Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated labor law with union comments, NLRB rules | Hacker News Reader

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated labor law with union comments, NLRB rules

seattletimes.com

86 pointsMilnerRoute34 comments

Consequences:

Amazon must post national-scale notices, authored by the NLRB, that "joining a Union is Okay, and Amazon violated labor laws", effectively.

So violating labour laws is ok as long as you are Amazon. /s

Lol.

Feels like the right call to me.

Consider how big the power asymmetry is at a place like Amazon. You could be on H1B (and therefore will be forced to leave the country if you lose your job), they have the means and capability to record and evaluate everything you communicate. If they could they'd probably try to purchase data on you before hiring you to know whether you are pro-union. If they were secretly monitoring people's email for the word "union" and happening to lay them off there wouldn't be much to stop them.

In such a system I think the only way to make sure people feel safe unionizing is for the CEO to say "Unions are allowed, and nobody here will ever be punished for joining one. If anybody at this company holds somebody back from their choice to unionize then that person will be fired."

Discussed previously:

Amazon CEO Andy jassy broke federal labor law with anti-union remarks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40241774 (3 days ago, 30 comments)

Can somebody give me the context or argument for why this isn't a straight up violation of free-speech? I came in all ready to side against Amazon, but the article is pretty barren on what led to the decision.

I can't give you a clear answer, but this seems to have all the case history:

https://www.nlrb.gov/case/19-CA-297441

And the document "Administrative Law Judges Decision" in that case history seems to be the actual decision:

https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d4583d193b2

I guess the section "III. DECISION AND ANALYSIS" is what you're interested in.

Speech by company officers is _highly_ regulated.

Same reason it's not a "free speech" issue to punish your boss when she tells you to clock out but keep working, or get fired.

It’s not at all the same thing. It’s one thing for an employer to make a direct (or even implied) threat to violate the law directed towards an individual or group of employees. It’s quite another for an employer to express an opinion about the merits of a labor union.

It’s difficult to see how any reasonable employee could feel threatened, or even influenced (gee, Amazon CEO says “unions bad”, what a shocker) by these remarks. Going after Jassy for this just feels like a “gotcha” tactic, and seems to me like a pretty clear violation of free speech. I think everyone who is saying this shouldn’t be protected probably knows that, but it’s an easy fact to bury when it comes to speech you don’t like. Unfortunately, that is when we most need to defend the First Amendment.

Labor unions being regulated has taken freedom away from both the worker and the employer. This is considered a “reasonable compromise” since the US has seen how effective labor force can be if not regulated.

If we are to reverse on this, then we should also note that there is no more “legal” or “illegal” strikes either.

The limitations are imposed on both sides, as a way of making sure labor forces don’t literally throw out the entire state with it.

Also, note that this punishes the company. Not the CEO. Companies are already regulated and can’t do anything they want.

But you can say "unions are bad." What you can't do is make baseless claims about the concrete outcomes of negotiations, precisely because they are negotiations between two parties.

So, for instance, if he says employees will be "less empowered with a union", that's something concrete that depends strongly on what the negotiated contracts with the union look like. How can he possibly know? The only possibility is to interpret it as a threat, e.g. I will not allow for a contract that empowers employees more.

Yeah. I was thinking it might be something like this, which, I mean, it's a somewhat plausible argument if there's some additional context. On its own though, it seems like a bit of a stretch, and I am inclined to think that if you have to stretch that far for something, constitutionally protected rights should prevail. They shouldn't be curtailed on the grounds that somebody's words merely could be interpreted a certain way without at least some evidence that they are either meant to be, and/or will be.

I'm sure part of the argument is that he was expressing his opinion while being interviewed as "The CEO of Amazon", not merely being the CEO at the same time as he made the remarks, but still...

Having done a bit of reading it seems the judge might not be totally impartial, so that might explain it. So it might just get overturned at a higher court anyway.

Judges don't limit rulings to the literal words used. If a Mafia stooge came into your store and said "nice place ya got here, it'd be a shame if something happened to it" he isn't literally threatening you, but you would feel threatened, and depending on the time and place quite reasonably so . Jassy's remarks were in that vein.

All speech laws have exceptions. E.g. it obviously wouldn't be "free speech" if a CEO was lying about company performance to investors.

