus OP is correct.
Sure, but any evidence which makes an accusation more likely than in the absence of that evidence suffices to meet preponderance of the evidence in the absence of any contrary evidence. The fact of the labor organizing, the fact of the firing, and their temporal relationship are, together, evidence for retaliation.
So, Amazon will very likely need to make the case (and Amazon will need to present the evidence to support it), that he was actually fired for violating the company mandated quarantine.
The actual evidentiary fight will probably be over whether that quarantine was a bona fide quarantine, or a pretextual one. But who has the burden to present that evidence will very much depend on who feels like they're losing the case. Probably both of them will need to present evidence to support their position.
You have a reasonable indication, but no preponderance of evidence. You probably have enough for discovery.
Even discounting all of that, the judge/jury/arbitrator/litigator would have to agree that sending him into quarantine and not others constitutes retaliation. To be completely honest, this kind of job is a huge joke. If you take too many bathroom breaks you won't hit your quota and they cN fire you for that.
The only way to win isn't to prove he was treated inconsistently, that can be ignored so long as the reason they stated for letting him go is true.
And arbitrators are always required to be agreed on by both parties.
This sentence is simply false.
While sort of true, using the word "proof" there is too strong. In a civil context, the burden of proof for a retaliatory firing is a preponderance of the evidence. That means, the plaintiff has to demonstrate with evidence to the court (in a bench trial) or the jury that it is more-likely-than-not (e.g. 51%) that the firing was retaliatory.
If you start with the evidence that Amazon learned that the worker was organizing a strike, and then very shortly thereafter fired the worker that evidence _alone_ (which seems to be undisputed) probably gets you near that burden.
Amazon, then, might present the lack of quarantine defense as an alternative scenario, but then some of the burden will be on Amazon to effectively make this case.
We should not expect that a corporation prove its case to US. ...we are not judges. We have no right to cast judgement or determine who's right, and have no rights to the evidence.
This will all be fleshed out IN COURT - where it belongs.
Definitely.
> When an individual worker does something a large company doesn't like and they fire him, the burden of proof in my mind is on the company. Because HR has professionals and if they can't tell a better story than what we are seeing, then retaliation is the reason 90% of the time.
You don't appear to understand why courts have "something called burden of proof". In court, the burden of proof is on the person who was fired. They must show that they were fired illegally. You can't just randomly assign "burden of proof" based on your ideological bias.
> I really hate it when people use he said/she said type arguments to pretend that they are being objective and 'rigorous'.
Sounds like you "really hate it" when people express a preference for finding out what really happened.
I have no strong opinion about this specific case.
You don't appear to understand that there is clearly visible causality here. A random person claiming they were unjustly fired is different than someone who was fired after organizing a strike.
I think your confused. OP isn't suggesting that Amazon is guilty, but that there is enough evidence to warrant investigating what happened.
The point of contention is to what extent someone starting to organize a strike should be evidence that they weren't fired for some other reason. But it's extraordinarily weak evidence because it's completely under the control of the party it's supposed to be evidence in favor of.
Anybody who knows they're about to get fired for some other reason, or who wants to be able to do something obnoxious without getting fired, could just start making noises about a strike and then claim that's why when it happens. But since anybody can do that, it doesn't prove anything.
It's like claiming your boss promised you a bonus, and using as evidence some fully-refundable travel tickets you claim to have bought expecting to have the money. You would do that if you really thought you had the money coming, but you would also do it if you're just trying to manufacture evidence. You have reason to do it either way, so you doing it proves nothing because it lacks any correlation with the result.
You're not really addressing the point. No one is saying anything about proof or guilt. To carry out any sort of effective investigation discovery is required. The act of firing someone after organizing is prima facie evidence for carrying out discovery. That's all they were saying.
Sure you are. Discovery is really expensive. The point of throwing out cases prior to it is to keep the court system from being used as a mechanism for harassment or extortion. Otherwise if you don't like somebody you could file a frivolous case against them and require them to spend thousands of dollars on discovery even though you'll never win, or use that expense to extract a settlement from them because it's cheaper to pay you off than win the case on the merits.
So the question is whether something the plaintiff does should be considered as evidence against the defendant. But the plaintiff could do it even if the defendant is totally innocent, and has an incentive to do it if it would allow them to bring their frivolous case, so it has no evidentiary value. It conveys zero bits of information because you could reasonably expect it to happen with equivalent probability regardless of the defendant's liability.
