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Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

> After Amazon told them that they had violated its external communications policy by speaking publicly about the business, their group organized 400 employees to also speak out, purposely violating the policy to make a point.

I get that Amazon and big tech hate posts are a daily thing on HN these days, but this seems simple enough to me.

They broke Amazons policies and organized other employees to also break policy. If I was a business owner, I would have done the same thing.

The most vocal crowd on the Amazon topic here on HN despise the company outright. I’m onboard with taxing big companies, etc, but it’s sad this stuff takes up the front page. The quality of discussion is the same as /r/politics or /r/worldnews.

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It's amazing all the free market zealots here are totally fine with companies completely messing with the fundamentals that make markets work.

Companies tell employees not to discuss their salaries, this causes an information asymmetry where employees can't accurately ascertain the free market value of their labor.

Workers try to pool their power together to get more of the value that they produce, they are evil. Corporate mergers and acquisitions that pool the corporations power so they can maximize profits, just the market at work.

I didn’t use the word evil. Why argue a strawman? Does that help you feel your opinion is superior or more important?

The big one to me is that the "free speech absolutists" are consistently nowhere to be found when labor organizing speech is silenced.

Those same absolutists were also cheering Google, Twitter and US government on about a decade ago when the platforms, and the government, really started to censor Islamic fundamentalist content as part of their anti-terrorism initiatives.

Company policy cannot overrule laws, but it is not illegal to put it in a contract. Companies put in things they can't enforce because it has the same effect of discouraging certain behaviors.

A company's policy cannot prohibit employees from talking about the company. Obviously there is more nuance (e.g. leaking internal info) but in this case we're discussing public events.

> If I was a business owner, I would have done the same thing.

But you're not. Why take the side of a class of people that you don't belong to that don't share your interests (owners) instead of the class you do belong to and do share your interests (workers)?

I don’t think this is black and white between owners and workers. Corporate America is much more complicated.

The owner and worker narrative sounds like communist take. I’m an American who values individualism and hard work. I fundamentally don’t believe in what you’re trying to say here.

You don’t have to “own” a business to understand how to manage people. If someone had issues and they take those issues on to stop your entire business and halt productivity, you remove that person. It’s really that simple.

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