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Comment by kitanata | Hacker News Reader

Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace. Remember that Amazon doesn’t fire people for unionization, or because they are black or transgendered. They fire them for disciplinary reasons that are completely “normal” and “typical” as under-performers. This kind of system of “feedback” is a weapon and it is absolutely used to that affect in every place where it is implemented to the degree that Amazon does.

Can we please stop be apologists to giant profit-driven organizations and start maybe… just maybe… empathizing with people instead?

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I love how, once you build a dystopian hellscape where robots punish people for breathing, the only critique our society is capable of leveling is, "yeah, but they might use the shock collars more on transgendered people!"

> Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace.

You point is moot in this case. Staten Island is in New York State, which is an at-will employment state. Employers in such states don't need a reason to fire anyone.

Nooooooope. This is so wrong it’s funny. Being an at will state does not in any way whatsoever grant you the ability to discriminate against people of protected classes. If someone complains to the labor board or files a lawsuit alleging they were fired because they were black or trans you better have some evidence that this wasn’t the case because they might have evidence that it was and civil suits are decided on who has the strongest case not “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Which is why Evil Inc. makes sure to classify everyone as an under-performer in some capacity so that can be used as the justification for furring and you can squash individual suits or complainants because no one wronged person has enough data to prove the pattern. Then waaaaaay down the line someone will do an analysis and figure it out but it will be an administrative complaint leading to some hand wringing, a change to some policy documents, and some new diversity metrics — much cheaper.

>You point is moot in this case. Staten Island is in New York State, which is an at-will employment state. Employers in such states don't need a reason to fire anyone.

I've never read what at-will is and I've never missed it either!

I empathize with people working the tough jobs! That doesn't necessarily mean I think the jobs must be made less tough, even if I'd prefer they had better options to choose from.

A claim that the produced warnings are selectively used to fire black or unionizing workers would be much more interesting, but I don't see enough evidence to make it yet. It also doesn't really connect to the big headline of 13000 notices at one facility - if that was the purpose of the system, you'd hardly need so many.

> That doesn't necessarily mean I think the jobs must be made less tough

Humans get injuries, psychological damage, and that translates to families and society.

To make jobs insufferable just because Amazon can is horrifying. And society will pay for it even if Amazon is the only one profiting.

Conservative towns have had tough jobs for decades and we're better aligned and more stable than many liberal towns who desire for easier jobs.

Sometimes it's better for people to suck it up and tough it out.

What the hell does it have to do with politics

Your statement is the definition of cucked by capitalism

Does everyone have equal rights to marry in a conservative town?

What a stupid question.

It's really not

https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns/using-the-sundown...

For many years the GOP platform has called for the end of gay marriage so asking that is valid.

Obama campaigned in 2008 saying he was against gay marriage. The question is still stupid because a town can't declare that gay marriage is illegal.

>A claim that the produced warnings are selectively used to fire black or unionizing workers would be much more interesting, but I don't see enough evidence to make it yet

That's because they've designed the system from the ground up to make collecting such evidence nearly impossible. Unless they're going to open up their books to you, how would you see such evidence?

>Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace.

Amazon is creating an extremely detailed paper trail of their enforcement actions. It'd be trivial to show that, as an example, on average black workers got fired for 3 errors while white ones were fired for 5.

The warnings seem mostly fair too. Counting 19 items when there we 20 in a bin during inventory as an example. I can see why some look at this as dystopian but this sort of objective measurement is pretty darn appealing. If we had a programming equivalent I think it'd make my life better by weeding out the bullshitters and those that fake productivity by creating complicated solutions.

Yeah what could go wrong when technocrats try to completely remove subjectivity from the world and optimize everyone's life and work towards some completely arbitrary measure so that my shitty things can get delivered 0.002 seconds faster.

I'm not sure if you've ever had a job where you worked to specific metrics exclusively, but it make's everyone's life worse and it makes the product/service worse.

pretty sure we've all been in school, and while it's not a great experience, you can work with it

i'm pretty sure amazon's optimizing the work more so that my shitty thing gets delivered at all, rather than 0.002 seconds faster. which is very valueable to me, as it happens

As it happens your stuff still gets delivered when workers are unionized and treated like human beings

If that's the case why are Amazon's competitors not as successful as Amazon?

Amazons competitors in America*

In Europe, Amazon has plenty of competitors found in regional companies (CoolBlue in NL/BE) and they seem to deliver within a day or two just fine.

I live in europe, I tried smaller competitors. I refuse to buy from them as a result of the experience.

I never had trouble with Amazon

Initially, Amazon benefitted from lower cost of capital. Because of tax holiday and persuading Wall St to prefer (long term) growth over (short term) profitability.

Now, AWS prints money, fueling Amazon's entry into new markets.

Because there's no objective metric for programmer productivity.

You prefer getting vaguer metrics to work towards? Sucky and misaimed metrics exist with the qualatative too. Blaming quantitative efforts is misplaced. Subjectivity is not your friend.

