Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer
vice.com
vice.com
Strategy: “We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety,” Zapolsky wrote. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”
As applied: “I was frustrated and upset that an Amazon employee would endanger the health and safety of other Amazonians by repeatedly returning to the premises after having been warned to quarantine himself after exposure to virus Covid-19,” he said. “I let my emotions draft my words and get the better of me.”
What a pathetic excuse from the General Counsel of one of the world's most powerful firms when caught engaging in employee retaliation. This isn't acceptable from any lawyer.
Better to make the world's worst excuse than lie in a way that'll instantly be revealed in discovery for any case that comes of this.
The surprise is that he let himself be reached for comment at all. Between that and the "yeah, I sure goofed it, huh?" style of what he said when he was, I wouldn't be too astonished to see a golden handshake eventuate in the fullness of time.
this could work, too, as long as you forget that drafting words seems to literally be his job (for which i'm sure he's handsomely rewarded).
odd edit: Just in case. I was kinda doing a fair amount of shorts on Amazon lately, so my opinion is not unbiased.
I looked online and I was only able to find one example of what I was thinking of ( https://awwmemes.com/i/spreads-message-of-anti-capitalism-fr... ). The one I remember was equally silly along the lines of "hates banks, uses money = hypocrite".
I will keep digging, because I know what I am looking for and it is not ancient history. I should have it somewhere.
It's like saying:
"Kidnapped victim runs away by shooting the captor's knee...
with the captor's gun, hypocrite much?!"
The message sticks with you. Look at me. It has been years now and I just remember the message despite not remembering the exact words.
Just for that reason alone I was surprised/grateful, I did not see that great a push from ad industry to use memes yet. There are clearly some thinly disguised ads, but the various communities tends to weed them out fast.
I do remember it popping up in a lot of places with anti-OWS message and I just found it interesting in terms of timing and how the subject was basically designed to be hated at the time. Like I said, it is this meme template. I can't find the one with exact wording, which is why it got my attention back then. It does not help that I don't remember the exact phrase.
I will add as a general note that memes are ridiculously easy to create and disseminate en masse. You can obviously create metric ton of variants and see what sticks best. To your point, they can be done Fox News types, Apple-haters, dog-lovers, apple pickers, you name it and tracking its origin can be genuinely hard.
1.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2063843/Occupy-Wall...
I think the ability to leak information about the wrongdoing of corporations or governments is extremely important, but most of the leaks I see coming out of the tech industry seem designed just to score points in some internal political war or push the company in the direction that the leaker wants it to go. Or just for some weird form of self-aggrandizement
I wouldn't call this a leak unless the news agency paid him or something else that benefited him.
I was able to develop enough variations that vastly outnumbered our users though, so even with just a portion of a screenshot, you could fairly easily figure out where it came from.
Just looking at possible CSS rules and you can see where the variations come into play - cell width, border width and styles, font color(e.g. the specific green or red that represents gain/loss), kerning, column placement , etc.
On top of that, I only fudged with display elements - the numbers were never changed. However, the numbers were updated on a near-continuous basis by ingesting various logs, so any column that was live(year/month-to-date, etc) would have only a very small time range where that number could have been displayed to the user.
Now when a leak happens of a specific number, you just check the logs to see who saw those exact numbers.
On the other hand, news outlets that receive leaks are typically well aware of these techniques and will act to frustrate them. When you see a leak reported on but not directly published, that's why. If you want to evaluate veracity, a good method is to look at any response made by the source. In this case, it's legit; if it weren't, the Amazon GC would say so. He's not going to lie in a way that discovery will make immediately obvious in any case that comes of this, so he made the world's worst excuse instead. The surprise is that he let himself be reached for comment at all - between that and the "yeah, I sure did goof it, huh?" style of what he said when he was, I wouldn't be too astonished to see a golden handshake eventuate in the fullness of time.
Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting.
Creating fact focused journalism is a laudible goal but I'd be curious of what specific time in history you think that this was generally the case?
These days, you can't start with the assumption that a story is written to J standards. Rather, you need to start with the assumption that it's pushing narrative, and hope to be surprised.
