“Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve...
>One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When the Pinkerton agents were withdrawn, state militia forces were deployed. The militia repulsed attacks on the steel plant, and prevented violence against strikebreakers crossing picket lines, causing a decisive defeat of the strike, and ended the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
Read the Ebay stalking indictment. They were the B team with extremely limited operational capability. Now imagine they had any of the following, which are all for sale:
* Real-time location from your cell provider
* Real-time AirBnB booking
* Real-time purchases from credit card companies
* Real-time browsing records from your mobile ISP, home ISP, and behavioral advertising networks
* Your complete prescription history from your pharmacy
"Pinkerton men"
-Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.
It might be worth reading about how workers were bombed and gunned down during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Here is a good history of the different full battles waged in the late 19th and early 20th century by bosses and the police [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.
It's not in the interest of virtuous people to have Marxism. It's in their interest to have freedom, which implies capitalism.
Several years ago, I started working for a company that was in the build up to a Yea/Nay vote for joining the union. During that time, 2 "goons" showed up at my apartment to discuss the benefits of joining the union and why not joining would be bad. However, these very "intelligent" goons showed up during the day, you know, working hours where I had a very low chance of being home. I don't know if they were just that dumb, or if they were trying to influence what they thought were family members. Instead, it was my flatmate from England. She told me just laughed at the thought of me joining a union, and not so politely told them to bugger off and closed the door on them. Ultimately, the vote failed miserably.
All of that to say, that I'm not surprised that anti-union shenanigans are at the same level as the pro-union shenanigans.
A former boss of mine once bragged about how he killed a union effort at a previous job. He worked a corporate job for a chain of restaurants that was threatening to unionize. He was given the task of showing up pretending to be a union-affiliated, bafflingly incompetent asshole. He went to individual employees to discuss the "benefits" of joining the union, because in a group he was more likely to be called out by somebody actually union-affiliated.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/operat...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/german-parliament-passes-record-budget....
> Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders)
Does anyone who doesn’t work at Amazon know what “L7 + ER Principals” means?
Perhaps these are universally understood terms in some fields, but my guess is that the “error” was posting this publicly, and it was meant to be an Amazon-internal job posting.
Sometimes, for legal reasons, these sorts of jobs are required to be posted publicly, but not in a way that makes the underlying content clear to anyone [0]. So another possibility is that the mistake was posting the job with too many specifics.
You could try to figure this out by trying to map out all of amazon and see how far away from Bezos your “stakeholders” are, but so what?
It’s a signal that tells some people much more information than it tells others. It’s either an oversight or a deliberate message that the job is for insiders. Either way, it’s baffling to me, an outsider.
>Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders) on sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company, establish and track funding and activities connected to corporate campaigns (internal and external) against Amazon, and provide sophisticated analysis on these topics
>Analysts must be capable of creating and deploying sophisticated search strings tailored to various business interests and used to monitor for future risk; Engaging business leaders (L6+) directly is core to this support, and may cover topics including organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders.
>Analysts are expected to close knowledge gaps by initiating and maintaining engagement with topical subject matter experts on topics of importance to Amazon, including hate groups, policy initiatives, geopolitical issues, terrorism, law enforcement, and organized labor
If anyone needed confirmation that unions are beneficial to employees, Amazon just handed it to them on a silver platter.
Nice! It's always good to see corporates fight against elected politicians that are hostile to projects like HQ 2. This is not dystopian at all.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit...
democracy is a flawed system so politicians should expect pushbacks.
I would honestly do anything in my power to not have to work in a union again. They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.
Of course, I'm probably replying to a Pinkerton employee right now. But, yeah, unions bad.
Ignoring the realities and complexities of established organized labour is not going to help the cause.
They also prevent technological advances and it only makes things more expensive for the consumer (Who do you think is fighting Uber and Lyft in major cities? Taxicab unions that were fleecing customers for decades and didn't need to add any convenience to customeers due to massive monopolies and the medallion system).
We also can't forget the police unions, which very system contributes to not firing bad cops..which results in brutality. This is never mentioned in our current discussions on race because the progressives in this country love unions and don't want anything to prevent their mass acceptance.
Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.
I think it's a fairly well established industry trend that, on average, union membership is a net positive for the worker.
