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Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

We should apply rigor to both sides. Each has incentive to cherry pick and mislead.

> 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...

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I really hate it when people use he said/she said type arguments to pretend that they are being objective and 'rigorous'.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's weird that you mention courts and then in the next sentence say this:

>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.

Exactly. When taken to court the plaintiff would have an easy time acquiring records of quarantine counts. In that case the "burden of proof" could somewhat be seen as being on Amazon, but really it's the court allowing the accusor to get such proof. (that is, some guy doesn't have to go around and ask everyone he worked with if they were quarantined, Amazon has to give him the information).

> 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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_%28law%29

Preponderance of evidence is the bar that must be met. But the plaintiff must provide the evidence to the courts. The discovery process makes some of the defendant's records available to the plaintiff, in case there is relevant evidence.

But if the plaintiff produces no evidence, Amazon does not need to make a defense. Thus OP is correct.

> But the plaintiff must provide the evidence to the courts

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.

Yes, exactly. If the only evidence presented demonstrates that the plaintiff was organizing, that Amazon learned that he was organizing, and after that point Amazon fired the plaintiff they would very likely have met a preponderance of evidence burden. It sounds like none of those facts are even in dispute.

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.

Fallacious. A headache is evidence of a brain tumor, but there's not a 51% chance you have a brain tumor. You've satisfied some necessary conditions for retaliatory action, but haven't converted that into a probability.

You have a reasonable indication, but no preponderance of evidence. You probably have enough for discovery.

Preponderance of the evidence is only used in arbitration, if he's suing then this is litigation. In reality, if he has a contract requiring arbitration or mediation instead of litigation then he has absolutely no power and no chance of winning because arbitratators/mediators are always hired by the company.

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.

That's not what "mediation" is. Mediation is never binding.

A quick google search says preponderance of the evidence is the standard of proof for most civil cases, so your assertion that it is only used in arbitration seems to be incorrect.

And arbitrators are always required to be agreed on by both parties.

> Preponderance of the evidence is only used in arbitration, if he's suing then this is litigation

This sentence is simply false.

Isn't the firing an accusation in and of itself and as such the burden of proof is on the company?

Absolutely; it's Amazon that are making the accusations here.

Firing someone isn't asking a court to do something. Companies can fire you for all sorts of silly reasons and most of them aren't illegal. The employee is accusing the company of firing them for one of the illegal reasons.

> 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.

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.

The standard for evidence for a corporation is indeed higher in court. That does not apply to the court of public opinion and social media.

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.

> There is a reason that the courts have something called 'burden of proof'.

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 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.

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.

Isn’t that casualty just an assertion? Proving that sequence of events played a role in the firing is the whole point.

Yes, but it is a sliding scale. Firing someone after organizing a strike would suggest sufficient prima facie to pursue the case in court. A claim without the appearance of supporting evidence would be thrown out.

That doesn't really work. If it did then anyone who knows they're about to get fired could just start organizing a strike. Or start organizing a strike as cover before purposely causing mischief.

Which would be discovered in court...

I think your confused. OP isn't suggesting that Amazon is guilty, but that there is enough evidence to warrant investigating what happened.

This isn't a criminal proceeding. The people who "investigate" a civil case are the plaintiffs, who don't need to be motivated by evidence in order to start investigating.

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.

> This isn't a criminal proceeding. The people who "investigate" a civil case are the plaintiffs, who don't need to be motivated by evidence in order to start investigating.

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.

> No one is saying anything about proof or guilt.

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.

Discovery is also the only way for a case of this nature to move forward. If it worked as you say it did, companies would be impervious to these sorts of lawsuits.

> 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.

> Discovery is also the only way for a case of this nature to move forward. If it worked as you say it did, companies would be impervious to these sorts of lawsuits.

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.

And I really hate it when people distort well-defined ideas like "burden of proof" to mean whatever they want it to mean, especially whatever is most advantageous to their worldview.

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.

> then retaliation is the reason 90% of the time.

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if the guy who posted it above is actually working for amazon to manipulate the situation. Introducing controversy is an actual technique used to discredit people.

Everybody is pretty clear about amazons reputation towards their employees, including software engineers.

>Is this confirmed? You can't just assume this to be true.

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.

> 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.

No, at most it sounds like retaliation.

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.

> No, at most it sounds like retaliation.

Full paid leave is not what most people in the US would call retaliation, particularly in the case of a warehouse worker.

The retaliation part is where they got fired.

He got fired for showing up to work when he was told to stay home.

So what's your solution then, companies can just tell employees to stay home for no valid when they try to plan a strike or organize, and then fire them if they still try to do so?

It's unclear whether there was "no valid reason" or not in this case. But if they're paying the employee to stay home (like Amazon was in this case) it's hard for me to see a huge problem.

The issue is that this prevents him from organizing strikes effectively. That is very problematic.

To me, this seems like retaliation, but he offered Amazon plausible deniability by not complying with job instructions. If you're told to work from home but you refuse, it seems within reason that you might be let go.

