Comment by dillondoyle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dillondoyle | Hacker News Reader

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There are a couple mentions but no top comments: Amazon has installed a mailbox at their facility, this mail piece specifically says to use it.

AND this mail piece says 'BE DONE by 3/1' when workers have until the end of the month to vote (context: amazon must stop anti-union mandatory meetings etc during voting).

This could be a legal violation & is a big deal. I think at a minimum breaks the spirit of the NLRB mail-in voting ruling.

HN seems to consider big tech = oppressive surveillance. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

This is also the latest in a long list of extreme tactics some aren't mentioned in this article. To name a few:

Amazon also fired an activist who was speaking out. It's been reported Amzn has been penalizing pro-union employees with baseless and unfair management penalties/'strikes' and purposeful last minute over-time demands as punishment. Digital surveillance. Management basically stalking associates in break rooms, asking if they are only there to organize and attorneys and consultants drawing graph person relationship research charts to map their employees. A big propaganda push online & a pretty successful press drive - most of these articles Amazon gets many inches of positive talking points.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18277322/amazon-fired-warehous... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/22/how-amazon-is-fighting-back-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/02/amazon-...

They hired actual fucking Pinkertons, which says enough about how aggressive they are. The gloves have been off for a while now.

Pinkerton are the corporate security company of choice for a lot of organisations...including Facebook

Things that don't make me feel better about something:

"No it's actually ok, facebook also does it."

I most definitely wasn't endorsing them. I know their historical reputation. I was just suggesting it's interesting that FB use them also.

Perhaps you are unaware that the Pinkertons have a long history of union busting behavior. The most infamous being their involvement in the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike.

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

Thanks I've spent more than a decade working with civil society groups including union organising. The comment was made to highlight that Pinkerton are working with Facebook (amongst others) thus Facebook may also be concerned about union organising. Esp with Pinkertons past record.

Love how all these people rushed to tell you who Pinkerton are and what they do.

In case you’re not aware, Pinkerton was a prominent security company which gained a reputation for literally murdering labor organizers. For context.

Thanks I've spent more than a decade working with civil society groups including labour organising ones. The comment was made to highlight that Pinkerton are working with Facebook (amongst others) thus Facebook may also be concerned about union organising. Esp with Pinkertons past record.

And one with a long, long history of violent union busting.

Pinkerton is the union-busting company of choice for Amazon. Amazon has its own very expansive security apparatus.

There are a lot of security companies that have a less storied past than Pinkerton that they could have chosen, particularly in the area of unions.

I think moderators should have responded to the replies here, this is why "assume good intent" or however it's called is in HN rules.

Yes that's what I meant. Unfort people take it another way.

The core of the issue is that people don't believe a company that big would break the law so easily. In reality it's the opposite: When you're that big breaking the law becomes really easy because you have the strongest legal defence. Amazon won't see a single minute of court time for this.

To add to that, fines can and do bankrupt small businesses. I cannot remember the last time a big company went bankrupt by fines. Breaking the law poses existential threat to small businesses, not large enterprises.

Fines should be proportional to income. They're supposed to be a deterrent, not a revenue source.

Companies play a lot of games to minimize income for tax reasons. Allowing them do do the same with fines is unreasonable.

It’s actually fairly difficult to get an objective measurement of a companies size. Go by total sales and industries with high profit margins look much smaller. Go by number of employees and retail looks vastly larger than tech companies etc.

Go by market cap (for public companies). The markets are pretty effective at valuing companies.

/me looks at GameStop

There's tens of thousands of publicly traded companies worldwide, and one company having some weird fluctuations for a period of a few days at a time is a tiny little rounding error. This is the exception that proves the rule. All the other metrics proposed by Retric have worse edge cases than this, which they pointed out.

Market cap has several issues. Most companies are private. The market cap is likely to tank before any major fine. Company size is a proxy for how much stuff their doing so a minor fine for an individual restaurant is wildly overkill applied all of McDonalds revenue.

Finally, it promotes using lots of subsidiaries to firewall risks from fines which adds a lot of pointless overhead to the economy.

