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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive class action lawsuit to me

On what basis? Aren't they contractors? Do contractors get protections against arbitrary "firings"?

Contractors get protections afforded under established contract law and principals of executing a contract in good faith. If Amazon has built a system that they know to be inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed then they are violating the terms of the contract.

So let's say I have a startup that uses 10 different SaaS providers. Suppose I decided one day to randomly pick one SaaS provider and stop using them. That sounds "inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed" to me. Would that get me in trouble?

Not the same thing as contracting employees, especially in the eyes of the government.

Plus cancellation terms are likely codified in terms of the license agreement.

Depends on the terms of the contract. Contracts must be executed in good faith. That is the law. If you with your SaaS vendors or Amazon with its Flex workers isn't conforming to that part of the law then there is the potential for legal liability.

What if paragraph 144 (a) (iii) subsection b of the contract explicitly states that the employee ahem contractor has a 0-day notice period?

People aren’t software.

And a automatic metrics based firing system is probably much fairer than a human. Hard to sue for discrimination when you can prove with code it was based on metrics.

Actually, it will be easier to show any labor law violations with an automated system. Any kind of wrongful termination or bias will be easy to show in the logs.

Note that getting a computer to do something doesn't make it unbiased. People can, and often do, write bias into programs.

And easy to prove when you can show a correlation like the employee being black results in being downrated. Code and especially machine learning systems happily encode our own biases.

Fairer? You mean like Amazons AI recruiting system that was biased against women? You can simply put discrimination into every metric.

Amazon says they are contractors. The US government (some US States as well) has been pushing pretty hard on that view recently.

> Aren't they contractors?

Question is, according to whom. For example, Uber got hit with a pretty big fine in Italy because in the view of the court, the people working for Uber should be viewed as employees.

I wonder how much these causes are for worker's rights vs some politician trying to win a popularity contest by bashing these "evil tech foreign giants".

But I know nothing about pre-Uber Italian taxi regulations.

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