Amazon loses effort to install camera to watch counting of ballots in union vote
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
> Amazon had sought to place a video camera in the NLRB’s Birmingham office, where votes will be tabulated, to keep an eye on the ballot boxes in the off hours between counting, according to an NLRB order denying Amazon’s request. The camera feed would have been accessible by both Amazon and the RWDSU.
That doesn't sound as nefarious as the headline suggests. In fact, it seems strange that the secure ballot box would be deliberately stored somewhere without security cameras.
So consider that Amazon's request for security measures beyond what the NLRB has previously found necessary will increase the time and cost for NLRB to run the election... it seems likely to me that the NLRB would reject the request simply because they feel it to be unnecessary and to impose additional complexity and cost on the NLRB (and thus potentially the taxpayer).
Adding a camera to a room is not rocket science, it's a 1-hour project at worst, after which the camera operates unobtrusively.
I bet this is more of a turf war, a demonstration of status.
The election process is codified in law. Changing it carries legal implications, one being the law is in question.
For an election of this significance, the very best thing to do is run it by the book, the entire book, chapter and verse.
I've been a voting official a couple of times in Germany. Here, the ballot boxes (which are literal trash cans, just in a different color) get loaded with everything (ballots, tabulation aids, even the pencils) at the end of the day and sealed off, then over night left behind in the room where the election and counting happens (usually a school classroom), and at the beginning of the next day we verify the seals haven't been tampered with, unload the cans and continue counting.
> According to the motion, Amazon asked that the NLRB change or reset the security locks to the storage room’s door where the ballots will be held, provide Amazon and the RWDSU with an electronic or physical log of when the storage room door is opened during the counting process and use tamper proof tape on the ballot boxes or storage room door to “ensure no unauthorized access to the envelopes, ballot boxes, or storage room occurs.”
These measures seem rather basic and in the interest of both sides, to be honest. It's strange that there's so much resistance.
1 - why should they have to answer to Amazon on how they conduct elections that they have been handling for longer than Amazon has existed?
2 - since it is Federal, any change to the way they handle things would likely delay the election - but perhaps that's what Amazon is really after - or they're taking a page from the Republicans and will use it to sow fake doubt about the outcomeMore cynically, it's also an agency who's purpose is to support labor. So, it seems understandable that one of the biggest companies with some of the hottest labor issues would want any types of insurance it can acquire in the interest of contingency-planning.
Giving Amazon the benefit of doubt, some unions are notoriously corrupt. Giving that benefit to the union, it could have just been the latest stalling tactic in a long string of reasonable requests.
Amazon has enacted policies that are entirely employee-hostile... like creating timetables that are impossible to fulfill unless they pee in bottles or take a dump to fertilize a customer's lawn. And those policies were created that benefits nobody but Amazon itself.
Why would this scenario be more acceptable than a union whose goal is to empower workers and to allow an official process to create lasting change?
If anything, any union policies that get enacted by the company generally benefits all employees of Amazon, union or not. It's not like amazon will give benefits to only union members, because that would then cause non-union employees to join the union, boosting the union's power.
In any case, if we're generalizing all unions like in your statement, then we can generalize corporations as well. Since all corporations just look out for themselves, and can throw you and your life under the bus at any time, having union is still better than a corporate overlord. Americans will therefore hate corporations more than unions.
I can think of two plausible, good reasons for resisting these measures:
1. It's in Amazon's best interest to delay the vote as much as they can. More security edicts from Amazon means more delays, which means that Amazon can spend more time blasting both the public and their own employees with anti-union messaging.
2. Security demands from Amazon are a chilling force on the independence of the union. The union already has voting rules and mechanisms; kowtowing to Amazon makes them appear weak and establishes a precedent for future union body decisions.
I think the first reason is stronger than the second, but that both are perfectly sufficient and acceptable objections to Amazon's demands, particularly in light of their established delay tactics. Absent of any evidence to the contrary, there's no reason to believe that the union and NLRB are incapable of holding a fair election on their own terms.
Amazon wants a camera they (and the union) have access to.
Without the data, I assume the federal body in question has their security practices and the people involved know this is a hot topic. Whether that is enough remains to be seen.
The chilling effect is on the prospective unionists -- there isn't much point in being in a union if the union unconditionally accepts orders from your employer.
As a reminder: there is absolutely no evidence of impropriety at any level here. Amazon's demands amount to handwringing and FUD; acquiescing to them sends the message that Amazon, not the union, ultimately calls the shots in union elections.