The reason this really messes people up is that it's one of those "this statement is false" things. If it can't be used as evidence and it still happens then it's much better evidence, because the plaintiff in that situation wouldn't have a motive to do it just to manufacture evidence. But as soon as you do allow it to be used as meaningful evidence, that motive reappears and destroys the evidentiary value.
> you could reasonably expect it to happen with equivalent probability regardless of the defendant's liability.
Your premise is also flawed, because that is not a reasonable claim. False rape accusations approach nowhere near 50% despite the possibility of similar incentives.
> So the question is whether something the plaintiff does should be considered as evidence against the defendant.
No, this is something that the plaintiff has carried out in response to the defendants actions. A smart company wishing to dismiss a low-performer will have a paper trail that can corroborate their actions and get these sorts of frivolous cases thrown out.
No they wouldn't, you would just need some actual evidence of the defendant's behavior instead of trying to use the plaintiff's behavior against the defendant.
> Your premise is also flawed, because that is not a reasonable claim. False rape accusations approach nowhere near 50% despite the possibility of similar incentives.
Rape accusations where the accuser has no corroborating evidence whatsoever tend to lose (or have the prosecutor decline to take the case), so that incentive doesn't really exist there unless you start to believe accusers without any additional evidence, at which point the rate of false accusations would skyrocket because they would be successful.
Also, how do you know what percentage of accusations without corroborating evidence are false? (That's legitimately very hard to measure.)
> No, this is something that the plaintiff has carried out in response to the defendants actions.
This is essentially meaningless. Many decisions are trade offs where reasonable people can disagree about what to do, so no matter what an employer does, someone can claim they disagree and would have done the other thing and use it as a pretext to organize a strike.
> A smart company wishing to dismiss a low-performer will have a paper trail that can corroborate their actions and get these sorts of frivolous cases thrown out.
That's assuming the employee was a low-performer or that there was a past pattern of misbehavior. Some people follow procedures right up until the point when they decide to stop.
That also rewards the most nefarious bureaucrats who keep the best records on every little thing anybody has ever done wrong so that they have a pretext to justify firing anybody. So then you're losing any connection to meritorious behavior -- a well-lawyered corporation has the paper trail to fire a real labor organizer while an honest company that isn't so distrustful of their employees gets into trouble when a bad employee starts lobbing false accusations at them.
Just to be clear, I think this probably was retaliation, and there seems to be almost enough to prove it. If it can be proven that Amazon put no one else in quarantine under similar circumstances (minus leading a strike) before this case, yes, most reasonable people would view this as retaliation.
Supposition does not mean "burden of proof".
> the burden of proof in my mind is on the company
Your presumption that the company is at fault is unjust.
Everybody is pretty clear about amazons reputation towards their employees, including software engineers.
Obviously, I mean the opposite ; )
The 'ideological clarity' of the novel virus is quite fearful [& provocative] ..
Somewhat related, I have been receiving a lot unsolicited communications for signing various anti-amazon documents.
UK and France are ~1/3 lower. Italy and Spain are ~50% lower.
1: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/gdp-per-capita
The hint is in the name.
(USGDPPC - EurozoneGDPPC) / AVERAGE(USGDPPC, EurozoneGDPPC) = 0.283
Roughly speaking, you could write this as "The GDP per capita of the Eurozone is 28.3% lower than the US".
There's no single apples-to-apples measurement we can make; the US has more natural resources than the EU, suffered far less harm from all the major conflicts up through WW2, &c.
I don't know whether or not liberalizing the economy of the EU would raise per-capita GDP or not, but the post I was replying to was claiming that a very specific and easy-to-check fact was wrong, so I checked it.
(USGDPPC - EU28GDPPC) / AVERAGE(USGDPPC, EU28GDPPC) = 0.338
So the comment you're replying to was correct, for at least one plausible definition of "1/3 lower than the US".
As for the countries you mentioned:
Monaco: < 1 square mile, not reproducible in a larger country
Norway: Giant oil reserves / tiny population, not reproducible without that
Switzerland: Valid
Ireland: GDP numbers shouldn't be taken at face value because tax laws[2] encourage corporations to attribute EU-wide revenues to Ireland. Reported GDP per capita is 135% of the US value, but 2016 median household income[3] was only 87% of the US value[4]. This cuts both ways, though - other EU countries should have their estimates nudged upwards.