I think what makes this case so weird is where the line is. There are legitimate reasons to not join a union and a company should be allowed to vocalize those reasons, of course the line is being crossed when the company threatens it's employees. But how far did the Amazon CEO go? Unions will add bureaucracy, that is certainly a fact and companies should be allowed to say as much...

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40241774

https://archive.is/dFV2Q

These ruling feels absurd and is an indication the NLRB is going too far. Speech should not be limited in this way.

We limit corporate-related speech all of the time. You're not allowed to threaten employees with termination for not enduring illegal activity, for example. You're also not allowed to advertise in certain ways in certain industries: a great example would be the ban on cigarette ads on TV, or the strict regulation around pharmaceutical ads.

Whether or not you agree with these decisions, restricting corporate speech is a very common and accepted practice. His speech isn't limited, FWIW - he's allowed to say it, but the company he works for may suffer operational or economic consequences for it. He won't personally go to jail for it.

Oh, and if you perhaps think that maybe corporate speech shouldn’t be limited: for an extreme example, while personally lying is protected speech, do you think that businesses should be able to lie in advertising or in-store displays about the price, quality, or terms of the items they sell?

I’m pretty much a “free speech absolutist” but if businesses are allowed the same freedom of expression as individuals, our modern system of commerce would break down because it would become game-theory-optimal to lie constantly, much in the way that has already happened in politics.

Yeah, people seem to think that being an employer carries no responsibility at all for the well being of your employees, along with an entitlement to defraud them by lying to them about the law.

Well of course, they might be the boss someday!

> We limit corporate-related speech all of the time. You're not allowed to threaten employees with termination for not enduring illegal activity, for example. You're also not allowed to advertise in certain ways in certain industries: a great example would be the ban on cigarette ads on TV, or the strict regulation around pharmaceutical ads.

Yes, you’re not allowed to do things that violate the law. That applies to individuals as much as corporations, though. But that is quite different from restricting someone from expressing an opinion.

> His speech isn't limited, FWIW - he's allowed to say it, but the company he works for may suffer operational or economic consequences for it. He won't personally go to jail for it.

The problem is not that the company may suffer “operational or economic consequences”. That could be true regardless of what he said, or whether he said anything at all. The problem is that the government is punishing the company for his publicly expressing an opinion. Even if you disagree with his opinion or find it distasteful, that should disturb anyone who values free speech.

> The problem is not that the company may suffer “operational or economic consequences”. That could be true regardless of what he said, or whether he said anything at all. The problem is that the government is punishing the company for his publicly expressing an opinion.

This is a good point. The problem is not that the company may suffer consequences, the problem is that the company is suffering consequences.

If you read the ruling you can see the judge explained that some of what Jassy said was opinion and some was not. If you want to call the ruling problematic you could try engaging with the specific arguments the judge laid out and refute them rather than refuting the strawman that opinion is not allowed.

This is a good point. Rather than responding to what somebody posts it is best to refute something else that they could have posted, but did not post

'It would be a shame if you were to join a union and something terrible happened...'

Who knows if these people realise how idiotic they appear when they pull the free speech thing as it should be something that allows them to live without any law

Well they should be allowed to live without any law that restricts their freedom to speak. Not any law in general, but just those that the constitution, our social contract, protects.

In particular, the comments made are in no way a criminal threat, so people have an absolute right to say them, whether the feds agree or not.

I’m really not sure what the word “right” means in this case. Normally I would think it means you can do something without punishment, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

The American constitution acknowledges that your rights exist independent of the law, and still exist, even if the government refuses to acknowledge them by punishing you for them. The American constitution is based on the assumption that rights derive from a higher authority that it cannot regulate. This is the sense I'm using it in.

The Constitution itself doesn't grant corporations any rights. Amazon the corporation is the one being "punished" here, not an individual.

Corporations are free associations of people, which are protected by the first amendment.

Your rights don't end the moment you slap a new name on something.

Do you actually contend that the first amendment only allows individuals to speak and not groups of individuals? That the right to speak disappears the moment one finds a friend with whom you collaborate?

Also, the entire verbiage is incorrect. The Constitution grants no human right. It prevents the American government from interfering with natural rights. Assembly and speech are natural rights.

Corporations have rights because they are free groups of people, who all have natural rights. THose don't disappear the moment they band together. Quite the opposite, as I'm sure you know from our shared support for unions.

Witness me: Jeff Bezos is coming back this/next year to Amazon.

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