That's BS - nobody talking about accepting every order forever, whatever it is. The matter in question here is completely common and reasonable security measure. To refuse it just to be obstinate and play the power game is childish and pointless. Exactly what one doesn't want in a union - preferring power games to the benefit of the workers - who, I presume, would want an honest election - and an election that can be proven to be honest.
> there is absolutely no evidence of impropriety at any level here
So what? There's no evidence I am a terrorist, but I have to show ID and go through the security when I fly (or enter a court building). There's no evidence I am not paying taxes, but I have to submit my tax return (and sometimes undergo audit - without any evidence I cheated!). There's no evidence I am an illegal immigrant, but I still have to show my ID when passing the border. There's no evidence I am a crappy driver, but I still have to get a driver license, by passing tests. There's no evidence I am a criminal, but I still have to show ID and submit to a background check if I want to buy a firearm. There's no evidence I stole my credit card, but I still have to type in the secret code in the form. There's no evidence I am impersonating somebody else on HN, but I still have to type the password when I am logging in. There's no evidence somebody is breaking into my house, but I still have lock and keys (and cameras).
I could continue for hours. There are thousands of cases where security measures are taken without evidence of somebody's personal misconduct that already happened. That's how you make sure the probability of misconduct is very low - by taking measures before it happened, not after. Somehow in this particular case it's not clear - despite widespread usage of security cameras otherwise, that could have hinted you that using security cameras does not have proof of misconduct as prerequisite - in fact, the presence of the cameras is usually the prerequisite of obtaining the evidence.
> Amazon's demands amount to handwringing and FUD
There was no base for FUD until people started refusing common security measures - and then there is, if they don't plan to cheat why they are so against the common security measures? If there's no misconduct, why they are so keen to ensuring there could be no possibility of having any evidence of it?
Whether or not it's reasonable (which it is!) is entirely orthogonal to the fact that Amazon is making it. Corporations setting the standards for "legitimate" union voting is a precedent that every union and the NLRB wants to avoid.
You've laid out a big list of things that society (or corporations) ask you to do when you exercise various rights and privileges. That's great. Now consider the following: it's not your (or my) union election. You don't get to make the rules; the union and the NLRB do. They don't see it fit to allow Amazon to engage in special pleading, for precisely the reason I stated above.
> There was no base for FUD until people started refusing common security measures
Common security measures would be the measures conventional to a union election, which (surprise!), are codified by the NLRB[1]. Those regulations include directives for security and certification. Nothing about a corporate dictate would be acceptable or common in the context of a labor election.
[1]: https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/rules-...
In other words, might makes right, go away with your stupid logic and common sense. I see.
The bottom line is this: the NLRB already has rules that protect the integrity of union voting activities. Amazon doesn't have a say in them, because they have no reason to have a say -- the prospective unionizers and their regulatory agency are the only relevant stakeholders. We (presumably) wouldn't allow McDonalds to impose arbitrary security considerations on our civil elections; what gives Amazon any more standing with the NLRB?
You argument was - since NLRB has the power, and unions need to demonstrate their power, it's ok to deny reasonable security measures because NLRB makes the rules, so they do what they want. That's what I referred to as "might makes right". And it's completely unacceptable behavior, yet very common.
> We (presumably) wouldn't allow McDonalds to impose arbitrary security considerations on our civil elections;
McDonalds does not run elections. But we do allow election poll workers to impose security measures, check your name in the lists of voters, establish chain of custody for ballots, etc. - even without proving in advance there's election fraud. That's how security works - it comes before, not after the hack. And yes, if McDonalds asked to have ballots secured, and somebody would oppose it for some reason - I'd suspect these people are about to perpetrate electoral fraud, and would question why these measures aren't already in place beforehand and require McDonalds to ask for them, instead of officials charged with performing elections doing them? Maybe those officials are in on the fraud and need to be investigated? We had some prosecutions recently for electoral fraud, so it's completely possible.
> what gives Amazon any more standing with the NLRB?
It's the election which affects interests of Amazon and Amazon workers, it's natural that they have special interest in preventing fraud in this particular case. You'd be more concerned about electoral fraud in your county than somewhere in a little town in another country.
I have trouble guessing which approach approach is more desirable in this situation.
So I don't think this poses a risk to anonymous voting per se.
Not knowing the specifics, I'd imagine trust has just completely eroded for the workers where they always assume Amazon is nefariously working against them. Pure speculation on my part, but it's easy to understand psychologically.