Say you have 10 workers - 2 are rock stars and make $50/hr, 6 are average and make $20/hr, and 2 are bad and make $10/hr (min wage - because they are never promoted).
Average "non-union" pay is: $24/hr
Now say you unionize and the union forces you to start paying the bad employees $20/hr like all the other average ones. So now you pay the 2 bad employees $20 each. Well, you still want to incentivize good work so you bump average employees to $25/hr. But dang, that's a lot of money, time to reign in rock star budget a bit. Now rock stars make $30/hr, average make $25/hr, bad make $20/hr.
Average "union" pay is: $25/hr
So yes, the "average pay" will be higher for "the worker"... but at a cost. Your average high performers will now be paid less, and your average low performers will now be paid more... which creates perhaps undesirable incentive structures ("why work my butt off to get ahead when it really won't make that much of a difference? I'd rather switch to a non-union company where my pay is directly tied to my output").
Unions should not be needed... the governments who represent the people working should provide the necessary protections for workers without unions being needed.
Unions are a way for some people to get what all workers should have by default.
Nothing in the world happens without power. A union is a way to get some. "Should" doesn't mean anything without it.
I think organized labor is a very good idea. We can see in the US how workers have been put in ever more precarious situations since the labor unions were significantly weakened 30-40 years ago.
But actually I don’t think having a normal corporation with a board of directors and then a union at odds with that board really makes sense. To me, worker owned cooperatives make a lot of sense.
I am coming to appreciate that there is however no one size fits all solution. So I look at this like “more of X would help Y”. And I do think more organized labor as unions or coops would help workers (in the USA where this is an issue). In the USA workers generally need better health care, maternity and paternity leave, predictable working hours and better pay.
I did however recently learn that in Germany apparently the big companies have representatives from labor in the board, and then they have another board that supervises them which is half labor. I’m fuzzy on the details but it was described in the linked lecture below which is pretty good!
wow! what a statement.
you are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs.
i think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s. the more we progress thru time the less we need unions because of all the new wealth that is created via the internet.
Same, and my workplace doesn't even have a union.
As a professional interacting with with unions has been frustrating too. No, sorry, I can’t turn that screw for you. The union guy left and won’t be back till Monday, sorry. Yes, yes, I know it’s only turning a screw, but I’m not allowed to do it. It will have to wait till Monday.
Saying that support of organized labor = support of corrupt unions is a pretty weak strawman.
What I love are unions that set abnormally high union initiation fees, only offer payment plans on people who sign dues check off forms, then include language in that dues check off form that keeps you from cancelling it unless you do so during a 15 day window every year.
As long as unions can forced on empolyees, unions can not be a market-based economy, it can not ever act against the interest of the empolyees it serves.
Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?
Different unions are different, just as different companies are different. Plenty of companies have positive, constructive relationships with unions; you have no particular reason to say that the union is what made the relationship antagonistic and not the employer, except for an implicit assumption that companies have a right to exist and push for their interests while unions don't.
In most other cases, unions are generally harmful, including most public-sector unions.
at the top level the workers unions manage the unemployment insurance with the employers unions, and talk to the government before labor laws are changed.
> A survey published by France’s human rights defender, an independent administrative authority, revealed that a “fear of reprisal” was cited as the most common reason for employees’ low-engagement in trade unions.
A large majority of those surveyed said their trade union activities had a negative impact for their professional growth and said they felt discriminated against by their employers.
The survey highlighted the main causes for the decrease of trade union membership in France since the 1950's, which is now one of the lowest rates of unionised employees in the European
But that's life. Real capitalism is also a far cry from the fairy tale capitalism presented by many popular economics books and articles (e.g. the beautiful self-regulating system where everyone is better off in the end by definition).
> They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.
You could say the same about democracy. Wouldn't it be better to replace our actual democratic system with an idealized autocracy? There'd be far less interpersonal strife over politics, and we wouldn't have to waste our time with voting or political participation, and could devote our energies to more productive things instead!
The union debate is weird like that. There's all kinds of negative discussion about specific instances of unions, considered in isolation. But that's rarely balanced against the specific problems unions are meant to solve or mitigate, so the effect is to compare the negatives of unions against an unspecified but implied positive management/shareholder-led status quo.