I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm saying it's the best we have. What alternative are you suggesting? The problem of private companies applies to every metric you can think of, as none of those metrics are private!

But... they like the stock

I've been saying this for years. It's refreshing to see someone else hold the same opinion.

Having arbitrary amounts that don't scale is both bribery and slavery. A speeding ticket for example that cripples someone with low income for weeks is just the cost of doing business for someone with enough wealth. It's really not that far off from actual bribery.

I agree with this idea and think it should extend to personal fines like speeding tickets, but I can see large companies offshoring illegal work to small contracting companies or shell corporations.

That's how fines work for individuals, in Finland:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

This is why surveillance capitalists tried to rally the Valley against the GDPR: fines based on global income could be effective, which is unacceptable to companies used to treating breaking the law as a minor cost of doing business.

This is such an important point. And sadly it appears that they have been successful. The sentiment on GDPR in SV seems to be overwhelmingly negative, for all the wrong reasons I believe.

What’s funny is that the GDPR is pretty universally well-liked, or at least accepted as a necessary evil in my European tech bubble...

Speaking as an American living in Europe, I love GDPR.

Speaking as an American living in America, I love GDPR.

Where I work [big-co], it is mandated that all of our services are GDPR-compliant, regardless of worldwide location.

The only people who hate GDPR are ad-industry parasites. To that I say: good riddance, and don't let starvation hurt too much on the way down.

Actually the biggest issue I have is all the amateur having misconceptions about gdpr and inventing stupid rules, because of it. For example my daughters kindergarten decided they can't do a class photo anymore because of gdpr. Even as all parents agreed, we had to leave the property to make the photo. Funnily, my older daughter had a school picture taken that is even published in a book and distributed to all parents at the school.

On a committee recently we had a large argument if we could email some professors to nominate their PhD students for a price. We had one person very strongly arguing that we can't "because gdpr". Because of people like that many people think that they personally can't do things anymore that they were used to.

> The only people who hate GDPR are ad-industry parasites. To that I say: good riddance, and don't let starvation hurt too much on the way down.

Broad generalizations are nice, but my experience on HN shows that it’s also people who don’t understand the law. Complaints about cookie banners and popups that you’re powerless to stop as an American do exist.

Even in the EU anyone savvy enough gets a filter. A cookiebar isn't mandatory - ignoring it just means you don't want their "analytics" and "targeted advertisements" cookies. That should be the default. Cookiebars are a conscious choice by the companies in question, explicitly designed to annoy you. The fact that it does should make you hate the companies, not the law protecting your rights.

powerless unless you get an extension for you browser and then never be pestered again.

Speaking as a European in NA, I love the GDPR but it doesn't actually do much for us here. Many services are GDPR compliant but only for people living in GDPR relevant countries. That is very unfortunate.

they just claim they are "job creators" and if they were fined it would force them to lay people off... then magically the public is behind them again because no one wants someone to lose a job. its a vicious circle that only benefits ultra large corps.

And then everyone unironically agrees how terrible it is that the overworked and underpaid warehouse worker won't be able to feed his family anymore. Like these jobs were ever doing a good job of feeding anyone on the $30k they pay.

As well as penalties diminishes as size grows. A small company might go bankrupt by a medium to large lawsuit or a large fine, while a large company can easily weather it off.

If a small to medium company invests heavily in something illegal and they are forced to stop with all the lost revenue that follows it would be devastating. For a large company, not so much. They can afford to fight a legal battle that delays when they should stop, in the meantime their illegal activity might have already yielded success.

And when Amazon dodges everything that gets thrown at them the burnt-out regulators will probably find some mom-and-pop store to take out their frustration on instead.

Having actually worked a union job once, I'll say this:

Unions suck. Bezos should fire them all and hire people that want to work harder to make more money. And try to replace each whiner with a robot.

Care to explain or elaborate? I'm in utter confusion at every hacker news discussion that touches on unions. I live in a country that is heavily unionised. Its almost unheard of to not be in one. And, y the benefits are so prevalent, that I'm just confused reading the things I read on hacker news. It's just, weird. I have my suspicious, but I'd have to keep those to myself due to the guidelines here.