Amazon as an organization doesn't care who you are or what demographic groups you belong to so long as the ROI of your continued employment is in the same ballpark as everyone else with your job title.

You remove the metrics and then anyone who has the authority to fire people for poor performance gains the ability to fire people for personal bias reasons while saying it's for performance reasons.

The whole point of the metrics is that it makes it harder to make decisions that are bad for the company (like firing otherwise productive people because you don't like them) under the guise of them being good for the company. Because of the metrics people with the authority to do influence hiring and firing at scale can't fire protected demographics without leaving an incriminating paper trail and getting told by legal to knock it off. Nor those people put their thumb on the scale fire non-protected demographics before some MBA sees what's going on and tells them to knock it off because they're leaving money on the table.

Literally none of the bad stuff you have described is made better by removing performance tracking and much of it is made worse. Go read about what working for BigCo was like for members of race/religious/political groups in the first half of the 20th century if you don't believe me.

Maybe think through your comment before you call everyone corporate apologists.

You probably don't realize this, but (in the USA) it's very illegal (although unevenly enforced) to actively prevent your employees from unionizing. This is because there is a huge incentive to prevent it, because as an employer you can keep wages lower that way. Because of this, to use your own clinical language "the ROI of your continued employment" is very negative if you might help start a union. But it isn't actually legal to act on this information.

So yeah, Amazon is absolutely trying to play the same game many big companies do, which is hamper union formation as much as possible without actually getting in too much trouble. Having all employees officially have bad performance warnings (which can then be acted upon if you see them unionizing) is one great tool in the toolbox of the union suppressor.

Even if Amazon gets in trouble for union busting, it may be the case that the consequences of getting caught are outweighed by the costs associated with rising wages/benefits/conditions for labor under a union.

Okay? They're still doing a bad, actively harmful and illegal thing to their employees

Who gives a shit about their profit when their workers are being suppressed

>You probably don't realize this, but (in the USA) it's very illegal to actively prevent your employees from unionizing.

You need to do some thinking about what the phrase "ROI of your continued employment" actually means in practice.

Fines and fees are basically the same thing when they're being levied against huge sociopaths entities like BigCo. Naive "but that's illegal" appeals to emotion do not matter to these sorts of entities because responsibility is so diffuse and compartmentalized that they can't do anything but ruthlessly pursue the sum total of everyone's KPIs.

>Having all employees officially have bad performance warnings is one great tool in the toolbox...

And how is this any different than if you didn't have the metrics in the first place? If everyone has bad performance nobody does. My point isn't that Amazon isn't doing shady shit. Of course they are. All big organizations are. My point is that metric tracking is at worst a net neutral with potential to be positive. My secondary point is that both the person I initially replied to and yourself have failed to think critically about the situation. A metric that says everyone is under-performing isn't a pretext to dodge accusations of an illegal or otherwise not good pattern of firing anymore than not having the metric at all is.

I think you are committing the common engineer's fallacy of examining a situation with Vulcan like logic, reaching a conclusion, and then applying it to a social process.

> A metric that says everyone is under-performing isn't a pretext to dodge accusations of an illegal or otherwise not good pattern of firing anymore than not having the metric at all is.

Just because you (and indeed I) think that way doesn't mean the actual social and institutional actors involved will. In any given hearing for a given matter impacting a single employee the data about all the other employees won't even be available to reach the conclusion you discussed. It would take a much bigger more well funded legal action to push the argument you are making. In fact, how do you even know that US law even allows the argument you are making? It very well may or may not.

It's not a perfect tool, but as I said, it's another tool in the toolbox to muddy the waters and make it more expensive and complex to challenge a dismissal.

I think the way you mentally model socioeconomic and legal processes in the human world is not very true to life. Pure logic is not any sort of big magical trump card. Humans are not rational actors.

Having done consulting work for a company that does performance management software the thing I found funny was pro-union workers the model kept flagging as lower productivity compared to neutral or for non-union.

When I tried to look into it the model was scoring them lower because of "activities spent not increasing bottom line".

Is your corporate apology coming from personal experience in Amazon or another "BigCo" where you can cite actual instances where a massive corpus of petty infractions has protected line workers from the malicious "people with the authority"?

Otherwise the parent commenter's conjecture as to how this surveillance system functions in reality is about as good and useful and thoughtful as your own. Maybe worth keeping in mind.

That is the whole point of the parent comment: if everyone gets a plethora of warnings for normal occurrences (poorly implemented performamce metrics), then anyone can be fired for non-discriminatory reasons (backed by data!!) when the real reason for firing is something else (unionizing, protected class, workplace politics, etc.). Selective enforcment allows for non-provable discrimination.

1000 times, this.

If everyone is under-performing nobody is. Having a metric that basically everyone fails to meet is no more useful for dodging accusations of illegally discriminatory firing than not having the metric at all is.

Seems like everyone in this comment sub-thread is assuming that the legal professionals who go after this kind of thing are idiots and wouldn't see right through that.

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