Iceland: 92% of US GDP per capita[1]
Denmark: 91% of US GDP per capita[1]
Sweden: 86% of US GDP per capita[1]
Austria: 91% of US GDP per capita[1]
Finland: 79% of US GDP per capita[1]
UK: 75% of US GDP per capita[1]
France: 74% of US GDP per capita[1]
Italy: 68% of US GDP per capita[1]
Spain: 65% of US GDP per capita[1]
EU (all 28 countries): 71% of US GDP per capita[1]
[1] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
[3] https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-gpii/geog...
[4] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
--Higher GDP European state--
Switzerland pop: 8.5m gdp/capita: 65k -- reputation as a tax haven
Ireland pop: 6.5m gdp/capita: 69k -- reputation as a tax haven
Norway pop: 5.3m gdp/capita: 85k -- petrostate
Iceland pop: 364,260 gpd/capita: 54,753
Monaco pop: 37,497 gdp/capita: 162k -- french riviera
--Most populous Western Europe nations--
Germany pop: 82m gdp/capita: 44k
France pop: 67m gdp/capita: 38k
UK pop: 66m gdp/capita: 39k
Italy pop: 60m gdp/capita: 32k
Look I'm all for a larger welfare state, and there are plenty of things our nation could learn from Europe. But to pretend that if we made our country more European our economy would grow to resemble a tiny nation/tax haven like Ireland more than the UK, France, or Germany is unrealistic.
Reality: 4.8 million
Norway is all oil, Ireland is the tax haven of the Fortune 500, Ditto Switzerland, Monaco is the tax haven of the rich, and Iceland is pure tourism.
Pulling out Iceland or Monaco and comparing them to the entire US is like pulling out Palo Alto and Seattle and comparing them to all of the EU.
UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc are a much better representation of what larger, mores diverse European economies look like.
In fact, if you take the whole EU together (as you should, the US number also includes places like the South and the Midwest), the parent comment is correct.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/emphasize-...
I lived in Germany for a couple years and now live in one of the poor(er) states. A comment above this says to jettisoning Idaho will game GDP numbers for the US. I'm currently experiencing earthquake aftershocks AND low GDP.
I honestly think for most people, Germany had a high quality of living (if you ignore AC when it's 35 degrees in summer). But in the US, we've got Mammon and, for better or worse, GDP is how we track that.
All jokes aside, I'd make that trade any day for the relevant social safety nets.
I assume your comment is that Amazon would lose money if a union happened?
I have had situations where it was not allowed to move a computer monitor from one cube to another - that had to be done by a union employee. Literally taking a unused spare monitor from one desk, and putting it on another employees desk where it was need. ...and there was a formal requisition process to get that done which took two weeks to get through approvals, assignment, and finally have it done.
I have had union workers walk off the job during a major system outage because their facility managers forced them to take their break time. The whole company was down - it was all-hands-on-deck outage due to Hurricane Sandy. The actual union workers wanted to help us get the systems back online for the company, but the union rep wouldn't let them work.
I have had great workers quit or refuse jobs with our company because they knew and loathed the union - not the company, but the UNION.
I don't have any problem with unions at companies that protect the SAFETY of workers, as they are needed in various industrial jobs. ...but at a TECH companies where workers are making six figures, have matched 401k plans, and safe and comfortable desk jobs? ...it just screams "ridiculous" to me.
The union is not superfluous to the employees- it is the only thing negotiating on their behalf in a power-imbalanced, often exploitative situation.
The union is not superfluous to the employer- it is actually a hostile counterparty in terms of wages and exploitation.
Thats not to say the added bureaucracy is always welcomed- it sucks.
Can you explain to me where this is a union thing? Like I'd honestly like you to point out and explain your logic why this is specifically because of a union.
The reason why I bring this up is because I have encountered the same issues at my prior jobs which were non-union. Literally the exact same issue, where I was not allowed to move a computer monitor because it had to be done by another department after submitting a formal request.
I feel like people tend to blame unions for everything and yet I see the exact same shit people blame unions for at my non-union jobs. Is that because of an invisible union? Is there something I'm missing?
Why is this a union thing? No idea. Is it real? Yes.
Perhaps somebody is enjoying some popcorn watching an unending battle between "the invisible hand of the free market" and "an invisible union".
Some reasons to have unions at tech companies:
IP restrictions, unpaid oncall/overtime, crunch, getting a larger cut of the wealth they produce, better parental/health/timeoff benefits, having a representative in disciplinary hearings, requiring clear salary and performance processes, and about a half dozen other ideas.
You can disagree that these are real concerns at tech companies, but they are not ridiculous.
That said unions help more than they hurt, in my opinion. It's also pointless to paint all unions with the same brush like that, you worked with a group of people that had bad management. That's can happen in any organization, not just unions.