Then the Cold War ended. And about the same time, union membership went into a steep decline. And the business owners have been slurping up all the money in the economy, and paying workers closer and closer to starvation wages. (And there's the working conditions at Amazon, which are... not treating employees decently.) This sounds more and more like the conditions where unions grew strong, because the workers found them to be necessary.
The biggest thing that always blows me away about unions is the work rules. Person A can't so much as lift a finger to do something outside their designated work area, etc. I can't even imagine running an organization with that kind of bureaucracy. How could you optimize process? It's a wonder any union shop with that kind of elephant on its back can get anything done, ever.
Rather than a new union specifically tailored for a industry/environment/location/job.
And don't get me started about NY unions which are literally run by mafias as part of a long con. The LIRR union head (with suspiciously mafia ties) threw a shit fit because "HOW DARE" the LIRR have a modern time card system that requires an employee to scan a finger so to confirm they are actually present to avoid the billion dollar abuse of physical timecards they were replacing.
It’s beyond me how that job post would make sense to anyone besides someone who is disconnected from the usual contending rhetorics Amazon is involved in.
Nobody raised a flag on how that would look like for them? You gotta be pretty oblivious to read that and say “yeah that looks good to me”.
I’m not even discrediting the value or purpose of that particular position since I have zero context besides the ad but I don’t understand how can you sprinkle those terms and reference those specific groups without reflecting deeply how it could be perceived.
In a broader context, I don’t understand how others see this as a victory. As if taking the job post down means it’s not still part of their strategy.
Maybe people involved on these projects are so oblivious that it never occurred to them that they may be contributing to something that could be borderline unethical.
What’s kind of ridiculous about this is that you can tell these job requirements were written by a lawyer or similar. People that are trained and presumed to have a somewhat acute skill to evaluate the ethical complexities of a situation.
I will never purchase anything from an Amazon-related company.
For sure, all three are bad for the online shopping business...long live the unlimited capitalism!!
BTW: When did you heard "Freedom Fighter" the last time in the "Free Press"?
Public unions are somewhat problematic, I'll give you that. Police are the best example of overpowered unions. Police forces often have tremendous leverage against local governments which makes it hard to keep them in line. What's happened in NYC anytime minor reforms are tried is a disgrace.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't have a problem with workers trying to unionize while recognizing that unions do have issues. Amazon warehouse workers are on the ground doing potentially dangerous work on fast moving floors with robots flying around. I think those people have a right to get paid a living wage given Amazon's profits.
Basically, if you treat your employees happy, they won't have any reason to attempt to unionize.
I find it frustrating to discuss the failure of unions without being labeled anti-labor. But it seems to me, the fundamental failure of unions, even when they seem to work, is setting up an adversarial system. I would posit for any social institution to be stable you need an alignment of incentives.
I don't even think it is about ruthless cost-savings, as it is about ruthless efficiency of the system. They are building an automated warehouse/supply-chain, they just happen to be using real-robots for some of it and humans for other parts. They humans are just cogs, with machine dictated instructions. Much of the misery probably isn't even intentionally, but they still are culpable for it. They need more constraints on how humans are used within their system. Just using a minimum rest period (even more gracious ones than state mandates) is not enough, if you presume humans are working at 100% efficiency, constantly moving and doing for the rest of the time. And not to mention that excludes human desires like autonomy. Accounting for that, while not hindering efficacy too much is an interesting systems problem that Amazon's industrial engineers should be spending more time addressing (though I'm sure they already are investing significant effort, just clearly isn't enough).
One of the big points of the videos is to report union organizers to management ASAP.
This kind of training is extremely common for low wage jobs in the U.S. If almost all large retailers are doing it, it mustn't be illegal, or not enforced.
I remember the video being incredibly weird - they basically posited unions as bad because nonmembers would feel socially isolated from member. Eg - in one clip two workers would be gossiping about info from a members-only meeting and the moment a nonmember walked up to them, they became quiet and it turned into this strange teen drama.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/2474
Honestly, I think you simply don't like that they don't agree with you 100% and act as you would have them act, and you should honestly admit that, and honesty would require that you stop accusing them of being other than honest on the basis of what you outlined.