To be fair though, this sounds like it's more of a storage box for NLRB to count incoming mail ballots.
But that's still an unnecessary step one has to ask why. Does amazon really think some government agency or a union will break in watergate style or tamper with votes on something this nationally important?
And the ballots themselves might be identifiable? I'm not sure if the envelopes have return addresses or there are names/signatures on the ballots themselves. There are already observers watching for each side - maybe an HD camera can see and record PII whereas a human can't?
A security camera must be agreed on, it's quality chosen, it's recording backed up, maybe someone watches it live and needs to be paid, they need somewhere to sit and monitors.
All of these things are decision points that can be used to delay any vote. No one here is necessarily trustworthy, but the nlrb is a supposedly neutral organization and presumably has it's own security. Why add more? If you assume malicious actors will compromise one security layer why not all of them?
You have to choose some cut off for security over cost and time. I don't think Amazon is arguing in good faith.
You must be kidding me. NLRB has known pro-union bias, which becomes especially acute under Democratic administration (it was a bit different under Trump but that has passed).
https://www.hrdefenseblog.com/2021/02/non-union-employers-be... https://www.nexsenpruet.com/insights/national-pro-union-poli... https://www.politicususa.com/2021/01/20/joe-biden-just-fired... https://www.labordaysblog.com/2021/03/are-unions-primed-for-...
> You have to choose some cut off for security over cost and time
Nobody asked for 2000 National Guard troops and Fort Knox security on it. What was asked for is one puny webcam. A school kid wouldn't have trouble setting it up. If anything isn't acting in good faith is pretending this is about costs.
Having worked in the federal government in the past I can assure you that the best rule of thumb to operate under is you can count on incompetence and you certainly can't count on the opposite.
Are the Union or Amazon going to break into the offices of a federal agency to deposit fake votes or otherwise tamper with the ballot box?
Doesn’t the security of the building contribute to the security of the ballot?
I want to believe, but an extra check won't hurt. Whether the extra check offered by Amazon may be seen as impartial is another question.
At some point you need to trust someone. I think it's reasonable to trust a government department with no history of questionable conduct.
Why rule against it if it isn't a big deal? When is "too much security" a bad thing?
Deleted comment
Since when is it possible to delete a comment after someone has replied to it, or was this done by a moderator?
It's totally in Amazon's interest (but also in the interest of anyone who wants a fair vote) to avoid any doubt/claims about tampering.
Companies' union-busting attempts are often the best advertising a union can wish for.
If you think you're on the winning side, you'd also want the results to be unimpeachable.
once unions disappeared in america, the working man lost wages, political representation and so on.
I've worked the same role in union shops and non-union before. Non-union paid more and had less deadbeat co-workers to navigate around. Depends on your profession and skills, honestly. Probably a benefit for amazon pick and drop workers.
Really sucks at mixed union and non-union tech companies, though. At my current company programmers aren't even allowed to move our own computer between desks because only union people are allowed to do that, and getting the union people to do it will take over a week and be done at an inconvenient time interrupting work.
This is also likely an insurance limitation as well. Where I work most employees are insured for basic injuries on site. Only those required to move equipment have the add on that they might move equipment weighing 50 lbs or more.
So if I move a desk that weighs 51 pounds and throw out my back, getting work to pay for it might be difficult because I should have gotten facilities to do it as they have the heavy weight add on.
It feels like you're trying to blame the union for pretty standard practices at established companies.
I think this was a case where no reconfiguration was involved.
The two big arguments I see against unions are
1. lazy workers
2. corruption
And in the case of 1., I mean come on. Lazy workers are everywhere union or no. In the case of 2., yes this happens. Wage theft from the worker by management happens probably a lot more, on the other hand. It impacts at least 1/3 of minimum wage earners in cities like LA and Chicago, and for those who have experienced a pay violation on average they loose out on 12.5% of their actual paycheck (1). Just look at the second page of this report and see the horrors for the working poor in our country who are under very little labor protections; all of these issues would have been stymied by a union protecting labor.
At least with a corrupt union you have some recourse where you can drum up internal support among similarly exploited people, and change your organization via vote. As a nonunion worker, in contrast, you can't do anything to enact change if management isn't playing ball with labor, short of quitting your job and losing any and all your benefits like healthcare in the process.
1. https://irle.ucla.edu/old/publications/documents/LAwagetheft...