More personally, I took a J class during this period and wrote for a school newspaper. The instructor talked about J standards the way NRA instructors talk about gun safety--it was practically a religion.
These days, if you want facts, you have to plumb the cesspools of the right and the left and work it out for yourself.
I could be wrong but I think the far bigger difference from then to today is not the quality of the journalism out of mainstream outlets but that the plethora of outlets available has removed the necessity of consensus myth making. Instead of a collected national myth that Americans share they can now choose their own myth.
They used to have to bend their views somewhat towards the major news because people seek to resolve their cognitive dissonance. Now they can change the channel. As an example, my parents are conservative and when Walter Cronkite criticized the Vietnam War and journalists put direct images of the conflict on TV they praised that. Yet when mainstream news which had generally backed the war in Iraq began to report on things going wrong there my parents were livid. When news outlets began reporting on soldiers dying and reading the names of the dead they were even angrier. Nevermind that the news was unable to air the kinds of direct footage of war they had in the 60s because the military had become much savier about the kinds of situations they let reporters into.
I think major news had almost the exact same, pro establishment, upper middle class ivy league bias it has today. I just think it's easier to confirm a contrary opinion. If Fox News existed in the sixties I think it would've run with slander stories about MLK for example and might've hampered Civil Rights. But they didn't exist and general regard for MLK as a hero became the default myth.
Again, I could be wrong but I think it's a perspective worth putting up against the common narrative.
And it seems to have become acceptable (on both left and right) for a news room to try to "get" a sitting President that they don't like, even if the result is sloppy journalism.
My impressions is that serious retractions (or worse, serious errors without retractions) are far more common now than thirty years ago.
As for MLK, even knowing what we do now, I still consider him a hero. But yeah, journalistic coverage of him back then was pretty uncritical.
Not saying that this problem never existed in the past, but it is far far worse now.
Go watch Walter Cronkite's reporting on the Kennedy assassination. He and his news room is just reporting the facts as they get them with no editorialization or agenda.
There's not a specific moment in time. There are specific innovations that accelerated and commodified the dissemination of facts, which each contributing to this decline in journalistic integrity and greater faithfulness to facts.
So is your gripe generally applies to all contemporary journalism or specifically with CNN and Fox News? Isn't it just as likely that legacy news sources are still doing the news pretty much the way they always have but that the availability of alternative sources has allowed people to diverge their opinion from a mainstream one more than they could before? (Which I'm not saying is good or bad. I think it likely has benefits and drawbacks.)
Case in point: The Economist. Certainly one of the historically and currently most respected publications.
The Econsomist never claimed not to be biased. In fact they proudly produce opinion journalism.
The point, however, is that their reporting is fair and considers the other side of the argument and that the're absolutely open about where they stand.
Foreign Policy is another good example coming to mind.
News is produced by humans and humans have biases and always will have.
What's new is massive lying on an industrial scale and the fact that facts seem very relative nowadays, depending on the news medium.
I think in some respects we're better off now. An outlet like The Intercept couldn't exist 40 years ago. They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.
Our old media system had the benefit that it helped create a fairly singular truth for people to follow. But it created what I think was equal to the massive lying you are concerned about by just not reporting on lots of stuff.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/why-doe...
I definitely agree that having a much larger ecosystem of news outlets is a big plus of the current era. One can almost watch the flow as things get leaked/scooped on obscure sites, and then often end up after a period of days/weeks/months on one of the "real" sites. (The Damore story and internal Google message traffic is an example.)
The downside is that it's a real grab bag of good stuff, junk, agitprop, and so on. In effect, we've all become journalists, in charge of sifting and verifying information to assemble a NPV story.
Journalists these days limit their fact-finding to what tweets they can dig up.
Which is kind of a depressing turn on what was once one of the American journalistic epics about the power of truth. Obviously it's hard to generalize, but it does seem to me that this is part of the advantage governments and companies see in a free press - it's a way to launder information, so you can be in every way obviously a rat, but have the voice of a trusted, independent organization.
I don't know if the watergate scandal was characteristic. Certainly, it's an extreme example. But if politicians and statesmen couldn't play journalists, why would they invite them to every occasion? If journalists were investigators in the sense that police are investigators - powerful people would quickly learn to shun them, just as criminals avoid every possible interaction with the police. Seems to me that investigative journalism is, in the final analysis, a way of giving credibility to a process that is at best haphazard and informal, and at worst, simple propaganda.
