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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that they didn't fire them for "letting it happen" exactly. They probably fired them because the employees would view those managers as someone they recently defeated over a major issue. Which changes the power dynamic in a way that's distinct from the presence of the union itself. It's a weak attempt to get some of that back.

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Or maybe as an example for other managers? Basically it's "no union" or your head...

Disgusting anyway.

I'm skeptical, because it seems like most of the anti-union activities are either dictated or run from HDQ. It doesn't feel like something where the local leadership was free to make their own plays.

The fact that a unionization vote was happening would have been more than enough to start an investigation into management and firing management before the vote due to bad practices could have prevented the unionization vote from being passed. I'm not sure it matters much how much leeway the managers actually had in preventing unionization from happening. Amazon has been extremely cold hearted and calculating with the management of their logistics infrastructure. They are managing (ruling) by fear, not love. They could easily have prevented unionization by treating their employees like human beings and not robots, but they chose to go the dystopian route of extreme monitoring and pushing their employees to work as hard as possible. It almost feels like a move that Putin and other dictators would pull. They shift blame to those that are relatively powerless in middle management and make an example of them even though the fault lies with those at the top.

> It doesn't feel like something where the local leadership was free to make their own plays.

Firing managers where unionization happens encourages managers where unionization efforts are under way to make their own plays, whether this is formally allowed or not, whether by company policy or the law.

Obviously, getting caught on independent, policy/law-forbidden, efforts would also have adverse consequences, so the incentive also is to not get caught.

All managers/supervisors and above have to participate in yearly training on Positive Employee Relations. At the Fortune 300 company I was at, this was a 4 hour session taught by legal counsel. It covered what you could and could not say to employees about unions, what to do if you suspected union organization activities, and how to communicate the company line about how unions were bad without running afoul of the NLRB

I read somewhere that these particular managers were somewhat well-like by the employees. Now that may or may not be true...but if true, then it's a kind of "start a union, and the bunny gets it" situation.

"letting it happen" could be many contexts as well, letting is happen could mean that the managers were soo terrible at their jobs that they allowed issues to fester to the point where the employees were disgruntles enough to vote in a union.

Happy employees do not vote to unionize. The "hot take" here is that Amazon management wanted to the managers to some how play hardball with the union, in my experience with issues like this normally management does the opposite and trys to "kill it with kindness" and attempts to stave off unionization by trying to resolve the complaints of the work force while balancing the needs of the company.

Sometimes the workforce is just too far apart from where management wants to be then I union is likely to form, but my guess is upper management at amazon feels these middle managers did not do enough to address the workforce's concerns.

That would make sense to me if this particular warehouse/region/whatever was characterized as having notably worse conditions than others. Reading about Amazon warehouses, it seems like a pretty universally bad working environment, regardless of which one.

My feelings are bit of a mix bag, some of the complaints I would agree, but some of them seem to be either employee or more likely media exaggeration.

I have no respect or trust of "main stream" media so the reporting on the issue has me questioning what the reality on the ground really is, and the reality from people experienced in working at other warehouses.

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