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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

The danger of any walkout is that you won't be allowed to walk back in. The time for useful collective action was back when tech companies couldn't hire fast enough, and tech employees enjoyed unusual leverage. After 27,000 layoffs, a performative walkout without a defined goal is just making it easier for Amazon management as they plan the next round of cuts.

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If the number is a large enough percentage they couldn't do a lockout. While it may be an industry-wide supply side problem for employees you can't just fire a huge portion of the staff and hire new people and expect things to just keep on truckin', losing that much institutional knowledge would be suicide.

That's certainly the theory behind collective action. But the problem is you can't go from nothing/online venting to organizing multi-thousand-employee walkouts, any more than you can get up after years of bedrest and run a marathon. The capacity to effectively organize white collar tech workers at Amazon (or anywhere else) was never built up, and now it's too late.

> you can't just fire a huge portion of the staff

Define huge? Tech companies increased their headcount between 2020 and 2022 by at least double-digit percentage, Amazon included. I'm not sure how many of them are essential in top management's eyes.

A large percentage of employees can definitely walk out if they do not need to worry about paying their bills, should things turn south. There will be less demand and more supply of workers in the foreseeable future.

My opinion is generic across all companies. I am not an Amazon employee, nor own any stocks.

Tell that to Twitter.

Basecamp might be a more salient example.

It's way too soon to draw conclusions.

Given people were originally predicting collapse within days, how long do you need to draw conclusions?

How do you know the business will not collapse? Revenue internally is down 40% and importantly the activity is a cesspool, wouldn't reckon that's the company just chugging along

"How do you know the business will not collapse"? That's a ridiculous question. Eventually all things die. The question is not will Twitter die but when, and so far the people predicting imminent demise were all completely wrong. Musk's detractors clearly had no idea at all of how much bloat ideological hiring had created inside firms like Twitter. Even if Twitter gets sold or whatever next year, it won't be vindication for those people because they were already proven wrong.

I made an account just to tell you that after a decade of placeholder Twitter account, I started using it after Elon. When Tucker Carlson posted his videos about being fired, my dad made an account because he thinks it'll be the new YouTube. He doesn't even watch Foxnews.

I was referring to engineering, not the rest of the business.

amazon is not twitter.

There is a big difference between a general 27,000 layoffs and a significant portion of key senior engineers walking out. Dysfunctional management could fail to grasp that and the company could continue to coast in the short term with happy investors. It will take some time until we see the cracks due to bad tech choices and inability to execute.

That's a good point about the defined goal. I'd personally like to know if Amazon treats its white-collar workers as shitty as it treats its blue-collar ones. If so, why are they working there when tech has been so hot for the past years, but if not, does that make this a case of "voting for leopards eating people's faces off party"?

Funny how now is never the right time. It's always just gone or some time soon.

There was a multi-year effort beginning with Trump's election to organize tech workers, and one of the key arguments was that there was a short window of opportunity in which to act, before some combination of automation and changes to the workforce removed the unique leverage tech workers enjoyed. The message was "now is the right time" for maybe three years, and now that ship has sailed. All we're left with is easy message board cynicism.

Speaking as somebody who was there when Tech Solidarity came through town after the Trump election, I saw you give a presentation that focused more on collecting Democratic party donations and fighting Trump than on any actual labor organization.

You had people drive in hours from out of town (this was deep purple Texas, Houston), and you wasted their time rattling a can for a party that sucks. Worse, you never came back.

For anybody interested in real organizing today that isn't just finding handouts for the failed Democratic Machine, check out Communications Workers of America ( https://cwa-union.org/ ). They'll help you form a chapter and learn how to unionize your shop, even if it's small.

I'm sorry that event was a disappointment. I had a terrific speaker lined up who called to cancel as I was walking to the venue. She was an experienced labor organizer and I would have loved to hear what she had to say. But like you, it turned out I came a long way for nothing.

Really love your writing man, keep up the great work.

Labor action is much more about solidarity then leverage. Yes, in modern labor actions leverage is what most organized workplaces use, however, with such low union membership in North America, you really need to build up a movement of solidarity across non-unionized industries.

Seattle actually has a history of this. In 1919 65,000 workers in Seattle went on a general strike to support shipyard workers. I think there are few better cities across America to build up solidarity. Especially now with Starbucks and other service work getting unionized one shop at a time. Class awareness is increasing, we now have labor heroes such as Christian Smalls. We know what is possible.

There might have been leverage back in 2016, but we didn’t have the same labor class awareness and cross industry solidarity. Your ship might have sailed, but there are other ships, and more workers now organizing and taking as we speak.

My good man, you are responding to an actual union organizer who actually spent the recent boom years doing "now is the right time" work at software companies, at the actual right time.

This is really interesting! What motivated you to start? It’s not like SWE are poorly treated on the scale of all professions. Do you predict some really bad times after the boom times?

It's easier to make a case to workers when things aren't so good.

This is particularly significant in software, where we have little experience with the benefits of organizing. It's an uphill fight to convince fellow workers. There have been decades of, now internalized, anti-union sentiment from owners.

If we're taking this opportunity to shout out others

Thank you Shawn - in many ways I owe my career to you!

-HR 33

The problem is that the right time for something is usually a sacrifice in a time of abundance. So nobody wants to think about such a negative during good times and thus no action is taken.

When things are good, “we don’t need collective action, look how good things are.”

When things are bad, “I can’t afford the risks of collective action, look how bad things are.”

When things are borderline, “We shouldn’t make any important decisions about collective action now, look how tenuous things are.”

Yea they know that. Even in the face of that they are walking out. Must mean they’re seriously pissed off. I would be more worried if I were the employer depending on this office and I would be trying to make these people happy so all my projects wouldn’t go into the shit bin for several months while I tried to rebuild my team.

It is extremely important in these situations to distinguish between talk and action. So far you have a bunch of people talking about walking out, which is very different from doing it.

We still all of the work. They can't do it without us. We have tremendous power that we seldom acknowledge.

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