Key word in your comment: “different country.” Unions in the US tend to have an image of bureaucracy and not actually helping. For example, I worked at a union grocery store job a few years back and the union did jack squat for quite a lot of us. No benefits, minimum wage (well, 10¢ or so over), etc.

My experience is obviously not representative of unions as a whole, but experiences such as these do taint one’s view of them in a bad way. Especially if they’re your first experience.

Surely that is the fault of that union, and not the concept of it in of itself? There seems to be such a heavy effort put to make unions look bad, that I don't doubt for a second that it isn't effective.

But the basic idea of it is that the employees have a lot more negotiation power collectively than alone. The whole goal is to have a fair compensation for work. Why would anyone work for a wage that isn't livable? It's more a hypothetical mind you, but with a collective bargaining power, no one would. I don't think there is a minimum wage in my country, but I'm pretty sure store clerks make enough to live a decent life.

> Surely that is the fault of that union, and not the concept of it in of itself? There seems to be such a heavy effort put to make unions look bad, that I don't doubt for a second that it isn't effective.

For sure: it’s the union, not the concept. But humans are a finicky bunch and let single experiences affect our view of the bigger thing. Such as when an employee at a grocery store is rude and you blame the whole company. Maybe you and I don’t do that, but some do.

When a union takes ~5-10% of your paycheck but then provides nothing of value (that you see), you aren’t going to go “well maybe there’s something behind the scenes?” If you already had a bad view of unions (possible due to the vast majority of the GOP), and then your union is bad, your negative opinion is going to be reinforced with “they’re doing nothing! Unions as a whole suck!”

>Care to explain or elaborate?

Ok. I once took a massive pay cut to go from piece-work to union hourly wages. The days were longer and overall crew production was around 1/3 of what it should be. Work availability was based on seniority within the union instead of performance.

Unions are all about receiving more for doing less, and are very detrimental to businesses.

In my experience union workers are a lazy bunch that talk more then they work, killing time is their main job description.

And union administrators are just parasites. It's all political. I've seen teachers unwillingly have to go on strike for months then be stuck with a worse deal afterwards.

Anyways I think if people aren't happy with their job they should go work somewhere else or better yet start their own business.

Replacing "union" with "management" yields a substantially equivalent argument.

Ha. True. I could be talking about myself now.

Data point: wages are higher in the US than most other countries, even for equivalent jobs. I routinely see development jobs in Europe offering 40-50k Euros that would pay double that in dollars in the US, and the US also tends to have lower taxes.

How does your country's wages compare? I do think the US works more hours (look at OECD data for this) but I think US companies are managed better in general, and the general non-unionization of the US workforce (only about 15% overall, with the majority working for government) is a big part of why pay is higher.

Nah. Even within the US, union members are better paid than non-union members.

What unusual metrics and arguments. What do you mean wages are higher? I took a quick look, and there are indeed laws for minimum wage, but depends on fields, and various criteria (education level, etc), but generally speaking at around 25 usd.

Taxes is a confusing point, because, paying taxes can (should?) distribute wealth. We are after all talking about minimum wage here... General high taxes is something that benefits this group of people the most. You pay comparatively less of income as tax, and you get to spend it on other things than health care, or education (as its mostly handled by tax money).

I work at Amazon. My father-in-law is a union pipefitter. We both make 100k a year. Except he has a pension and I have to pay into a 401k.

Further, the culture at Amazon is such working harder would require sacrificing physical and mental health. Especially on the retail and warehouse side.

Bueno. Thanks for sharing your perspective. You seem to be making relatively decent money there. If you want more, make some moves.

I should have been more clear in that while I'm against unions I'm all for paying workers twice the going rate. And firing them if they don't perform.

And my comments about working harder for more money was about pay based on performance. ie produce more, make more. Go hard or go home. Not sure how that can fit into retail and warehouse there exactly but it probably could be done.

Pensions, 401K. Not my cup of tea. I prefer to watch trees grow. And have you seen how easy it is to launch a product these days? Well, actually nothing's easy.

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