Not they're not all great all the time but I think the Hollywood unions are something we as tech workers could model ourselves after. You still negotiate your own salary and such but certain benefits like pension/retirement/healthcare (which are great at scale but hurt employers and employees at smaller businesses) can be amalgamated across the membership.
Like for example just a couple years ago the writers unions got into a spat with their agents over double dipping with production companies and not representing the interests of their clients. That kind of bargaining power can be wielded to fix institutional problems across an industry, but it doesn't have to come at the cost of individual gains - the writers still negotiate their own compensation and sign their own deals.
Unions can be a great way for industries to self regulate imo.
That's a guild, not a union. And sure, it's good. As long as you don't care about people that aren't in it right now. SAG does their very best to keep new entrants out.
And they don't work to keep new entrants out. Union workplaces do prefer to hire union members, but if they can't then they'll work to get someone enrolled in the union.
If only there was some sort of system to enforce laws. Oh wait, that only exists in a perfect world where a government actually cares about your rights...
Honestly I get it on both sides, but I really think the union has to be a jerk. It's annoying to most small independent types or middle management areas, but the people in the union need that type of power to influence the BS corporate hierarchy of exploitation to absurd degrees. It's fine to be exploited, it's annoying when the company will drop you in a heartbeat because some minor issue thats come up. If we had laws that at least made it easier for employees to exert their rights (through agencies that the government didn't short change like they love to do) we would have no need for unions. Culturally it'd be a precedent that management can't be dicks.
Management can choose to share profit fairly in a keep what you catch manner so everyone's interests are aligned, and report accounting fairly, to the whole company.
Or Management can choose to do what Bezos did and ruin the retail market by selling at a loss for 2 decades while playing guile and psyop games with the public; he owns washington post BTW. Amazon is terrified of unions because that means they can't be profitable. Agriculture, Warehousing and logistics are major employers of illegal alien labor; the way Bezos makes money is by undercutting brick and morter retailers' supply chain costs because he doesn't have to hire anyone to run a store.
The reason unions form is management gets abusive; this pandemic is one such instance.
I think unions do good, but they can also be an enemy of progress. Here is a piece about unions that I found on google.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/unneces...
It very much depends on the legal framework that organized workers and organized employers interact in.
The union helped Macys layoff thousands of workers including her with no severance in a nice streamlined fashion. I am wrong, but this is what I learned: Unions are basically fat cat organizations that leach hard working people.
Like democracies, unions suck, but they are not as bad as the alternative -- unless you're the boss or the generalissimo.
It's all unions, all the way down.
There is nothing magic about unions or democracy which means that they guarantee good outcomes. You have to work at it and be involved. In fact everyone has to.
...unless people are literally dying in the factory. Unions were made for worker safety and made sense THEN - not today.
In other shocking news today's capitalists don't wear top-hats and drive around in Rolls Royces: they wear hoodies and drive modest cars.
Regardless, here in the US it is typical for couples to form a partnership in which both income and expenses are shared. Possibly the reason for the recent emergence of the term 'Partner' to describe one's Significant Other.
>My girlfriend worked at Macys
>She was paid
>(She) was in a "union"
>Each month we would walk
>we paid "dues"
>we couldn't pay online
>we handed our check
>throw her check
I was just wondering if there was some hidden twist behind the change of subject, so I asked bluntly.
They won't be able to treat the employees like trash anymore, and profits will go down as a result.
Think about it logically, if the outcome was the opposite (profits go up) Amazon, etc. would love unions.
So it's just a question of whether you want more corporate power and profits, or you want employees to be treated well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/02/amazon-...
if you ask me, that's a pretty dick move for someone. Can't you wait your strike protest after your 14 days of quarantine? just 14 days.
With everyone throwing a fit about pastors and churches gathering together during this, where's the outcry over this guy seemingly rounding up groups of employees to picket?
Is it ok to protest dangerous work conditions by actively creating dangerous protest conditions?
Where did it say he was rounding up groups of employees and picketing?
> throwing a fit
Who is throwing a fit? I thought they were fining and/or arresting pastors that break the law and threaten the safety of entire communities?
(Honest question, I'm not familiar with how organization/ unionization works, or if there's another legitimate reason.)
Have you seen people's reactions to the churches that are still meeting in person? Check out op/eds and letters to the editor in Tampa, Baltimore, and Baton Rouge, just to start. Twitter if you want to see the ugly that is expected from Twitter. But throwing a fit is an understatement.
In other words, is the claim that Chris Smalls was being vocal in reporting safety/health issues and was illegally fired as a result?