To do so without commentary or comparison to factual reality is a kind of bias but feels neutral because it doesn't create contention in an individual's mind. There are exceptions such as Cronkite's broadcast after the Tet Offensive which I am not lauding or criticizing here, only to say it was out of the norm.
I didn't realize marine pollution had gotten so bad.
They mean eloquent, not "articulate".
That meaning is fine. What makes you think Zapolsky is wrong?
As far as I can tell this guy is a freaking PR genius. He managed to turn a leak into another chance to ram home his message.
The entire Vice article is ridiculous. People trying to organise a union smear their employers all the time, it's rather inherent in the task. Employers smearing back is now shocking behaviour? Double standards are rife.
...Until events unfold more, we cannot speculate as to the charges (if any) will be brought against Amazon.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/nlrb-suspends-unionizing-am...
All of this evidence would have been found as part of discovery if there would have been real litigation, anyway, so I doubt it's going to be particularly painful for Amazon.
The exception was in the very beginning a few books. After they apruptly changed their privacy policy that did it for me.
They're trying to make the whole movement look dumb by proxy, or that anyone who joined the movement is dumb because they're following a dumb guy. The public PR angle is that only a dumb stupid babbling person would deny the goodness that Amazon does for its employees and try to organize a walkout.
I think it's interesting the contrast with the SVP who said he let his emotions got the better of him. If the union guy says something not-smart, he's dumb and the whole movement is dumb. If the SVP says something not-smart, he was just trying to protect the workers.
Agreed with GP that the other parts of the memo about obtaining and distributing masks don’t sound so bad at all, especially if they actually translate it into safer environments at warehouses and surrounding communities.
In general, I wish companies who want to avoid unions just treated their workers well enough that they don’t want to unionize — seems like the most straight up way to “fight” unions. It’s akin to simply improving your product to get more users instead of employing dark patterns or grey hat SEO.
That's pretty clearly not the case. Unions aren't about being 'treated well' in so many cases, they're about granting power to the union organisers.
Look at Kickstarter. They got a union because they took down a project that was violating their own terms of service by fund-raising for political violence. The union organisers primary aim was literally to force Kickstarter to support violence against conservatives. Being treated well had nothing to do with it. Look at Google. A pampered workforce, talking of unionising to try and force the organisation even further to the left.
Smart managers fight unions with everything they've got, or else the most hard-left workers they've got will take over the company by force and subvert it to evil political ends.
Before liberals downvote me. Conservative media does this too. In fact, journalism these days regardless of political views is riddled with making someone look bad to score cheap points. One of the most toxic more recent developments is taking particularly unflattering still images from high definition video to present someone as dumb, stupid, angry or any of the myriad emotions one might present in the course of existing while filmed.
Making your opponent look bad is sadly par for the course pretty much everywhere these days from politics to corporate PR to social media debates on facebook and twitter. Heck, you see it here on HN too these days. Certainly far more than in the past.
Also complaining about downvoting usually just leads to downvotes...
I'm wasn't counting, but I must be close to a 3 year no-Amazon streak. Who's with me?
It was fucking horrifying reading up on that practice. It freaks me out to even type out this stuff but it's all true.
Of course it'll be many years or decades before we have any real clarity on that, but if it works, and if it's a negligible, non-risky amount of blood donated by each person which also isn't risky for the recipient, and if it can be afforded, it really feels very ignorant not to sign up, to me. They just need to lower the costs so ordinary people can easily partake as well, not just super wealthy people.
Obviously giving away an organ is far more health-adverse than giving away a small amount of plasma. Unfortunately, lots of people already do donate plasma in exchange for money because they desperately need the money, and that's just for plasma that goes to sick people. In my opinion, if rich people are offering those same plasma donors 10x or more than the amount they'd get from donating to a typical blood bank, then it's at least a big improvement over the current situation. And hopefully they put limits and ID checks in place to ensure people never donate above a certain amount of plasma per day/week/month and risk their health.