I don't know that he can work from home, as a fulfillment center employee. It seems to me that Amazon was just trying to find a way to keep him away from other workers in order to collapse strike efforts. And I don't know that it's reasonable for a company to bar you from the office if you're trying to get the company unionized.

How about not trying to organize a strike in the middle of a national emergency? Is that an option?

You realize why he wanted to organize a strike right? Amazon knew that one of his co-workers was infected, and said and did nothing.

Hosing everybody -- your company, your coworkers, your customers, yourself -- with a strike isn't the way to address that issue.

We have these things called "courts" that are well-suited to addressing complaints like this one.

You sound like you have it all figured out, perhaps you can point at which law amazon violated.

Honestly, it's not a good look for them if they tried to order him into quarantine 18 days after his exposure. I can't defend that based on what I've read from the Amazon supporters here.

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.

Its a shame they didn't seek your approval to make sure it was the appropriate time to strike, when the least amount of people would be upset, after all strikes are definitely not about inconveniencing people.

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.

> The only worse thing he could have done would be to try to lead a strike during a world war.

That’s how we came to have employer-provided healthcare:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...

Did you read the article you linked to? Employer-provided insurance had nothing to do with strikes or unions. It became popular as a way to improve competition in the job market in the presence of wartime wage controls.

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.

> You realize why he wanted to organize a strike right? Amazon knew that one of his co-workers was infected, and said and did nothing.

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.

And if we was told to stay home because to prevent unionizing, that's retaliation. Intent matters in law.

> And if we was told to stay home because to prevent unionizing,

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.

over and over in this thread you have been repeatedly told that amazon waited well over 2 weeks to "quarantine" him (and only him, nobody else that was exposed) despite knowing he was exposed (and also did not tell him).

Yet in every post you make, you continue to misrepresent the situation.

You are being hugely dishonest

No, of course not. The employee complains about not being quarantined for 14 days after exposure. That makes sense. The only way to fix that was to have made a better decision. Quarantining him 18 days later is entirely pointless and adresses nothing.

> Even if they did quarantine others, putting someone on a 14 day quarantine 17 days after contact is hard to explain.

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.

Why are they quarantining people because they may have been in contact with the virus but did not quarantine people they know were in contact with the virus?

Could be the usual bureaucratic reasons. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Or the left hand is correct and they should all be quarantined and the mistake wasn't sending this guy home, it was not sending the others home too.

If these reasons exist, the company put lives at risk for weeks and then fired someone for doing the same thing for one day. Many members of management should have been fired before Monday for this to seem legitimate.

Not necessarily. Choosing whether to quarantine people is a judgement call, but going into work after being ordered not to is insubordination and trespass.

>Choosing whether to quarantine people is a judgement call,

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.

> This judgment call changed.

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.

This is just wrong, this disease was not some mystery three weeks ago and implying that the Amazon managers just learned of the dangers last weekend is absurd.

Three weeks ago there were less than 5000 known cases in the US, now there are about a quarter of a million and the most in the world. The idea that what we know now is equivalent to what we knew then is absurd. Three weeks ago there was some hope it could be contained using ordinary measures.

They'd have been smarter to respond to it sooner, but better late than never.

The US declared a national emergency on the thirteenth. Every day past that in which they did not quarantine the employee is a far greater risk than the day he came in. And the idea that they didn't understand the risks until the 28th is ridiculous.

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?

Statements like this sound so reasonable but they ignore the massive power imbalance. Amazon is the largest company in the world whose owner has literally bought news papers. Given that power I’m way more likely to believe the workers...

By what measure is Amazon the largest company in the world? It’s not by market cap, employee count, revenue, earnings, or any other measure I can think of.

I'm guessing this was unintentional by GP, but it's probably true that amazon is the largest company in the world where the founder also owns a major newspaper.

I think we should lean toward the workers, take them seriously and investigate. But it's unwise to go beyond the facts. If claims turn out to be false it'll damage the believability of victims in the future. Being prudent is necessary to have believability tilted in their direction over the long term.

Completely agree, it's just a tough line sometimes.

Moreover, Amazon has a long history of unethical and often illegal repression against its workers, so there's that.

Yes, but in the case one side is well known for abusing the other side, the benefit of the doubt goes to the abused.

Amazon has an abusive culture. Let's not "both sides" that out of existence, shall we?

Ordering quarantine 3 weeks after exposure is the the big one.

When a strike leader gets fired over some bullshit like this you really have to be a sap to take the company's side this seriously.

One side has a long history of labour abuses however. It would be different if it was Patagonia or Columbia and they had a history of treating people great

Amazon has a really good reputation for treating its warehouse employees well so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. /s.

Obviously, I mean the opposite ; )

You aren’t being rigorous at all, you are just asking questions and have no idea about the answers.

asking questions when you know the answers is pretty pointless, innit

It's the Socratic method and foundation is of our trial justice system.

Well there's a difference between asking questions with the actual intent to find the answers, and asking just in order to 'both sides' a discussion without contributing any new information. The latter is more akin to sealioning, really.

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