Those facts are not even in dispute.
Maybe because it was bullshit and retribution on Amazon's part.
Multiple employees have spoken out about the working conditions at Amazon's warehouse facilities over the last couple of weeks. Common complaints include a lack of protective equipment, sanitization, health monitoring, and working "shoulder to shoulder". Workers are getting sick, and Amazon isn't properly reporting the actual cases of COVID-19 at their facilities.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/26/amazon-warehouse-employees-g...
Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/whole-foods-amazon...
Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/whole-foods-workers-to-strike-...
Mr. Smalls announced ahead of time that he was going to lead a general strike at his facility in solidarity with the instacart and wholefoods strike on the same day. This was reported in the media. Amazon knew this was being organized and waited to fire the worker until after the planned protest strike occurred.
Source: https://apnews.com/cf27e9bec86d846447aad7e632484bea
Here is Mr. Smalls talking about this in detail: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/03/30/staten-island-whole-fo... - All he was asking for was for the building to be sanitized after a confirmed case of COVID-19 occurred at his facility, at Staten Island near the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States in New York.
The attorney general of New York recognized this issue for what it is.
---
New York Attorney General Letitia James said late Monday evening that "it is disgraceful that Amazon would terminate an employee who bravely stood up to protect himself and his colleagues."
"At the height of a global pandemic, Chris Smalls and his colleagues publicly protested the lack of precautions that Amazon was taking to protect them from COVID-19," she said. "Today, Chris Smalls was fired. In New York, the right to organize is codified into law, and any retaliatory action by management related thereto is strictly prohibited."
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/tech/amazon-worker-fired-stat...
---
Here is another article discussing the actual conditions of Mr. Smalls Facility:
---
Despite Amazon’s efforts, Amazon employees at multiple facilities who spoke to CNBC argue that the measures aren’t enough to keep them safe. They say uneven safety precautions at facilities across the country have sown feelings of distrust between workers and their managers. Workers say they’ve become worried that managers aren’t being honest about whether employees are sick with the virus, so that they can keep the facilities open.
At some facilities, workers say essential supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes are rationed or there’s none available, putting them at risk of catching the virus. Warehouse workers say they’re forced to choose between going to work and risking their health or staying home and not being able to pay their bills.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/amazon-fires-staten-island-c...
---
Amazon is in the wrong here. They retaliated against Mr. Smalls. This was a labor movement action, and they illegally fired Mr. Smalls for organizing at this facility.
These workers aren't asking for more money. They are asking for safe and sanitary working conditions. Are they not entitled to a healthy working environment?
Edit: Formatting issues. This was a copy-paste from a comment I made on a /r/business thread on reddit. Formatting on HN is a bit different. :)
Source: https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2014/10/can-you-be-fi...
This is actually quite unclear
It's similar to the way at-will employment works with ADA protected classes - sure, they can fire you, but if you can show that them firing you was because of a protected action (union organizing), you can sue and will likely win.
Given the likely fact that Amazon only cared about quarantine for this individual, only after they organized a strike, and three weeks (!) after exposure, it's pretty clear that what Amazon did here was illegal.
No relation whatsoever.
I think there's more than a few of us who are ready to vote with their dollars.
I think for most consumers, some things are absolutely required in order to switch away from Amazon: fast shipping, an inventory of hard-to-find items (e.g. car part or furnace element typically found on Amazon), a good refunds/returns system, and a massive crackdown on counterfeit products.
That last one is really important to me. Vendors are now filling legit containers of brand name items with fake product, then resealing them as new. This is becoming increasingly common now. I've noticed it with food (Pumpkin seeds, noticed a poor re-seal job), vitamins (a hole in the top seal beneath the cap despite being plastic wrapped), and Clorox bromine tablets for a spa (tablets didn't match store bought version). These products have all been obviously tampered with.
It's Wal-Mart and walmart.com. Oh. Not much better from a workers' rights standpoint than Amazon, I guess...
Our LAN has probably quadruple the amount of needless redundancy.
From an engineering perspective, this makes perfect sense!
But management reacts negatively, maybe even becoming skeptical of your value to the org. Why?
1. The savings you propose are too small to make a significant difference to profitability. $100k is equivalent to between .3 to 1 FTE engineers depending on geography.
2. Someone has to run this project, they will cost money. Engineers will have to be involved, they will cost money. Every project team is going to have to evaluate their usage and provide justification documents, so now the costs are cascading through the org.