Wage theft is serious, but has enforcement paths independent of the presence of a union and if reform is needed, it should start there.
I am sympathetic to the plight of the poor but they can be harmed by labor practices supposedly friendly to them.
Sometimes people end up in the "yes I can do that" status group.
Could be they have union representation and contract rules that give them considerable agency coupled with low cost and risk.
Could be they are untouchable for some other reason too, principle friend, family, lover, child, sibling... Or, could be they have secured it through various relationships, power, leverage.
Unions do not cause this.
Poorly functioning workplaces can permit it to happen, and any workplace, union or not, can be poorly functioning for a ton of reasons, legal, contractual, managerial, financial...
Where that agency exists, sometimes people exercise it, simple as that.
It's completely plausible that unions are bad for both employers and employees.
While you try to find some bad example of unions and show us how they ruined some companies consider that I will respond with similar examples where the CEO and the board did even worse stuff - so maybe we skip the examples comments and we can conclude that there can be bad unions and bad CEOs (or board/whatever), the main difference is that one group controls a lot of money and can create a lot of PR to present the other group as evil.
CEOs also control a lot of money and create a lot of PR, so don't try to paint them as always the good guys.
Statistical multiplexing is the only thing that makes unions viable to my understanding, and I may be wrong on that, as warchests may be partitioned by workplace, I can't confirm whether or not that is the case.
This is also one of the reasons why I'm not sold on the illegalization of secondary strikes. Labor should absolutely exploit network effects to make up for the fact that the capital class will pretty much by default.
Classic. But historically, advances in wages and advantages tightly follow the economic curve: Employers increase wages when skills and economic development gets better. Not correlated with unionization, even when the union is here when the paper is signed and brandish it as a success (looking at you, Congé Payés in France in 1936, many companies were already doing it when the union gathered with the bosses to say “We do it”).
Except that hasn't been the case since the 70's
I think your perspective does not match the reality of the last 50 years or so. We are not in the 1800's or early 1900's, when unions were super important in shaping our labor laws and actually helping workers. Nobody can deny that.
Since then?
To reuse a phrase: The huge sucking sound you've been hearing are jobs --union and otherwise-- going to China by the millions. Unions, and their aggressive anti-business stance in the US, have been a part of this exodus. I know people who forcefully retired from a number of union jobs as their unions decimated their respective industries and their jobs went to China.
Sure, of course, reality isn't a single variable problem and we can't just blame unions for the erosion of our industrial base. There are many factors that led to this, including our incompetent politicians and their never ending quest for party power rather than what's good for the nation.
Unions in the US have become distinctly different from their European counterparts. Our unions use the threat of destroying a business as a way to get what they want. European unions have somehow reached a balance where they understand protecting the business is just as important as protecting workers. It's a far more symbiotic relationship rather than a brutally adversarial one.
No love lost of Amazon here. I just think it is important to understand history so we don't repeat our painfully-learned mistakes. The US and Europe are out of time. We can't make more mistakes. We have been helping China achieve the rank of second economy in the world for fifty years. How much more self-harm is enough?
I desperately want to go back to having manufacturing in the US as an option. Today, that option does not exist but within very specific boundaries. Anything "union" is dead, whether they know it or not. Save this message and read it again in 10, 15 or 20 years.
What's their perspective exactly?
Sure, the headline optics of the webcam are bad, but the other requests... what’s not to dislike about them? More careful security and anti-tampering measures, what’s not to like about that? Sure, it’s a bit onerous, but also, who wouldn’t be willing to pay that one-off onus in order to head off the prospects of a contentious result further down the line?
And that’s the thing: I can’t quite answer my own implicit question. I’m pretty sure Amazon is really really upset about this, and they’re preparing to contest the legitimacy of the result, somehow? Is that what I’m getting the feeling of? I’m really not sure, but the whole request’s troughs and valleys strikes me as decidedly odd, and I feel strangely impinged-upon by it. Manipulated, even.
EDIT:
Several commenters have remarked below that it is actually a federal agency which conducts the election process. This is implied (or explicitly stated) to be FUD: Amazon preparing to discredit the election’s integrity by remarking that the unions hadn’t accepted their requests when it wasn’t the unions who could grant satisfaction of those requests (but rather, the appropriate governmental federal agency).
What kind of job title would disqualify an employee from being allowed to vote to unionize?
An AWS engineer casting a vote for the warehouse workers to unionize would be invalid, for example.