Amazon will look after Amazon's interests (aka the shareholders). The little people have rights defined by laws. As long as they are not breached, Amazon (and every Amazon out there) will match on.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I do not condone the majority of Amazon's practices and thus I don't buy from them (or at least they are low in my list of preferred options). But since we got capitalism, and since the US is the HQ of capitalism.. then why is anyone surprised? Facebook will spy. Amazon will squeeze every cent they can, and so on..
I've known friends that hate their unions (usually retail), and those that love their unions (electricians, UPS drivers etc.) These are of course just a small group of anecdotes and not representative of a comprehensive dataset so I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another if the question is "are unions horrifically evil or a godsend that's universally necessary."
The framing of this type of debate doesn't seem to foster good faith discussion.
My only personal experience with being in a union was a call center job I had when I was 18. I don't recall dues being much, and everybody got full health coverage (including dental and vision) at 25 hrs/wk, and that ended up being a big draw for a lot of people in the area. So that was pretty cool.
I've also worked at a lot of places that weren't union where the employees were paid well, received benefits and treated fairly. That was also pretty cool.
I guess to me if I were to have an opinion it'd be something along the lines of "If people want to unionize, they have a legal right to do so, and I don't have any particular issue with that. If it works out with a positive outcome, great! If it doesn't, that sucks!"
I'm definitely not in favor of people being bullied or misled to go either way on this issue. It literally just seems like something people should talk about in good faith and make their decision accordingly. It's just a choice.
1) Unions, good or bad?
2) Is it appropriate for a company like Amazon to spy on their work force to stop them from unionizing, as compared to persuading their work force that unionizing would be bad?
It seems as though this thread has had a whole lot of posts conflating the two issues you mentioned and it just muddies the waters imho.
As I mentioned, I think it should be a good-faith discussion across the board and I'm not a fan of bullying or misleading people.
I could be misunderstanding this but the discussion about your second point has been in some cases in this thread been supplanted by people arguing about who is on the "right side" rather than the more immediate discussion of "is this an acceptable practice?"
Like I said earlier, it's really fascinating how emotional this gets.
But I am also not not saying that.
This presupposes that Jeff cares about his legacy. I genuinely don't know what drives him; my best guess is 'making Amazon ever more successful'.
The excuse heard round the world.
My thoughts after reading the title: "Oh good, I always thought Amazon was scummy and lacked integrity, but credit where credit is due, they did good here.
.
The actual article's title and body: Amazon deletes their own job listings for union-busters, as a PR response due to public outcry.
My thoughts: #$%@!
Don't get me wrong, I think worker unions are essential for pushing the demands of underprivileged and should exist, but nobody should agree every demand from them.
The idea that a company must "agree to every demand" from a union seems to me a strawman. Bargaining ideally maximizes net value, and true collapses in bargaining are rare.
"Outrageous" demands that are met, therefore, represent a company's unwillingness to reallocate the value of those demands towards other contract elements (that is, to say "we can't do that, but we'll offer this instead"). If they were truly too costly, the company would have either a) refused the terms, or b) failed to bear the cost and gone under.
The reality is that Amazon is under so much scrutiny that pretty much any program on this area would be criticized.
Spying, yes, but I don’t see that in the description.
And your Twitter post is gone.
They're not bad for business, they reduce profits, and they limit the ability of a company to exploit it's workers.
Right, so bad for business. Great for most workers though.
I would honestly love to hear from those that aren't favorable towards unions about why it's acceptable for business management and ownership to punitively destroy jobs and value over ideological issues, but it's unacceptable for the employees to have that option as part of collective bargaining?
(0) https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/03/561830256...
This reminds me of how back in 2016 right before November US elections,I read threat intel reports and conference style presentations from threat intel vendors talking in detail about Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the Steele dossier, this was before buzzfeed decided to publish it (all other media refused at the time). This is all public stuff now but big corps are very interested in learnig about the latest strategic intel so they can adopt. And that's perfectly fine so long as no laws are broken. This is similar to how big corps get a scoop on emargoed CVEs so they can patch before it's made public. A lot of times this is what intelligence community people do when they want to settle down and make money. I'll bet good money whoever they hire has background at FBI,NSA or DIA.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345259
Even if not quite a dupe.
It's truly late stage capitalism if companies can impede labor organizing so brazenly in public like this and have only encouragement at the federal level to go further. HN a few days ago (the 787 structural issue) was also talking about Boeing closing plants and sacrificing safety to avoid union labor.