3. Remember that the cost of a decision is the sum of the the cost of the thing done plus the cost of the things forgone. People working on this are not working on things customers will pay for—that is, things that get multiplied by many customers now and into the future and differentiates from the competition. This project has its own costs. The savings must be very, very high to compensate for both.
4. It’s hard to imagine how the savings can be sustained without significant new bureaucracy. Every resource allocation is going to have to go through an architecture, implementation, harmonization, and business necessity justification review. That is a lot of new gate keepers.
5. You indicated that teams already “can’t/won’t/don’t communicate.” This means the teams are going to have significant political battles over who owns/runs which resources. Ownership of a the architecture is a tool to bludgeon other departments into compliance—which will make inter-team conflicts worse because they can’t just agree to disagree. Suddenly, one team winning an argument means winning forever.
6. Solving the previous point with better communication is not viable—it would mean solving fundamental problems in organizational management and psychology.
So, what can you do? The fundamental issue here is that the scale of the problem does not match the scale of the organization. Cost saving projects that succeed—like google early on deciding to develop their own servers and racks instead of buying off the shelf—provide a sustaining competitive advantage. Google saves so much money from its infrastructure investments that it lets them build products that would be wildly expensive for others to replicate.
In business language this is referred to as cost leadership. Ferrari has a much lower need for cost leadership than Toyota. Ferrari still needs to contain costs to be profitable, but it primarily competes on differentiated products in a focused market. They might be interested in saving money on aerodynamic simulations so they could do even more of them. But Toyota would quickly go bankrupt if they didn’t make cost leadership part of everything they do—just a few years a failing to improve efficiency would lead to their cars costing many thousands of dollars more than competitors in a market sensitive to price.
Which kind of company do you work for: one that serves the broad market (AWS) or something more niche (IBM Mainframes)? One that competes on price (commercial airlines) or one that competes on differentiated features (private jets)? Craft your project proposals to the business and they may have a much higher probability to getting heard.
It's the type of reply I want to write every time I see misguided comments from people who don't have the full picture of the business and don't even know that they don't have the full picture.
> Where I work, we're basically donating money to the Bezos charity known as AWS at this point.
And ended with:
> And I know we're not alone and that there are other places (even in my immediate geographical area) that have waste well in excess of what we're pissing away.
That was my point. I perfectly (okay, maybe not perfectly, but well enough to understand that it's not worth my time to pursue) understand why and how these things happen, it isn't my first rodeo. And, honestly, I think I'd probably applaud the guy for figuring out how to get _damn near every one in SV_ to open up their fat fucking VC wallets to the man if it weren't for his business practices, like what we see in TFA.
You do sound resentful, though. Is it because you think an aws customer has a moral obligation to divert money they would save in aws costs into salaries for their own employees as opposed to finding aws employees so that bezos doesn't get his cut?
Working for tech in the valley is going to be extremely biased on focused differentiation, so cost containment has a lower priority.
On the other hand, the people I know in logistics and manufacturing are extremely concerned about cost containment. For them, charging more for the product/service is orders of magnitude more difficult than cutting costs—indeed, improving efficiency is often the primary method of growing the company (through lower prices or increased output). Such companies, even ones making hundreds of millions in revenue, would be very interested in proposals that save $100k/year.
If you can’t give two fcks for the workers, do it for tour own consumers’ ass.
Amazon must enforce sanitary and safe working conditions during the COVID19 epidemic lest it becomes itself a source of contagion. More so now that home delivery is so important in the “stay home” strategy.
For fcks sake people, how big a stick do you need before you notice?!
It doesn't.
> The scientists found that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detectable in aerosols for up to three hours, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel.
24 hours is within the time-frame of same-day deliveries at the least. I think OP's point still stands; it's a disease vector.
(Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, but only in proportion to how easy the evidence would be to find if it existed, and how hard we've looked.)
This strikes me as an egregious safety violation and a truly excellent reason to fire the worker.
If there's an egregious safety violation here, it's Amazon corporate who is guilty.
worker was exposed to co-worker with covid-19; Amazon knowingly allowed exposed worker to continue working; when worker found out of the exposure and Amazon's failures worker organized a strike; only after organizing a strike did Amazon require worker to stay home in quarantine.
>This strikes me as an egregious safety violation
Not only a safety violation by Amazon but a Constitutional violation.
Because people who can afford Amazon prime and prices are the most vulnerable
Can be elderly. Family members could very well be buying on Amazon & having it shipped to those in their family +70. This is what I would be doing if my parents were older & nobody was able from the family to deliver to them.