For example, a lot of engineers in aerospace and defense (including software engineers) were members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of American (UBC).
That came about because when Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose he hired a bunch of UBC labor. They only built one Spruce Goose, but as the company did other things, many of those workers stayed, and UBC continued to represent them. When Hughes started Hughes Aircraft, more workers turned to UBC to represent them.
As late as 2000, Local 1553 of UBC was still representing all kinds of engineers at various companies that have arisen out of the various splits and mergers that the Hughes companies have been involved in. I don't know if that is still the case.
There's something funny about satellites and missiles, which are about as far from wood-based projects as you can get, being built by people represented by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. But then there is "Japan developing wooden satellites to cut space junk" [1], so maybe it isn't so funny after all.
Managers and supervisors, generally, including when supervision (including just giving out work assignments with some degree of discretion) is a relatively small part of the worker's job.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-...
Can you tell a camera's field of view by looking at it? Could your grandparents? Trusting systems that secure the vote is much easier when they are designed resist being changed to abet oppression.
1. verify who is voting
2. verify trail from voter to count
3. no extra votes
4. no discarded votes
As the recent US elections showed, voting machines are open to the opposition saying "we only lost because the machines were hacked against us".
This is naive. The Georgia Presidential election was hand-recounted, twice. The loser still claims it was stolen, incited an insurrection that sacked the Capitol while Congress was certifying the winner.
When one party is solely dedicated to power, not democracy, none of your ideals or safeguards mean anything. They just don't care what anyone thinks as long as they can hold power.
But, of course, if you had a camera, voters might reasonably be worried that you would combine the footage with vote order and figure our who voted when.
This doesn't seem hard at all to do right.
However, that's not the standard. The standard is avoiding the appearance of being able to track votes. I don't trust the people who make voting machine software or the government. You don't know that your voting tabulation software correctly anonymizes the results and you shouldn't need that technical knowledge to feel safe. The correct approach is to make a system that guarantees what we want and would be impossible for a bad actor to abuse.
Any gaps in that leads to suspicion of error and fraud. That leads to bad things, as recent events amply illustrated.
Yes, it can be done while still having a secret ballot.
No such system is possible
You also want protection against discovering who voted at all!
It says that the cameras would "keep an eye on the ballot boxes in the off hours between counting" which seems... perfectly reasonable to me.
Just look at this thread and how much confusion over what the cameras are recording.
It looks like they aren't anonymous?!
First, go through all of the envelopes, reading the names, and either side can contest ballots, which are set aside.
Then, the uncontested ballots are removed from the envelopes and counted.
If the vote margin is less than the number of contested ballots, that kicks off some kind of remediation process.
> During this portion, the NLRB will read off each voter’s name and both sides will be allowed to contest ballots, likely based on factors such as whether an employee’s job title entitles them to vote or an illegible signature. Any contested ballots will be set aside.
>...Amazon had sought to place a video camera in the NLRB’s Birmingham office, where votes will be tabulated, to keep an eye on the ballot boxes in the off hours between counting, according to an NLRB order denying Amazon’s request. The camera feed would have been accessible by both Amazon and the RWDSU.
Cameras would limit the secret part.
Not to say that unions and employees can't overreach and overreact, in this case I hope they get things through. I also hope that Amazon doesn't close their local facilities as a result.
“The people who cast the votes decide nothing; the people who count the votes decide everything”
--- Usually attributed to Joseph Stalin
Cryptographic software is tricky, very easy to implement incorrectly or with major security gaps, completely opaque to the amateur user, vulnerable to all kinds of zero-days and possibly even progress in mathematics (God save us from the day when someone comes with a fast factorization algorithm). If secure enough, it will be burdensome enough that people will try to circumvent it. It runs on a stack of OSes and hardware that may (read: of course they do) have fatal security flaws rendering your secure app insecure.
No, thanks. Give me a paper ballot any day.
Protocol: Alice and Bob send their votes to Eve. Eve wins. The end.
What IS easily forged and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to secure is a result printed out by some opaque computer that is running a huge amount of software on an extremely complex processor which runs its own closed-source firmware, probably communicating over the internet 'securely' to some other computers.
The manager rounds up the workers and "suggests" they all compare how they voted. Those who voted "pro-company" will likely reveal their vote. So for everyone who refuses to reveal their vote, the manager checks a box next to their name on the attendance sheet.
There may be a voting system that provides all the desired guarantees, but I doubt such a system is also easily understood and trusted by the average voter.