The whole thread is interesting.
The same trend exists for blue collar union members, too.
[1] https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.baylor.edu/dist/2/1297/f...
As in so many internet spaces, partisan zealots are degrading our ability to converse. I hope the mods figure out how to keep them from turning HN into yet another dunghole.
We build an economic system that rewards selfishness and drive for profit at all costs. Successful companies generate profit. More profit is generated by charging the highest cost for the lowest quality product and paying the worker as little as possible.
Unions threaten that profitability. Its simple math. Its cheaper to hire analysts to track and snuff out labour movements than it would be to capitulate to the demands of any labour movements that formed, such as wage increases or benefits.
Why are we shocked and appalled when the system we created does what it does best?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Of course it's not a coordinated effort, any more than the pro-union comments are coordinated. This is just a classic issue on which the community is divided. The temptation to see opposing views as inauthentic and manipulated is somehow irresistible to most people on the internet. I just wrote about this in a completely different context, but the same argument applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24356300.
This is why we have this site guideline: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Do I have sciencily evidence? Nope. Could it be a confirmation bias or just a coincidence? Sure. However it seems to happen a lot.
The popular narrative around unions is one of the employees versus their employer, but ultimately even the business’ customers or adjacent businesses end up paying some of the price.
For an example that will probably hit home for many HN users, try asking your trade show team about dealing with unions. The restrictions imposed by unions on trade show attendees are unreal. We had to spend extra to use tool-free fasteners and pre-wire our booths to avoid trigger union regulations that only union employees could use certain tools and do certain wiring jobs on the trade show floor. The union even sent someone to watch us to ensure we weren’t using forbidden tools or wiring one year. If we did, they would send us a bill.
Unions have their place, but it’s dishonest to suggest that anyone skeptical of union efforts doesn’t have valid reasons to oppose them.
I would consider not being able to plug in my own gear at a trade show a small price to pay to show my support for unions and union workplaces.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
A lot of small business owners who also happened to work for a union and had a bad experience? That seems like a lot for a site largely filled with software developers. Is HN more mainstream than I'm giving credit?
A union is a company that represents the interests of workers in the same way that a company is an entity that represents the interests of capitalists.
Besides, many people on HN work for tech companies like Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm or eBay, all of which were found guilty of colluding[1] to keep engineer salary below market value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I'm a union member, but man do I think twice about ever commenting on anything to do with a union because of the huge negative wave that comes your way.
I am a 34 year old immigrant from a country where unions are synonymous with both corruption and workers rights.
US also has a similar history.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=518184...
Edit: downvoted for pointing out facts. Your downvotes won't change reality, as much as you think it does.
1. an allegedly corrupt democratic institution that you personally have influence over which exists to fight for your rights
a bigger problem than
2. a definitely corrupt authoritarian institution run by self-interested plutocrats that exists to squeeze as much free work out of you as possible?
1. There is a conspiracy to bad mouth unions to protect the capitalist class.
2. Unions have problems and people are expressing their opinions about those problems
I doubt it's a coordinated effort, it's just resident libertarians getting agitated by a concept they've been conditioned to fight against.
There are extremely rich and powerful people who will sink hundreds of billions of dollars into making sure those things don't change.
America is just so profitable the way it is.
It's easy, spend 100M dollars on a law that makes warehouse labor a mandatory union.
Mom and pop companies can't afford to fill out government/union paperwork for their 3 employees and customers can't go to cheaper alternatives.
But this means Amazon and Amazon employees win.
Example of unions that are net negative for society: police unions, teacher unions.
It's the only time it has made sense to me, within my lifetime. Otherwise, I think unions have way more power than what they need at this time. Now, they have to do things to justify their existence. Would things go back to the way they were before unions if they didn't exist?
>Monitor various collection platforms for incidents that pose direct and indirect risk to Amazon operations, personnel, or brand;
There is nothing in there about union busting or making sure employees don't organize. This author is naive to think that Amazon isn't dealing with state level threats. They likely need state level intelligence.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200901125940/https://www.amazo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200901142713/https://www.amazo...
Literally from your own link:
> Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders) on sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company
(emphasis mine)