> Because people who can afford Amazon prime
Not everyone has Amazon prime.
The employee was exposed to another employee who tested positive for covid-19. They asked him to stay home with pay for 14 days and he came back to the building to protest, putting other employees at risk.
Re: the OP - this isn't just a throwaway account. It's a pretty obvious agenda beyond just sharing the facts.
I agree that breaking quarantine is bad, but let's look at his side of this. Amazon has the ability to shut down any protest or picket by alleging that an attendee was sick, or that a strike organizer was exposed.
Amazon is crucial right now in maintaining social order. It's one thing to be quarantined at home, but to be quarantined without anything arriving to your house is a quick recipe for riots on the streets. Anyone or anything disrupting this is potentially as dangerous as a famine.
I 100% sympathize with the protestor's plight, but it's an interesting situation.
If a company functioning is a matter of national security, it should be significantly more controlled by the nation.
Target, Walmart, grocery stores, etc. all are able to do curbside pickup and in many cases deliveries via stuff like Instacart.
Amazon isn't the only option.
Instacart is not the only game in town, either.
Amazon isn't exactly a champion of taking care of your employees, so yeah, you go guys.
Having a private company and having it's employees banned from striking is really contradictory ideologically and dysfunctional. If a company is private, then the employees should be able to have their private right to strike.
It's been done before, numerous times.
The Taft-Hartley Act has been around for a long, long time. Among other things, it gives the President power to order workers in an essential industry back on the job if they strike.
I wasn't able to quickly find the current total number of times it's been invoked, but here's a WaPo article about Jimmy Carter using it in 1978. Even at that date, it had been used 34 times.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/03/07/p...
I learned about this stuff in history class. Did you not? If not, perhaps you should ask yourself why that is.
And maybe you should ask yourself what exactly you're accomplishing by downmodding factual, noninflammatory comments just because you don't like the facts.
Corporate employees have never had more leverage than they do right now.
Google employees organized largely online, internally and did just this. And the situation at Amazon for low wage workers is arguably worse.
If workers at Amazon are legitimately motivated to do this, there’s not much that can stop them. Also, firing workers on top of workers for organizing tends to not play out very well in the courts and Amazon HQ people are well-paid enough to find good lawyers.
I don't actually know the answer. But in general, I'm guessing that you can't end a strike by ordering all employees to stay home and then firing them if they don't.
More morally hazardous of course, but I don't think anyone would really even challenge the cause here (it's trivially easy to argue that this behavior shows they would endanger workers within the workplace as well).
This obviously an illegal retaliatory firing. Amazon is running domestic sweatshops where they don't even provide basic PPE during a global pandemic, and he was the leader trying to get that gear.
Seriously - what goes through the head of somebody who posts a comment siding with management in a situation like this? I literally can't understand why you'd think to post something like this, unless you're an Amazon executive or shareholder and only care about short term face/profit. Otherwise - why the reactionary take?
I just find this level of obedience to authority baffling. It's endemic in the United States, which otherwise prides itself on it's "maverick" status - except when it comes to shocking levels of obedience and servitude to the police and to market forces.
EDIT: I looked up this user and he is an Amazon employee, which explains this bizarre take. Given Amazon's policy of paying employees to say nice things about the company online, even when they work in unrelated departments, I think we should seriously consider warning/banning users who engage in astroturfing for their employers on HackerNews.
It doesn't help your argument to frame it in hyperbolic terms. Amazon pays a minimum wage of $15/hour, every warehouse is air conditioned, they now offer paid time off to every worker who works >20 hours a week, they have substantial career advancement training and education benefits, they have health benefits and matching 401k program, 20 weeks paid parental leave.
I mean, come on. There might be some legitimate problems, but when you call it a sweatshop, you've already lost the argument.
I mean, come on. What would take for you to piss into bottle at your work instead of going to toilet.
But that's the price you pay for a job that has no requirements beyond being able to use your hands.
"Yeah, they're really disgusting on ice, aren't they?"
Amazon will keep exploiting everyone they can until they are sued and independently monitored into compliance. Go ahead and pretend all those benefits are the result of Amazon management realizing on their own that they can be good to their people. Every one is either settlements, PR dusting, or mandatory after being caught at prior abuses.
No respect for anyone at Amazon who drinks or spouts the company kool-aid.
You're arguing that shaving off a couple minutes a day is worth the loss of human dignity that these workers experience.
And when we talk huge sums of money, morality often is tossed out of the window first.
I don't really see it that way. In my view, small businesses abuse their employees just dramatically more than large businesses.
