Amazon employees stage walkout over RTO mandate, climate goals, and layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Amazon employees stage walkout over RTO mandate, climate goals, and layoffs

techspot.com

36 pointsthunderbong25 comments

You know what could be more effective is for teams to execute rolling sick days. Multiple persons take sick days on those dates where important meetings are scheduled. Additionally, once a week one person from the team takes a day off.

This will halt progress on any initiatives, push back timelines, and negatively impact Amazon's bottom line. And, it's all legal.

It's called a sickout, but I wonder what sort of Orwellian means Amazon can bring to bear to counteract it. It will be interesting once they have all employees enrolled in their single-payer system.

Another tactic Amazonians can use is to keep track of all correspondence and docs highlighting misdeeds and retaliatory/harassment/federally illegal types of language and events. And just like P2P, seed those resources. Help each other. Now is the time.

> I wonder what sort of Orwellian means Amazon can bring to bear to counteract it

Fresh meat, is the answer in many cases unfortunately.

That's okay. The great part about fresh meat is that they don't know anything, so they keep repeating the same errors as the previous persons when they first joined. In either case, Amazon hurts.

It's interesting to see how each article on this progressively de-emphasizes the climate aspect and foregrounds the RTO aspect. Judging from crowd response and placards at the event, though, climate concerns were more important than that.

I suppose it's easier to write an article about "tech workers want their cushy jobs to remain cushy" and harder to write an article about "tech workers want their employer to do better for the world".

People are unhappy about RTO, to be sure, but it's the kind of thing they're accustomed to dealing with via individual action.

Yes, the anti-remote worker propaganda is ramping up. "Laptop class" is a punchy bit of populist rhetoric I've seen slung around. Perfect for angering blue collar workers and business owners alike.

> each article on this progressively de-emphasizes the climate aspect and foregrounds the RTO aspect

That's because framing it as a walk-out over non-RTO is a tactic to try to avoid retaliation. Everyone knows it's really about RTO, with some other convenience participants.

Is this the walkout that was supposed to start at noon and go for an hour, which coincidentally happens to align when most everyone there has a break for lunch?

you weren't supposed to notice the similarity to, "standing around outside during your lunch hour".

I've seen this comment made a few times but I don't get the point. It's a walk out protest not a strike. They never claimed they would stop doing their jobs. If someone doesn't understand this, that is their error, not a substantial criticism of the protest

Many dictionaries explain the definition of a walk out is a strike.

“Amazon employees stage walkout over… climate goals”

Really? You think people working in Amazon warehouses have at the forefront of their mind climate goals?

No these people want less shitty work and less shitty pay. They want to have dignified working life.

Injecting climate propaganda into every topic isn’t clever

These mostly appear to be office workers.

And I think they get to choose what their complaints are, unless you're suggesting that the article invented that?

The only quote from a striker from the article was:

"I'm not suited for in-office work," said Church Hindley, a quality assurance engineer (via The Guardian). "I deal with depression and anxiety and I was able to get off my anxiety medication and start living my life."

So yea, it's plausible the author inserted their own cause in there.

Either way, one of the keys to striking is you have to have direct reasons for the strike as a group. If 10 people interviewed say 10 different things, it just sounds like people bitching. If they all said this particular strike was for RTO, it would have much more directed power.

It's all three, in equal measure. If you're not in the Seattle area, you don't realize just how much of the South Lake Union area is taken up by Amazon and how much traffic it contributes to the problem.

Amazon sliced through their list of shuttles, forcing workers to buy cars in order to get to work in some cases because the Seattle public transit system is woefully underfunded, with companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft contributing heavily to the issue.

If I had to ballpark it, I'd say 1/3 of the smog produced every day is from some kind of Amazon or related transit route, be it from busses that have to go from Seattle all the way to the far reaches of Redmond just to cart Amazon employees to and from the office or the sheer volume of cars that clog up the bridge, 405, and 5 every morning and evening.

Amazon has been touting how "green" they are while simultaneously forcing their employees to continue coming into office when they don't have to.

Really? I found that Seattle has some of the best public transit in the country.

In the land of the blind...

Yeah but that's not really saying much...

It does, for the western US. Comparing it to.... Albuquerque or Denver maybe.

It's nothing compared to the powerhouse of Boston or New York city. Seattle is Alright compared to them.

San Francisco wipes Seattle on the floor of the fish market in comparison tho.

Amazon software engineers in Seattle probably start at $150k. They should buy EVs if they are concerned about smog, or spend their $$$ on living close to work (within walking distance).

Living close to work in Seattle would mean they'd have to join a shared house with some other Amazon devs, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to afford to live that close.

The workers who left aren't warehouse workers, and the layoffs also referenced were mostly non-warehouse workers. RTO also has nothing to do with warehouse workers. The warehouse workers have a lot to complain about, but this walkout was pretty much unrelated to that group.

Given the location of these office workers (Seattle) it's quite possible that environmental concerns are important to them. It's as wrong to dismiss that concern as it is to inject "climate propaganda" in situations where it isn't true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com