Hopefully we'll one day be able to grow or synthesize the youth-preserving compounds in the plasma without requiring the donors.
How, exactly? If you know someone else received what you believe to be the same document, what's the disincentive?
Is it mostly a matter of attempting to not give away any indication of who else may have received it, so that no one knows who could be a candidate to compare with? Or including some amount of explicitly-marked data specific to the recipient which they somehow would have difficulty censoring before sharing?
He threw himself under the bus.
Definition from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/smear...: "to publicly accuse someone of something unpleasant, unreasonable, or unlikely to be true in order to harm their reputation"
Second definition from https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/smearing: "the making of false statements that damage another's reputation "
From the article itself, which quotes meeting notes written ostensibly by "Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky":
> “He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,”
This statement from the notes is not accusing the former employee in question of anything, and it is not making false statements about him either. It is expressing an opinion. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Furthermore, this article and others from Vice, Vox, Huffington Post, and others are proving why Amazon does not want to explain for the "umpteenth time" what they are doing in response to the virus. There is only so much that can be done within the confines of a physical operation like an Amazon warehouse, and it is crucial that online stores keep operating at this time, so that shoppers stay home.
And yet, all these articles make it seem like Amazon has done nothing. In actuality, apart from providing industry leading wages for warehouse workers, Amazon has increased baseline pay, overtime pay, and enacted numerous reasonable changes to alter the operations of their warehouse. Vice buries one of the most interesting bits, which is how Amazon has been trying to get PPE but has had difficulties:
> Zapolsky’s notes imply the company’s attempts to purchase N95 masks from China fell through. “China has deemed N95 masks as ‘strategic,’” Zapolsky wrote. “They’re keeping them for optionality. They also want to use them for ‘diplomacy.’ The masks in China that we thought we had probably got redirected by profiteers.”
Even the "protests" outside Amazon's warehouses in response to this news story are overblown. For instance https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-chris-smalls-walko... notes that although activists claimed there were 50 employees protesting, the actual count was 15, and only 9 of those were Amazon employees. Yet mainstream left-leaning media keeps amplifying this story.
In actuality, it appears Amazon has been continuously attempting to improve working conditions, and were finally able to get masks based on orders they placed weeks ago - well before the recent social media / left-leaning journalists' attacks on Amazon began. See https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/02/amazon-begins-running-temp... for more on that:
> Amazon has already described some precautions it’s been taking, including mandatory paid 14-day quarantines for employees who test positive, as well as increased cleaning and sanitation efforts of facilities and infrastructure. The new measures to be introduced next week include taking temperatures of employees at the entrances to warehouses, with any individuals with a fever of more than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit to be sent home, where they’ll have to have three consecutive days without fever to return to work. Employees will also be provided with surgical masks starting next week, the company says, once it receives shipments of orders of “millions” placed a few weeks ago.
Lastly, everyone seems to ignore that this employee violated a direct work order to not come on site, because he had been in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Regardless of what people speculate about Amazon's reasons for firing this person, no one seems to be disputing that this employee violated a requirement to not come to the work site. That is clearly grounds for termination, irrespective of other considerations.
So can we please stop sharing these low quality articles over and over on Hacker News?
Keep asking why. Why was this worker ordered to stay home. Was it because he had a brief, 5 minute contact with a covid-19 patient? Other news outlets say that Smalls was unique in his being sent home.
Or maybe was it because he was pushing for a union and the company wanted to find a way to keep him out. Given the article, the latter seems FAR more likely.
The "5 minute" contact argument doesn't make any sense to me, and only works to weaken his case. To my knowledge there is no minimum time requirement for virus transmission, so this argument comes across as naive.
If five minutes of exposure is really that big of a threat - perhaps it is? - then why does Amazon care about their employees so much that they waited weeks to act and then only sent a tiny number of people home?
Now is your chance to organize and prove this is true. Google employees did it and so can you.
It’s thus hard not to see attempts to frame him as “not smart” or “ not articulate” as classist and racist dog whistles intended to discredit a courageous man.
not a term that is scientifically accepted when discussing humans
If you want to be a credulous dupe and think that the richest man in the world and his highly-paid PR team don’t understand this history and context, be my guest.