For a small business, a single employee may be the only person working the till. The employee simply won't be allowed to go to the bathroom at all except during designated times.
Instead of giving them safety gear, they've fired the lead organizer.
They only reason they have any of the rights and conditions you described in the first place is because of organization and agitation, not their generosity.
The end result of letting authoritarian capitalism into the global marketplace can be seen in the conditions of Amazon warehouses in the United States. I'm certainly not the only person to say this, their own employees do as well. Hint - that's why they're organizing.[1]
BUT - more to the point - why post this? Are you an Amazon employee as well? If not - why? I just can't fathom in a situation like this why you'd feel the need to list - from memory? - all of the employee benefits that Amazon provides to its warehouse workers.
[1] https://nypost.com/2019/11/30/amazon-warehouses-are-cult-lik...
There aren't any masks and gloves available to anyone.
> "Are you an Amazon employee as well?"
Just a reminder that that sort of question violates the HN guidelines.
I mean, for N95, maybe. Surgical masks you can buy from China. On Amazon. They'll ship by air mail, but I'm sure Amazon could get them even quicker.
20 weeks maternity leave, and that for mothers who were with Amazon for > 1 year (I believe it was 4 week pre-delivery and 16 weeks after). For fathers it was 12 weeks, at least until last December.
They identify with management, because they want to be there one day. They see themselves on "the side" of the managers and those in control, and try to view things from that perspective.
It's the same reason you have poor voters who support tax cuts for the rich, even if those tax cuts mean the government can materially do less for them. They don't perceive themselves as users of the welfare state, but as soon-to-be wealthy folks.
Their view is well represented here.
It's not like the guy was violating a reasonable quarantine; he was violating a retaliatory silencing "quarantine" outside of guidelines.
FWIW, this is a really patronizing view of poor people. An alternative hypothesis is that some people vote based on principles, whether it personally benefits them or not.
There are many people that don't see the government as an ATM machine, and think that its role should be limited.
Having said that, my opinions are a little more pro-corporate than most of the commenters here due to my personal experience.
The abuses you're worried about are real in principle. The problem is, internet users are a thousand (nay, a million) times too quick to become aggressive about them, which ends up causing a lot more harm than the things they're fighting.
In particular, (1) most people are posting in good faith, even if they happen to be defending their employers; and (2) most internet comments about astroturfing have no foundation. On that last point: if you saw as much data on this as we do, you'd be shocked at how made up and imaginary they are; having studied this closely for years, I can tell you that it's nearly 100% projection. In both of these cases, the putative cures causes more harm than the putative diseases.
The point about not attacking people because of their employers is particularly important. HN has members working for lots of different employers, and one's work tends to be the thing one knows the most about. The last thing we want on this site is a climate of hostility to disincentivize people from posting to threads where they might know something. I'm not talking about this thread (which I haven't read), I'm saying that in general, it's a super bad tradeoff to tolerate this sort of soft-doxxing on HN, so we don't.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Oh and by the way: HN has reams of anti-Amazon discussion and pro-union discussion. Indeed the top comment on the current thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739059) is a counterexample to what you're saying, and meanwhile the comment you were complaining about was highly downvoted. Such perceptions of HN being biased against one's view are notoriously unreliable; the people who hold opposite views see the community as biased in just the opposite way, and are just as sure about it. You (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) can't trust your ad hoc observations about this, because your pre-existing opinions condition what you notice and how strongly you weight it. It is a well-known cognitive bias, a flaw that we all suffer from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
From this distance, while we may all have our respective sympathies, both stories are plausible and we don't really know. It is abundantly obvious that companies generally find reasons (legitimate or otherwise) to fire those advocating for a union, but it isn't exactly unheard of for an employee knowing they are facing termination or disciplinary action for legitimate reasons to cover that over with some socially-acceptable reason like various claims of discrimination or starting a union like this, etc. It's not a secret hack nobody's ever heard of.
Edit: See boiled cabbage's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739059 More data can bring more clarity.
- How many employees did they quarantine in that facility?
- Were all employees exposed to the original worker quarantined?
- How long after exposure--i.e. was Smalls later, or were others quarantined at (roughly) the same time?
- Who makes the call to quarantine workers, and what discretion do they have?
I don't necessarily expect Amazon to have all those facts available immediately. I do think that they must provide them if they wish to have any credibility.
If you do, aren't you required to disclose as such by Amazon, in addition to a disclaimer that this is your personal opinion and you are not representing Amazon's official view here, when publicly commenting on Amazon-related issues?